Iran, North Korea provide plenty of comic relief

All these threats coming from Iran and North Korea, and the press has a heyday with it.

There are interviews with this government official or that “expert,” and everybody is “concerned.” Last week saw Iran unveiling its first home-built stealth fighter, which was quickly debunked as being fake — part wooden mock-up in a room, part small plastic model that had been Photoshopped to look big. Scrolling through comment sections, blogs, posts and rants is to see a never-ending call for the U.S. to “punish” these countries. Bomb ‘em, nuke ‘em, war-war-war.

I say no! Leave them be! In a world that grows scarier by the year it’s nice to have some comic relief. Think of Iran and North Korea as the Abbott and Costello of the world. Personally, I sometimes wonder if they do it on purpose as some sort of gag.

Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “Did you see the ‘new stealth jet’ we unveiled today?”

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un: “Yeah! What was that? Where did you get that?”

Ahmadinejad: “OK, so get this — It’s not real! HA HA HA! We built a fake mock-up using pictures off the Internet as models. The other pictures were just a plastic model we glued together last Saturday!”

Jong Un: “HA HA HA! I love it! OK, OK … I can top that. We’re putting out a press release that our archaeologists found a cave full of unicorn fossils!”

Ahmadinejad: “No! You’re not really going to try that are you?”

Jong Un: “Yep! Just finished getting the Photoshopped pictures ready!”

If you think I’m making that last part up, you really haven’t read the news lately. Yes, their news really did say that they had found evidence of ancient unicorns. Unicorns are symbolically important to them and gosh, I’ll be darned if they didn’t find some! An ancient unicorn graveyard if I remember right.

Last week, I took a break at work to surf the news and started cracking up at my desk. The headline was “Iran Sends Monkey Into Space.” Before I had clicked on the link to read the whole article, I had images in my head of a giant catapult flinging screaming monkeys into the atmosphere. If it wasn’t Iran, it wouldn’t seem likely.

The article went on about how they had (supposedly) put a monkey into a rocket and sent it into space and back. The Iranians were quick to point out that it was part of their ballistic missile program. So,what was the monkey for? Was it trained as a cheap guidance package? Does the monkey steer the missile? Is he equipped with a cheap classroom globe and trained to pick out North America and steer the missile there? With Iran, a more likely monkey weapon would probably involve the world’s largest slingshots set up along the border, on stand-by to hurl bomb-laden paratrooper monkeys toward Israel.

But they didn’t stop there. Still insisting they had sent a rocket into space (must have been a stealth rocket since we never tracked anything), Ahmadinejad then came out and said he was volunteering to be the first Iranian astronaut. Says he wants to ride a rocket. I say let’s help him out! Strap a saddle onto a booster, give him a helmet and a pair of goggles and let her rip! It’ll be the greatest moment in Iranian military tech since the teeny-tiny, baby blue colored submarine they unveiled a few months back. I’m assuming it set a new record for how fast a submarine has dove and is currently setting all kinds of records for how long a diesel submarine has stayed submerged.

Iranian Brig. Gen. Salami (yes, that is his name. Now if they could just dig up another general named Pastrami, we could get years’ worth of jokes out of it) will step forth any day now saying, “Demonstrating to the world yet again the superiority of Iranian military and defense, our new home-built submarine dove several months ago and has remained submerged ever since!”

Anybody else catch the video released by North Korea last week? The one that shows a North Korean space shuttle? (Apparently their space program is ahead of Iran’s because they used actual people instead of a monkey.) Anyway, we have to give North Korea credit because at least they presented it as a “dream sequence.” In the video, the North Korean shuttle orbits the Earth and stops to watch the U.S. burn after a nuclear attack. Not funny? It is when you add a kicking soundtrack like “We Are the World.” Because nothing says atomic Armageddon like Michael Bolton and Willie Nelson singing about helping starving Africans, right?

Think of the world as a city block, a small neighborhood. The countries are represented by the people walking up and down the street. Some are big. Some are small. Some are fair and some aren’t. Some are bullies while others like to lend a helping hand. So who is Iran and North Korea? Easy; they’re the quivering, shivering, incessantly yapping Chihuahuas that growl and snarl at you through the fence as pass. For now we roll our eyes and just keep on walking. And we’ve all heard from people that own dogs like that, “Oh, my dog is little but he’s tough! He’s not afraid of the big dogs!”

No, your dog isn’t “tough.” Your dog is just stupid. Or, it feels safe being obnoxious so long as it’s being ignored. Chances are, if the little rat-dog ever gets carried away and actually comes at somebody it will run away, peeing on itself after they turn around to punt it.

Let’s hope Iran and North Korea are the latter. And for now, let them keep going. Let me keep pointing and laughing at them. This is good stuff.

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.