The Banality of James Church
The pseudonymous author is asked to perform his only apparent talent for an interviewer: writing dialogue between fictional North Korean bureaucrats — here, as based on Church’s assumptions about the ongoing captivity of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Judging from what Church wrote for this interview, I wouldn’t call Church a bad writer or an especially good one. I suspect the final revelations about Ling and Lee, if we ever have them, will be unkind to some of Church’s assumptions, but I’d like to direct your attention to another part of the interview:
Not to mince words, Western media treatment of North Korea has generally been pathetic. “Lazy” and “intellectually bankrupt” also come to mind. Too many reporters and editors love to fall back on “it was a dark and stormy night” journalism when it comes to writing about the country. If one cannot figure out what to say, spill some ink talking about how the North is a mysterious place, a black hole of absurd behavior, a Stalinist Disneyland.
North Korea is a bureaucracy, it is Asian, and it is a totalitarian state inhabited by human beings. None of those attributes are beyond our understanding or experience. In other words, North Korea is not an unknowable enigma, yet we insist on seeing it as the equivalent of the planet Pluto–dark, cold, and distant. Why are we stuck in this rut? It’s a very American problem. Perhaps we don’t understand other peoples as well as we might because, as a nation, we sometimes fool ourselves about ourselves. [James Church, in an e-mail interview at sarahweinman.com]
Let me offer Mr. Church a clue: It may be that Laura Ling and Euna Lee attempted to get information about North Korea in much the same way that journalists get information about every other country on Earth — sans guided tour of a worn circuit of monuments that Mr. Church passes off as country expertise — and it may be that they were trying to do that from across an international border. The “dark and stormy” way in which North Korea dealt with this intrusion by the prying eyes of Earthlings seems not to have penetrated Mr. Church’s dense cranium before he hit “send.” I ask: does Mr. Church find it the least bit “mysterious,” “dark,” “cold,” “distant,” or “absurd” (his words) that we’re relegated to studying the vast majority of North Korea with the very same kind of instrument we’re relegated to using to study Pluto (which is no longer considered a planet — buy yourself a newspaper, man)?
This I will acknowledge: it must be a difficult task to avoid cliches when writing about North Korea — a place that seems to pull toward one cliche with particular magnetism — but a good reporter can still manage it without compromising the truth. Church manages to do neither.
But all bureaucracies are enigmas! And the next time your local tax assessor has the power to control what you read, search your home in the middle of the night; starve you and your entire family into a mass grave; send them to die here, God forbid; or summarily order them all to face a firing squad (perhaps a relatively merciful alternative) I’ll agree that James Church makes any sense at all.
Update: One of the things of which I’m always in awe is this site’s amazing readers. By now, I’ve been told many things about Mr. Church, most of which I will not print because he’s obviously chosen to keep his personal history and identify private. On a certain level, he has a substantial background studying North Korea. Which just goes to prove that no amount of factual knowledge can make up for the absence of logic or critical thinking skills.