MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2025
Michael Palin, but also The Dead: There are various types of year.
The calendar year starts on January 1. The fiscal years starts three months earlier, on October 1.
Within our own experience, the school year always started on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Southern and southwestern states often started earlier than that.
Tomorrow, we'll be starting the new narrative year. We'll be trying to define the state of play here within our own split nation as the existing United States continues to come undone.
We've described the ongoing circumstance as a "revolt from below." By our own reckoning, this involves an ongoing war which we denizens of Blue America have quite possibly already lost.
Tomorrow, we'll start to try to sketch that scenario with greater clarity. We'll continue along with this award-winning premise:
To understand the ongoing situation, we need to step back from our failing culture's 24-second news cycle. Instead, we need to understand the nature of the current warfare through portrayals which already exist in the pages, and in the verses, of pre-existing literature.
Borrowing from Frost, we need to step "back out of all this now too much for us"—back out of that bewildering flooding of the zone.
That's our prescription for a fuller understanding of what has already occurred. For the record, we know of no reason to think that any such strategy might allow Blue America to withstand the ongoing "night assault."
Along the way, we've worked from various literary texts. Readers groan when these titles reappear:
The Iliad: Homer
The Plague: Camus
My Antonia: Cather
humanity i love you: Cummings
People: Yevtushenko
I Pity the Poor Immigrant: Dylan
The Gift Outright: Frost
Also, we've frequently cited this text—the most ignored text in the cosmos:
Too Much and Never Enough: Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.
This week, we'll be adding two titles to the list:
The Dead: Joyce
Michael Palin in North Korea: Palin
Michael Palin in North Korea? The leading authority on the program tells us this about that:
Michael Palin in North Korea
Michael Palin in North Korea...is a travel documentary presented by Michael Palin and first aired in the UK in 2 parts on Channel 5 on 20 September and 27 September 2018.
Program history
The program was made by ITN Productions, who had proposed a North Korean documentary to various channels under the title Let's All Go To North Korea. Channel 5's Director of Programs Ben Frow was not interested in the project at first, but after Michael Palin was hired to front the program, he changed his mind and decided to commission it for the channel.
Michael Palin in North Korea recorded viewing figures of 4.5 million viewers and was nominated for two BAFTAs...
International airings
The documentary aired on 30 September 2018 in North America on National Geographic with the title North Korea From the Inside With Michael Palin.
Episodes
In the first episode Palin arrives in North Korea on a train from China. He is greeted by his guides, a woman named Li Soo-young and a man named Li Kyung-chul. Palin's guides bring him to sites across Pyongyang, including statues of the first leader of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, and his son and the DPRK's second leader Kim Jong-il.
In the second episode Palin celebrates his 75th-birthday in North Korea, and travels to the Demilitarized Zone that divides North and South Korea, the ancient Korean capital at Kaesong, Mount Kumgang, and the coastal city of Wonsan. Palin then flies from Wonsan to Mount Paektu on the border with China before returning to Pyongyang, where he visits members of the North Korean national taekwondo team.
The synopsis omits the core of the program—Palin's friendship, and his barely disguised romance of the heart, with his charming young North Korean minder, Li Soo-young (spelling uncertain). Late in Episode 2, that narrative backbone culminates in the scene which YouTube presents in full:
Michael Palin: North Korea—Criticizing The Leaders Is Criticizing Ourselves
It's part of the way we humans are wired. For ourselves, we're inclined to see Brother Palin as smart and very wise.
At some point, the program migrated from National Geographic on to PBS. When the program re-aired on a local PBS channel this weekend, we sat there and watched it, fascinated, for the second time.
It seemed to us that it gives us a way to describe the furious foot soldiers who are currently waging war from within the "hermit kingdom" ruled by President Trump.
(We're speaking here about employees of the Fox News Channel and other such figures. We are not talking about the tens of millions of neighbors and friends—and fellow citizens—who voted for President Trump.)
Online, you can watch the entire program—through the auspices of National Geographic—simply by clicking this.
What's actually happening here at home, within our failing nation? We think Palin's fascinating program starts to provide a bit of the language with which that question can be answered.
Starting tomorrow, we'll also be returning to The Dead to describe the "paralysis" which infests our own Blue American nation. We'll be moving past Gretta Conroy and on to Joyce's apparent view of her husband, Gabriel.
According to Camus, the citizens of his fictional Oran weren't up to the task of recognizing and addressing a plague which had come upon them. Here at this incomparable site, we see that same problem infesting us in Blue America as a furious group of angry foot soldiers keep coming over the walls in an endless night assault.
Tomorrow we start a new narrative year! Knowing how way leads on to way, we think it may be late for any such effort to help.
Tomorrow: "Paralysis," he said
That one additional text: We should have listed the account by Professor Knox of the death of sacred Troy.
We've cited that portrait again and again. We think it's highly instructive.
