[He] Went To North Korea

What You've Heard Vs. What [he] Saw...

I'm not about to argue that the country is secretly a paradise. But if we reduce North Korea to a state run by cartoon supervillains, it becomes equally absurd and dangerous. Their government may be atrocious, but there's still a clear logic to their actions -- to dismiss them as lunatics invites the paranoid fantasy and anxiety that nuclear war is just a bored Kim Jong-un's whim away. Unfortunately, our tour didn't get the chance to sit in on any high-level strategy meetings, but that same line of thought extends to everything there. It may be foreign, and it may often be cruel, but it's not a dark fantasyland -- there's a reason for all of it, even if that reasoning rarely accounts for human happiness.

Even mere sightseeing debunked a good chunk of what floats around online. There is, for example, a theory that Pyongyang's metro station consists of just two stops that run only when tourists visit. Well, I rode through six stops, and I can't imagine that the government has nothing better to do with its time and resources than to make hundreds of actors pretend to ride it with us for the benefit of a motley collection of visiting writers, teachers, and computer programmers. Shockingly, it turns out that dictatorships are capable of maintaining basic public transportation, presumably because they like it when their people make it to work on time. But that's all part of the biggest myth about North Korea ...