[FOUNTAIN]Puppet shows

There are countless villainous vassals in history that usurped power and turned the emperor into a puppet. One notable figure is Chou Shilliang, from the late Tang Dynasty. He is the notorious eunuch who swayed power for 20 years under six emperors. Chou killed two emperors, 1,000 royal concubines and four ministers. He taught the junior eunuchs not to give a moment of dull time to the emperor. By providing endless entertainment, the emperor would stay away from reading books and would not show interest in state affairs. They made a fool out of the emperors and turned them into puppets.
David Weiner and Gilbert Heftner wrote in “Battling the Inner Dummy: The Craziness of Apparently Normal People,” that the instinctive and emotional limbic brain, a primitive realm, makes people do incomprehensible things. The desire for power, territory, sex, affection and survival are the things that propel people to behave unreasonably. The sex drive is the one that is most commonly exploited. Emperor Xuanzong of Tang was once considered a wise king, but when he fell for Yang Guifei, he neglected the empire and ruined it. Notorious beauties such as Baosi, Daji and Xi Shi seduced emperors and made them their puppets.
Purpose, mission, ideology and conviction can also make people do unreasonable things. While they are controlled by the neocortical brain, the logical realm, these concepts make the brain crazy, as if they were products of the primitive realm.
Religious fundamentalists are good examples, for they do not compromise their theories and display a fanatic and aggressive attitude. They turn into puppets for an ideology or an idea. In a puppet show by a Korean drama troupe, the player, daejabi, grabs the dummy by the scruff of the neck. “He orders me to dance/My arms belong to me/but I am not the one controlling the movements/ I want to take a rest/ but he urges me to stand up and dance,” wrote poet Park Jeong-sun in the poem, “Marionette.” It is dreadful to see a villainous vassal armored with ideology become the daejabi.
The absurd argument of Pyongyang that “the ‘army first’ policy of the North is accommodating the security of the South” is one example of a crazy brain. Some say that the daejabi holding Kim Jong-il by the scruff of the neck is the military group.
The rupture of the train service test, missile launches and the West Sea clash are known to be decisions by the military. Some also worry that the 386-generation codes might be taking this government by the scruff of the neck.

by Kim Jin-kook

The writer is an editorial writer of the JoongAng Ilbo.