The office of Dear Leader of the DPRK is traditionally endowed with a lot of not-especially useful superpowers (all three of them were apparently adept at finishing up golf outings with 18 hole-in-ones)…but not even the most loyal and/or terrified North Korean could have predicted that wee rolly polly Kim Jong-un could have out-flash-memed the Trumpster on his own virtual turf. Such a bizarre development could indeed suggest he just might not be the man they think he is at home. Oh no no no.
Because love him, hate him, fear him, and/or mock him, the rocket man in the platform shoes wins this round decisively, while the larger campaign of pre-nuclear dick-measuring rages on. He and Trump squared off, eyed each other, and launched tactical nicknames. Trump’s attempt probably sounded good in his head, but all he did was put an awfully enjoyable song in all of ours. But when Kim that magnificent bastard returned fire, he sent half the English-speaking world scrambling for dictionaries.
Dotard. He called him a dotard. Donald J. Trump please click here for a directory of reputable burn clinics near you.
Our conundrum is this: no matter how you feel about Trump, if you have a spark of human dignity in you, you never ever want Kim Jong-un to be right about anything, ever. But then he goes and calls Trump a dotard, and either you looked it up or you already knew what it meant (sure you did), and then you sat and thought about it. Trump. Dotard. Dotard-Trump.
Uncanny, Kim. Uncannily on the nose.
You have to dig deep for it, but there’s a glimmer of hope in all this. Kim wins the internet, so we laugh. Laughter is unexpected yet so so welcome in the midst of intercontinental tandem temper tantrums. That pair of man-children both salivate over the idea of a war that neither will have to fight, but as long as they’re hurling names, just names, maybe we can enjoy a laugh or two before the dotard and the rocket man kick things up a notch or ten.
Or it could be better even than that. Neither of them shows any sign of being easily deterrable, but both give every sign that they loathe being laughed at. The opportunity is ripe—they’re acting like clowns after all. So let’s laugh at them and see where that takes us.
I can see a future where both are laughed from power: Trump free to schlump further into his dotage, and Kim eagerly sought after for Hollywood parties, where he exhibits his limitless skill in summoning the perfect obscure OED ephemera to hand out as nicknames. Dennis Rodman emcees.
You never know, and it’s never too late to hope, and it should never be too grim to laugh. So give it a try. Just laugh at those twits.
First though, we’re gonna need a funnier name than Rocket Man. Thanks, dotard.
