Section 22 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 March 5. Wednesday.
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Today's sound effect is a big sizzling hiss as the North Korean situation gets dumped into the hot oil in the frying pan. A North Korean fighter plays a game of "let's see if we can get us both killed here" with a US spy plane, and the Bush administration, in an "unrelated move", sends bombers to Guam.

This from the Voice of America, dated 04 Mar 2003, 19:28 UTC: "The United States is dispatching a bomber force to the island of Guam, in case it would be needed in the nuclear standoff with North Korea."

This provoked into life the following mirage, a little piece of reverse news which floated upwards from the fermenting bilges of my mind. This, then, from the North Korean Organ of Global Rectification, propaganda mouthpiece for Majestic Panda, the plump guy in the gray boiler suit who is also known as the Boss:

North Korea today sent bombers to Cuba after American warplanes harassed an unarmed North Korean observation plane.

"This is an unrelated move," said Peacemonger III, spokesperson for the Ministry of International Pacification. The problem, said Peacemonger III, was the "nuke 'em first" policy of Warmonger Bush.

International analysts have interpreted the US harassment of the NK obs plane as "a ploy from the US to get NK to come to the negotiating table." But, in the words of Majestic Panda:

"We have no interest in talking to these guys. This is the America which has been to war with some country or another just about every year for the last twenty years. Grenada, Panama, Somalia, you name it. That's why our bombers are in Cuba.

"We want to finish off this rogue regime, we want to put this Bush guy in the zoo, we want to move into America and put the Ministry of Starvation in charge. This is the humane policy, you know. Millions of Americans are dying every year from sugar and corn syrup. They need our help.

"It has to be understood that our hearts bleed for the American people, and that, ultimately, we have their best interests at heart."

Well, so much for North Korean Organ of Global Rectification. To return to the regular press, yesterday I found an interesting little snippet in the news, something that read (if memory serves) "Insecurity is a well-known trigger for aggression". I don't think there's any need to enlarge on that.

Over the last couple of weeks, then, North Korean military provocations look like this:-

• (i) A North Korean fighter plane intrudes into South Korean territory.
• (ii) North Korea test-fires a short range Silkworm missle into the sea off the coast of North Korea.
• (iii) North Korean warplanes harass an American spyplane flying in international airspace near North Korea.

This is not a smart game for North Korea to be playing, as it will not succeed in bringing the United States to the bargaining table. However, having thought it through, I can't see a better strategy for North Korea's Kim Jong Il.

At this stage, as I see it, Kim Jong Il's problem looks like this:-

1. Kim Jong Il is a bad guy, a small scale Stalin, in fact, so George Bush has put North Korea in the Axis of Evil, the Group of the Infamous Three which is comprised of Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

2. Once you're in the Axis of Evil, there's no way out. If you don't disarm then you (the leadership) are going to be annihilated because you have weapons of mass destruction. But if you did disarm then you would be annihilated anyway because you might make weapons of mass destruction in the future.

3. Trying to make the Bush team come to the negotiating table by threatening them is not very smart. But there is no smart way to make the Bush team come to the negotiating table. Because let's face the facts. These guys don't negotiate. They kill people.

Having written (3) I look at it carefully. What's wrong here? What's wrong is that this stagement should look outrageous. "These guys don't negotiate. They kill people." That should look absurdly adolescent, like something out of a comic book.

        "That Danborstun is, like, heavily into pure power," said Montractus Knifespiller. He was talking about the lord of the House of Death, the leader of the nation of Nastofolus Gorung. And, while he was talking, he was studying his map of the nation in question, a map which was still a bit difficult to decrypt, even though he had succeeded in scrubbing away the worst of the blood. "That guy doesn't negotiate. He kills people."
        "So what're we going to do?" said Blurry Sammy, checking on the pig.
        The pig grunted. Apparently it was still breathing. Disappointed in his own sloppiness, Blurry Sammy started tightening the ropes.
        "Do?" said Montractus Knifespiller. "I don't know that there's anything that we can do."
        "Preemption," said Blurry Sammy.
        "Huh?"
        "Get in first. Kick these guys in the balls."
        And at that moment the door burst open and in came none other than Danborstun himself, machinegun burping fire.

And that's the George Bush style. He doesn't negotiate with his enemies. He kills them. Which is an understandable trait in a thug in a movie like Gangs of New York - but it's more than a little disconcerting if it happens to be the style of the guy who is, pretty much, the current ruler of planet Earth, the unstoppable conqueror who can go kill pretty much anyone he wants, and who has a list of the people he wants to start working on.

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2003 March 05 Wednesday continued ...

Jump forward to body bag as security blanket comment, 2003 March 19

Jump forward to discussion of America as a nation inspired to violence by fear, 2003 April 08

Yesterday, as I mentioned above, I read a little snippet in the newspaper which said something like this:-

"Insecurity is a well-known trigger for aggression".

When I was working on the opening of this diary entry, on the train going to work (a solid journey which takes more than an hour) I applied that nugget of wisdom to Kim Jong Il, the increasingly insecure ruler of North Korea.

However, the original author of that quote (someone writing in Britain's Guardian who was later quoted by the International Herald Tribune) was actually talking about America, and was wondering aloud about how maybe American cultural insecurities (one child in four living below the poverty line, for example) are contributing to America's current global violence.

I wasn't going to mention that theory of American cultural insecurity, since it didn't (and doesn't) make much sense to me, certaintly not if applied to the White House, which floats several clouds above such mundane considerations as how to pay for little Johnny's shoes and grandma's colostomy bag.

There have been poor kids in America right through my whole life, but that's never destabilized the White House. As far as the White House is concerned, never until now has there ever been anything like the current unbridled enthusiasm for starting wars, bombing cities, and, let's not forget it, for using nukes if that turns out to be convenient.

But the "Insecurity is a well-known trigger for aggression" quote makes very good sense if said about Kim Jong Il, so that, at the start of the day, is how I used it.

As the day wore on, however, it gradually began to dawn on me that the quote fits another guy, and fits him really well.

Suppose you take this failed businessman, a guy whose major achievement in life is having given up drinking, and suppose you have an accident with some voting machines which ends up with this guy becoming president. And suppose that he proves to be wretchedly inadequate at the job.

As president, the guy has a number of problems. He's a lousy speaker, so he comes across as an idiot, even though he's at least as smart as the average truck driver. Plus, famously, there are quite a few people in the upper echelons of the world with whom he doesn't feel comfortable.

So he can do the job, sort of - it helps that he's picked a really strong team to help out - but there are times when he's more than a little out of his depth, certainly culturally and socially, if not intellectually. And he knows this. The team is supportive, but Mr Inadequate comes to the job self-undermined.

So, anyway, at the start, things are set for a quiet presidency which will focus on burning coal, pumping oil and cutting taxes, a repeat of the Ronald Reagan era, only more so. And, really, in the grand scale of things, what does it matter if Mr Inadequate annoys the world with his willingness to rip up arms control treaties and abandon international agreements on things like global warming?

But then a bunch of fantatics fly a couple of airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and the game changes. Suddenly Mr Inadequate is under enormous, impossible pressure. He is threatened, his nation is threatened, and he reacts by becoming angry - a classic response to insecurity, but not really the one you want in a guy who has his finger on the nuclear button.

"Insecurity is a well-known trigger for aggression".

So, in my analysis, what has been driving George Bush ever since 9/11 is aggression. He feels threatened, so he responds by killing people.

Now, up to a point, that's legitimate. If Osama bin Laden cooks up a plot to fly a couple of airplanes into skyscrapers filled with living, breathing human beings, then, sure, go kill him. I don't have any problem with that. None at all. I'm not a pacifist, and I believe that, yes, there's a time and a place for killing people.

But I do most firmly believe that the use of violence (lethal or otherwise) should be solidly founded on the bedrock of necessity, and I don't see any necessity for George Bush to go to war with Iraq (now) or North Korea (later).

At this stage I've had a whole working day - more, in fact - to think about the following statement:-

"These guys don't negotiate. They kill people."

And, yeah, I commit to it. The guys in the House of Death have different reasons for killing. The things that might be driving them are as diverse as oil, money, and the pure and simple pleasure of the exercise of pure power. Although they are a tight, cohesive bunch, they are very different people, and their motives undoubtedly vary. One of them is probably going along with the rest because, as at least one commentator has speculated, he's just too much of a good soldier to do anything else.

But George Bush, I think, is mostly driven by aggression, pure and simple. This makes sense. Rage is a nice, simple, comic book emotion which explains the gaudy extravaganza of slaughter currently in planning.

It would be nice if George Bush could find Osama bin Laden and kill him. It might give him a sense of achievement and settle him down a bit. But, in the absence of Osama bin Laden, he seems happy to kill whoever happens to be handy.

Let's look again at that quote from the Voice of America, dated 04 Mar 2003, 19:28 UTC:

The United States is dispatching a bomber force to the island of Guam, in case it would be needed in the nuclear standoff with North Korea.

That's how far we've come, in a very short time, all the way to something characterized as a "nuclear standoff".

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• UTC = Coordinated Universal Time. In effect, the same as Greenwich Mean Time. Also known as Universal Time, Greenwich time and and (military) Zulu time.

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Section 22 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 March 06 Thursday.
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The other day I ate strawberries, Japanese strawberries, and they tasted normal, entirely normal. It wasn't until I had finished that I remembered the strawberries I used to eat when I was a child, and realized what the difference was.

When I was a child, the strawberries served up in the family home always had sugar sprinkled on them. Maybe memory is deceiving me, but I seem to remember that sometimes the sugar would be sprinkled on the strawberries in advance, to bring out the flavor. Sometimes cream was added in addition to sugar - heavy whipped cream.

But the strawberries I ate the other day were totally plain, eaten with neither cream nor sugar, and they seemed sweet enough to me.

After five years of living in Japan, I've found that my body's attitude toward sugar has undergone a shift. Not a profound shift - that would be to exaggerate it - but a definite shift. I no longer have the same aggressive desire for sugar, and, if I'm confronted with some extremely sugary food, I find it too rich and a little difficult to eat.

The Japanese diet is not a model of healthy eating - for one thing, it contains more salt than is healthy, particularly in the salt-laden miso soup which is a Japanese favorite - but, compared to the average Western diet, it is light in sugar. Japanese cakes, for example, are typically not as sweet as Western cakes.

That's today's cultural note from the Japanese archipelago, written on the train going home. Everyone on the train, as is usual in Japan, is absolutely silent. Well, not everyone. I can here one guy talking somewhere in a low voice, but he's probably not talking on his cellphone, as the train companies have outlawed the use of cellphones on the trains. Just as well, otherwise people would have trouble sleeping.

The man to my left seems to be asleep and the woman to my right is definitely asleep. But don't get the idea that everyone in Japan sleeps in the train. That's a false stereotype. Of the people who are seated and who are within my line of sight, only fifty percent are sleeping.

I read a newspaper article recently about how everything looks so normal to the visitor who comes from Japan. Even though the statistics tell us that the economy is on a downhill slope, that unemployment is rising, that many people are anxious about the future and that the suicide rate is up, the visible surfaces of the society are still smooth and shiny.

And it's true.

On the surface, everything here is still running like clockwork. I first visited Japan back in 1989, when the economy was unimaginably more affluent than it is now. But I would have difficulty in pointing to anything visible in the day-to-day Japanese scene which would show how things have changed.

The woman to my right is now snoring.

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