[Updated below]
Now that Laura Ling and Euna Lee are on their way home, I have a short list of things I do and do not want to hear from them, starting with any retch-inducing drivel about how well they were treated while they shouldn’t have been in captivity at all. Let’s make that the first thing on our list:
1. Please spare us the Stockholm Syndrome at LAX. Try to remember that you weren’t in North Korea to rob convenience stores, hide a dead hooker, or hand out boxer briefs infected with herpes. If things were so wonderful at that cushy non-gulag guesthouse where you were held — unlike conditions for those North Koreans who offend His Withering Majesty — then go back. This is not a misunderstood state that eventually made contact with its inner goodness by freeing you. It’s a place that starves, terrorizes, tortures, and murders millions of non-famous North Koreans, including potentially everyone whose face appears in the video the North Koreans say they seized from you.
2. The only things we want to hear at LAX are how you really got across the border and a few polite words of thanks for those who helped to free you. Were you abducted, did you get lost, were you lured, or are you just imbeciles who were trying to cover a story you knew absolutely nothing about? Then go home to your families and say nothing else for at least a week.
3. When you emerge, remember why you were there. You were there to tell the story of desperate people like this woman and tens of thousands more like her who will remain forgotten, unmourned, and unmentioned in all of the glowing, shallow, stupid press coverage that will soon follow. They won’t be objects of hope for the great, false diplomatic breakthrough that your release from unjust imprisonment represents to unintelligent people of every race, color, creed, and political persuasion. You can make those people minimally less unintelligent by taking a moment out of the first act of your book tour to remember the refugees and those who are dying in the real gulags.
4. As a corollary to number 3, it’s not all about you. Before you tell your own story, tell the story you went there to tell.
5. As a corollary to number 4, if you actually got people killed by carrying video of them into North Korea, repent what you have done. The ignorance and stupidity that killed them should weigh on you. Telling their stories is a small token of the burden of repentance that you owe them. I would much prefer, of course, that you truthfully clarify that you did no such thing.
6. No Larry King. Not tomorrow, not next week, not ever. Larry King is a tool and a blight upon our society, and your support for him poisons a world in which my children will have to live.
7. Please do not pretend that your experience has made you an authority on North Korea. This doesn’t mean you can’t become one, it just means you aren’t one because of this.
8. Please do not tell us what your release proves about diplomacy or policy, and do not humor anyone who is stupid enough to ask. You’re not policy analysts or diplomatic correspondents. You’re pawns.
9. Please don’t try to redeem the cowardice of Current TV. That is a lost cause.
10. If you did cross the border voluntarily, mortgage your homes now and start writing checks to repay the taxpayers for whatever your ransom cost us.
Update: Retch inducing:
Laura Ling’s sister says the two American journalists briefly touched North Korean soil before they were captured and detained for months in that communist country.
“She said that it was maybe 30 seconds and then everything got chaotic. It’s a very powerful story, and she does want to share it,” Lisa Ling told CNN Thursday. [….]
Laura Ling told her family she was treated humanely, but meals were meager and her phone calls were monitored, Lisa Ling said.“She had two guards in her room at all times, morning and night. And even though they couldn’t speak to her, somehow they developed a strange sort of kinship, Lisa Ling said. “She had some really lovely things to say about the people who were watching over her.” [AP]
It’s all about me, and I was treated well! Tell it to the people who appeared on your confiscated video before the Chinese police poked wires through their wrists and dragged them back across the border to die in the gulag, or before a firing squad of onlookers.
Until now, I confess that I could not bring myself to believe that people could be this stupid, and wanted to extend Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee the benefit of any remaining doubts. It looks like I was wrong. This must be the most consequentially idiotic thing I’ve seen done in the five years I’ve been writing this blog — frankly, it borders on negligent homicide. Is it any wonder why there’s so much awful journalism being written about North Korea today?
Related: John Podhoretz isn’t thrilled with this pair, either:
[N]ow that they are out of jeopardy, Ling and Lee deserve to be held accountable, at least in the realm of public opinion, for the unthinkably bad judgment they displayed in their preposterous, vainglorious, and astoundingly naive venture. Possessing some fantasy about presenting an inside look at North Korea on an justifiably unwatched (because unwatchable) cable channel called Current TV, they thought they could sneak undetected into a Gulag state, film some footage with a DV camera, and then sneak back out to the hosannas of the Peabody Award committee. This is something they chose to do and were given license to attempt by their employers, and for which they paid a horrific, far too horrific, a price.
That must be the case as well for Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the co-owners of Current TV, who have doubtless existed in a state of terrible “what have I done” anxiety about this since the arrests. But none of them can be simply excused for the way in which their foolishness has exacted a price from the government of the United States, which has been at a loss under administrations Democratic and Republican for more than two decades as to what to do about North Korea and its threat. The interpolation of this melodrama and its resolution have made this nation’s policy toward North Korea even more messy, though that hardly seemed possible, entirely due to a preventable error on the part of two amateurish journalists and their amateurish network.
