How would you like to be a North Korean athlete at the Winter Olympics this year? I’m afraid the team’s official state motto might be “Win or Die – and Your Family Too.” Those sledders and skaters and skiers have a lot to live up to. After all, it was current leader Kim Jong-Un’s father, Kim Jong-Il, who famously got eleven holes-in-one playing his first-ever round of golf several years ago. That’s the greatest score ever recorded in the history of the sport. Woe be to those comrades in the Games who don’t thoroughly trounce the Capitalist competition.

Much as the Soviets used to keep Mom and Dad under house arrest while young Russians went abroad to prevent athletes from defecting, North Korean relatives may very well be sequestered too. But that won’t stop the Pyongyang delegation from sampling at least a little of what life is like outside the hermit kingdom (or despot-dom, to be more accurate).

Even if all they do is eat at the athletes’ mess hall, the competitors will probably see more food in one day than they’ve seen total in their entire lives. McDonald’s is providing burgers and fries to participants. I’d love to see the bugged-eyed reaction of a North Korean teenager biting into a Big Mac for the first time – and washing it down with a Coca-Cola. The Real Thing has to taste a whole lot better than flavored, carbonated Tumen River water. Officials might want to check duffle bags going back home. They could be stuffed with Chicken McNuggets instead of boots and skates.

It will also be interesting to see how much mingling goes on between the North Koreans and the rest of the world. You know just about every other competitor is going to have the latest iPhone, iPad, and other electronic devices with them. Rumor has it that while some citizens of the North actually have cell phones, very few can actually connect to a number out of the country. And cell phones were banned for about five years in the middle 2000s.

There apparently is also free Internet available to anyone with access to a computer. Couple of catches to that, though. Computers can cost several months’ salary, and the North Korean government has to grant owners permission to buy. Basically, that translates into maybe a few thousand folks out of 25 million with Internet access. I would guess even most of those special recipients can’t search for much besides Kim Jong-Un’s latest diatribe against the United States. And I’m sure there’s a list available of names Donald Trump has been called. (“Mentally Deranged U.S. Dotard,” “Frightened Dog,” and “Gangster Fond of Playing with Fire” come to mind.)

Speaking of ugly rhetoric, Kim stepped it up again recently. It seems he and his military are going to “scare the h— out of the U.S.” by holding a huge parade featuring hundreds of missiles as the Games get underway. Meanwhile, Donald Trump hasn’t really backed away from calling Kim “Little Rocket Man” much.

And now into the fray steps Vice President Mike Pence. As I write this, the Veep is scheduled to be in South Korea for some of the Olympics as part of an Asian tour. He’s taking along Fred Warmbier, the father of Otto Warmbier, the U.S. student who died in 2017 shortly after he was released from North Korean detention. He’d been sentenced to hard labor for trying to pilfer a poster from a hotel wall. It was reported that Pence fired up his own Tweeting machine and sent out the message that, “He (Otto Warmbier) and his wife remind the world of the atrocities happening in North Korea.”

Some had hoped that the presence of North Korean athletes at these Games would have opened up a chance for a chat, however unofficially, between U.S. officials and Kim’s boys. Some of you may recall that Richard Nixon used Ping-Pong as a diplomatic tool back in 1971 to start the process of normalizing relations with what was then referred to as Red China.

I doubt if anyone would be upset if some progress in resolving the nuclear issues between the U.S. and North Korea, even a small bit of a thaw, were to occur in the next fortnight. Kim’s all about saving face. He knows he can’t fight us and win. Maybe Mike Pence can make schussing and ski-jumping work as table tennis did. And he might try offering a Coke and a smile (alongside a Quarter Pounder with cheese). Surely Kim can’t resist that.

©MMXVIII. William J. Lewis, III – Freelance Writer in Atlanta