Bimbim-bap!

photo - A.P.

One of the unfortunate truisms of life is that you can pick your friends but you can't pick your family. Who among us doesn't have one goofy uncle who likes to act up at the family barbecue?

Or maybe likes to drop trou at the nudist resort with a bunch of similarly disrobed octogenarians, like my good old Uncle Norm likes to do. Most of us just slough it off and have another long neck. Not North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He had his own uncle wacked.

For not clapping fervently enough at his nephew's speech. 

Jang Song Thaeck was asked by Kim's own pop, his wife's brother, nutty Dictator Number two, to watch over the lad while he grew into the full flower of evil despotism. Guess it was a lesson very well learned as Kim made a move that would have made Oedipus himself proud and went to the mattress rooms only a year or two into his nascent bloody reign.

So the young tyrant went Luca Brasi on his poor Uncle. Some thanks, huh Jang? You try to help a kid out. But remembering Tessio, I am sure it was only business. Jang certainly knew how the game was played on the parallel. But a machine gun? Ouch.

Kim may not be thinking too good. Jang was the go between with China and those are not the kind of neighbors you really want to piss off. But with the circle of confidantes that were advising the youthful dictator, people like zany power forward Dennis Rodman, it is no wonder that he may not be thinking right and got fratricidal with the poor guy.

I heard some talking heads trying to read the tea leaves on what might have precipitated the purge and a few mentioned a generational conflict. Something similar happened in the cultural revolution in Red China when the young bucks were walking around pulling the old guys beards and wreaking all kinds of havoc. Kids!

Anybody else remember the movie Wild in the Streets from the sixties, where everybody over thirty five gets sent to a death camp? Watch those younguns folks, they don't seem to be thinking quite right.