Soccer

Soccer (pronounced sok-er)

(1) A form of 11-a-side football played between two teams, in which the spherical ball may be advanced by kicking or by bouncing it off any part of the body (excluding the arms and hands unless re-starting the game by throwing in the ball from the sideline), the object being to score points by putting the ball in the opponent’s goal-net. The special position of goalkeeper may, within certain positional limitations, use their arms and hands to catch, carry, throw, or stop the ball.

(2) In the slang of Australian Rules Football (AFL, the old VFL), to kick the football directly off the ground, without use of the hands.

1888: A coining in British English, a colloquial term for Association Football, the construct presumably (As)soc(iation football) +c+ -er.  The other forms were socker (1885) & socca (1889), the first known instance of "soccer" noted in 1888, the word coming into general use between 1890-1895 and it evolved from slang to a standard noun.  The special verb use (soccered & soccering) happens in Australian Rules Football and describes a player kicking the football directly off the ground, without the use of the hands.  The forms soccerer & soccerist both mean “a soccer player” but are now used only humorously.  Soccerplex (a sports complex with facilities for playing soccer but with other ancillary (other sports, training, gyms, commercial outlets etc) installations is a word unique to North America.  A Socceroo is a member of the Socceroos (the Australian national soccer team, the construct being socce(r) + (kanga)roos.  Soccermania describes an intense enthusiasm for soccer which may manifest as an obsessive interest; the forms soccermananic and soccerology are both non-standard but have been used in the context of the afflicted.  Soccermania differs from soccer hooligan (or football hooligan, exemplified by the violent Italian “Ultras”) in that it doesn’t usually manifest as violent or anti-social behaviour.  Soccer is a noun & verb, soccerplex, soccermania, soccerer & soccerists are nouns, soccered & soccering are verbs and soccerlike is an adjective; the only noun plural in even occasional use is soccerplexes although plurals of the derived forms (soccer fields, soccer players, soccer balls, soccer clubs etc) are common.  

The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought usually to have been borrowed from Latin –ārius and reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant was -our), from the Latin -(ā)tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  Usually, the –er suffix was added to verbs to create a person or thing that does an action indicated by the root verb; used to form an agent noun and if added to a noun it usually denoted an occupation.  However, there was also the special case of the “slang –er”, which etymologists sometimes call the “Oxford –er” because of the association (though not the origin) of the practice with the university in the nineteenth century.  The slang –er was used as a suffix to make jocular or convenient formations from common or proper names and appears to first have been English schoolboy use in the 1860s before entering the vernacular via its introduction to Oxford University slang from Rugby School, the Oxford English Dictionary even identifying the first documented instance “at University College, in Michaelmas Term, 1875".  The first coining was probably rugger (the game of Rugby) and constructs on the same model include brekker (breakfast), fresher (freshman), leccer (lecture), footer (football), fiver (five-pound note) and tenner (ten-shilling note).  The practice continued in the twentieth century and some coinings endured in the plural such as preggers (pregnant), bonkers (behaving as if bonked on the head) and starkers (stark naked).  Given it was originally the work of schoolboys, some have expressed surprise they didn’t instead render a verbal shorthand of “Association Football” in a form using “ass” (although at Oxford briefly it was used as assoccer before quickly being truncated).

Football-type games have been documented for centuries and it seems likely something similar was probably played in prehistoric times on occasions when young people congregated but the point of Association Football was that in 1863 it codified a set of rules, allowing structured competitions to be formed.  Prior to that, clubs and schools played many variations of the game and this caused difficulties when the young men met at university, finding no general agreement on the rules.  Those at the University of Cambridge did create their own rule book but it was one of many, this proliferation leading to the formation of the association, the discussions eventually producing not only the rules of what would emerge as modern football (soccer) but also the schism which saw some schools and clubs go in another direction and play what became known first as rugby football and later simply rugby.  Later still, when it suffered its own schism and the professional code rugby league emerged, the name “rugby union” was used to distinguish the original and to this day the clipped terms “Rugby” & “Union” remain in use.

To most in the US, the word "football" means something different than in much of the world so it's not clear what Lindsay Lohan thought she was being invited to when Carolyn Radford (b 1982; Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Mansfield Town Stags) extended the offer of a seat at a match.  It’s not known if Ms Lohan did manage to catch a game but the promise of her presence clearly inspired the players because the Stags, then languishing in the non-League (fifth level) division of the English football league system, in 2024 gained promotion to League One (the old third division).  

In most parts of the world, the game is known as football but in places where other forms of (closely or vaguely) similar ball sports had become popular and referred to either officially or casually as “football”, soccer was adopted as the preferred term for what was, at the elite level, a minority sport.  Thus in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa & Ireland the game came to be called soccer although, in New Zealand, beginning in the late twentieth century, “football” increasingly supplanted “soccer”, the assumption being that because the volume of overseas matches televised (with the native commentary) vastly exceeded that of local content, the word became accepted.  Additionally, because the rugby codes (historically rugby union and increasingly after the 1980s rugby league so dominated) and the common slang was “footy” rather than “football”, the latter in that sense never achieved the critical mass needed to entrench use.  Globally, the cultural and economic impacts of soccer have long been obvious.  Although Lord Moran (Charles Wilson, 1882-1977; president of the Royal College of Physicians 1941-1949) thought England eventually would be remembered for her school of physics and lyric poets, the less romantic Sir Richard Turnbull (1909–1998; long serving UK colonial administrator) told Denis Healey (1917–2015; UK defence minister 1964-1970) that “…when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression ‘fuck off’”.  

"Fuck off" has of course flourished in Australia and in some suburbs conversations without it being heard at least once are rare but the adoption of "soccer" was different.  It was different in Australia because of Australian Football which, while occasionally called “Aussie Rules” has long been commonly known as football (or footy) so the round-ball game became soccer and the name Socceroo (the construct being socce(r) + (kanga)roo)) was adopted as the official name for the national team.  In Japan, where the dominant influence on the language in the twentieth century was the US, the most common form is サッカー(sakkā, from soccer).  In the US, a hybrid (with a few unique innovations) of rugby and association football emerged and was soon more popular than either.  The early name was “gridiron football” but in the pragmatic American way, that quickly became simply “football” although curiously, “gridiron” has survived among many foreign audiences.  Realizing the linguistic battle was lost, the USFA (United States Football Association), which had formed in the 1910s as the official organizing body of American soccer, in 1945 changed its name to the USSFA (United States Soccer Football Association) before deciding the advantages of product differentiation should be pursued, deleting entirely any use of “football”.  The other great US contribution to the language was the “soccer mom”, an encapsulation of a particular (usually white), middle-class demographic describing (1) a woman who often drives her school-age children to sporting activities and (2) in a quasi-disparaging sense, a white, middle-class woman who obsessively talks of her children’s successes and achievements.  There are derivative terms such as soccer dad & ballet dad but they’ve never achieved the same cultural traction.

At least some of those involved professionally with structural linguistics are football fans (maybe even afflicted by soccermania) and a number have discussed the soccer vs football phenomenon.  In most cases, the pattern of use easily is explained by the history of use in different parts of the world and the general tendency for “football” to be applied to the other sports in which kicking a ball is a part.  What however most interests those of a certain age is that the use in England of “soccer” seems now really to upset some people.  However, those old enough to remember the way things used to be done recal that as late as the 1970s, nobody seemed concerned about such things with “football” and “soccer” being used interchangeably.  All seem to agree the origin of “soccer” is uncertain but the use of the element “soc” from “association” is the most plausible explanation, despite the pronunciations not aligning.  Anyway, until there’s evidence of another origin, it’s thought to be soc(c) + -er and all agree the word definitely first was used at the University of Oxford as a coining by students.  By at least the mid-1880s it was appearing in print in various parts of England (the short-lived variant spelling “socker” thought a product of oral transmission and that may have seemed to make sense given socks are worn on the feet used to kick the ball), after which it spread to other parts of the English-speaking world.  The documentary evidence makes clear British newspapers preferred “football” but well into the 1980s “soccer” also often appeared, apparently without inducing many complaints.  So why in the twenty-first century is there among some in the UK an objection to hearing “their game” described as “soccer”?  Nobody seems to have linked that development to any specific event or social movement and it’s though just an example of (1) the English fans proprietorial attitude to the “world game” being “our game” and (2) a resistance to the “linguistic imperialism” of US English, a long established process greatly accelerated by the internet and social media.

The well connected Sepp Blatter (b 1936; President of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association (the International Federation of Association Football) that, for historic reasons, recognizes more countries than the UN), 1998-2015) with people he has met.

(1) With Silvio Berlusconi (1936-2023; prime minister of Italy 1994-1995, 2001-2006 & 2008-2011).

(2) With Bill Clinton (b 1946; POTUS 1993-2001).

(3) With Elizabeth II (1926-2022; Queen of the UK and other places, 1952-2022).

(4) With the FIFA World Cup trophy (which hasn’t been a "cup" since 1974 when the finals were contested by 16 teams (expanded to 24 1n 1982, 32 in 1998 and 48 in 2026)).

(5) With Vladimir Putin (b 1952; Russian president or prime-minister since 1999).

(6) With Benjamin Netanyahu (b 1949; prime-minister of Israel 1996-1999, 2009-2021 and since 2022).

(7) With David Cameron (b 1966; UK prime-minister 2010-2016).

(8) With Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad Al-Thani (b 1988; chief of Qatar's 2022 World Cup Bid).

(9) With Nicolas Sarközy (b 1955, French president 2007-2012).

(10) With Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (b 1954; Turkish president or prime-minister since 2003).

(11) With Boris Johnson (b 1964; UK prime-minister 2019-2022).

(12) With Kevin Rudd (b 1957; Australian prime-minister 2007-2010 & Jun-Sep 2013).

Unlike some sports where the influence of technology or improvements in this and that are so significant it verges on impossible usefully to compare players from different eras, probably few would disagree that among sports administrators, Sepp Blatter has achieved some of the most extraordinary things.  In office as president of FIFA between 1998-2015, Blatter devoted much of his time (and FIFA’s money) to building his power base among football’s influential in Asia and Africa.  This attracted some comment from the football community in places like Europe and South America but it was in May 2015 he really made the headlines when a joint operation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Swiss investigators staged a raid on the Zürich hotel where FIFA were about to conduct their annual congress.  Seven FIFA executives were arrested and charged with racketeering & money laundering while a further seven officials and sports-marketing figures were indicted by the US DoJ (Department of Justice) for offenses reaching back more than two decades.  Shortly afterwards, the DoJ revealed four other executives and two companies had already pleaded guilty in the international probe, which involved the payment of some US$150 million in what were alleged to be bribes and kickbacks.  Despite it all, two days after the arrests, Blatter was re-elected president by nearly a two-thirds majority of the 209-member FIFA voting body.  Contrary to the president’s expectations, a public outcry ensued which in just a few days escalated so rapidly that Blatter called for a special session of the FIFA congress to be convened, vowing to resign once a successor had been elected.  In October 2015, following the announcements of further investigations of Blatter’s conduct, FIFA’s ethics committee suspended him from the organization for 90 days, appointing an acting president.

Two months later Blatter was found guilty of ethics violations and barred from football-related activities for eight years.  Some of the charges were pursuant to a US$2 million payment Blatter made in 2011 to Michel Platini (b 1955; president of UEFA (Union des associations européennes de football (Union of European Football Associations), the peak body controlling football in Europe) 2007-2015), the supporting documentation associated with the payment said to be about as extensive as what might be in the petty-cash tin, stapled to the receipt for a packet of biscuits.  Platini had long been assumed to be Blatter’s designated successor.  Blatter appealed the decision and in February 2016 FIFA’s appeals committee reduced the ban to six years, a ruling upheld by the CAS (Tribunal arbitral du sport (Court of Arbitration for Sport)) in December.  Under new FIFA President Gianni Infantino (b 1970; FIFA president since 2016), further investigations were undertaken and in December 2020, FIFA filed a criminal complaint against Blatter relating to his role in the FIFA Museum project before, in March 2021, citing financial wrongdoing in the payment of huge “bonuses”, imposing a fine of just over US$1 million and extending his ban from football for a further six years, beginning as soon as the original ban expired in October 2022.  That was bad enough but his life appeared to be getting worse when, in November 2021, Swiss authorities brought to trial fraud charges associated with the falsification of documents relating to the mysterious payments to Platini.  Some eight months later, Blatter and Platini were cleared of all charges.  Sepp Blatter has achieved extraordinary things.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia (pronounced sin-uhs-thee-zhuh or sin-uhs-zhee-uh)

(1) In neurology and psychology, a neurological or psychological phenomenon in which a particular sensory stimulus triggers a second kind of sensation.

(2) The association of one sensory perception with, or description of it in terms of, another, unlike, perception that is not experienced at the same time.

(3) In literary theory or practice, an artistic device whereby one kind of sensation is described in the terms of another.

(4) In medical diagnostics, where a sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus that is applied to another, as in referred pain.

1892: From the Modern French or the New Latin, from Ancient Greek σύν (sún (with) or syn (together) + αἴσθησις (aísthēsis), (sensation; feeling) from the primitive Indo-European root au (to perceive) + abstract noun suffix -ia.  The word was modelled after existing construction anaesthesia.  Traditional spelling in the British Empire was synæsthesia but the US form synesthesia appears now global.  The meaning in psychology relating to the senses (colors that seem to the perceiver to having odor, etc.) is from 1891.  Synesthesia & synaesthete are nouns, synaesthetic is an adjective and synesthetically is an adverb; the noun plural is synesthesias.  

Clinicians have two categories of synesthesia: projective and associative.  Those who project see actual colours or shapes when stimulated whereas associators will feel an involuntary connection between the stimulus and the sense that it triggers.  For example, in the form chromesthesia synesthesia (sound to color) a projector would listen to a piano and see a purple shape whereas an associator might respond to the music by thinking it “sounds” purple.  There are a number of types of synesthesia, the best known of which grapheme-color synesthesia or the association of colours with letters or words.  In auditory-tactile synesthesia, certain sounds can induce sensations in parts of the body and debate continues about whether the near-universal reaction(s) induced by finger nails on a blackboard indicates synesthesia is a spectrum condition or this example is endemic in human physiology.  Lexical-gustatory synesthesia is the phenomenon of certain tastes being experienced upon hearing certain words.  Mirror-touch synesthesia is where someone feels the same sensation another person feels such as when a synesthete sees another touched on the arm; the synesthete involuntarily feeling a touch in the same place.

Logically, every possible combination of experiences which can occur can be a type of synesthesia.  Like a syndrome, something need not be wide-spread to be a type of synesthesia, it needs just to be specific: someone with the grapheme-color variant might see "Lindsay Lohan" as Lindsay Lohan.  Simultanéisme was a short-lived, early twentieth century movement in French poetry.  The writers aimed to achieve a kind of “simultaneousness of image and sound”, to represent or reproduce human sounds mingled with other sounds (ranging from birds & land mammals to those heard in cityscapes including the then novel automobile).  An attempt to form complex and dynamic onomatopoeiae, types of synaesthesia and kinaesthetic images, the finest surviving examples are in La Trilogie des forces (The Trilogy of Forces, 1908-1914) by the movement's founder Henri-Martin Barzun (1881–1973) and Naissance du poème (Birth of the poem, 1918) by Fernand Divoire (1883-1951).

For many reasons, as a literary device, synaesthesia in the twentieth century became much analysed and discussed with the critics even managing to build theories although it was not at all novel, innumerable writers of prose, poetry and non-fiction for millennia having synaesthetic references in their texts.  It’s a familiar feature of everyday speech, mentions such as “a heavy silence” or a “black look” being commonplace and there are no pedantic literalists who complain when a music critic writes of the “darkening voice” of the aging soprano.  So it’s a mixing of sensations, the concurrent appeal to more than one sense; the response through several senses to the stimulation of one and while as an intellectual exercise than can be made complex, in everyday life it’s just the way people think.

In the medical literature the French term synesthésie had appeared at least as early as 1864 but that was of bodily reflexes and co-sensations rather than the neurological condition and the first use in English in the modern sense is thought to appear in a translation of Jules Millet’s (1965-1982) doctoral thesis Audition colorée (Colored hearing) in which he differentiated synesthésie (for all kinds of combined senses) from those specifically associated with links between colors and sounds.  At the time, scientists and physicians in the English-speaking world were still using the borrowed French term pseudochromesthésie, a long word with a brief history.  In 1848, French physician Charles-Auguste-Édouard Cornaz (1825-1911) was the first to give a name to what would come to be known as synesthesia, calling it hyperchromatopsie (perception de trop de couleurs) (hyperchromatopsia (perception of too many colors)), the rationale for that being Dr Cornaz regarding the condition as the opposite of the well-documented chromatodysopsie (chromatodysopsia (color blindness); the term was the precursor to what would become hyperesthesia.  Dr Cordaz's coining fell into disuse after biographically otherwise obscure French physician Ernest Chabalier in 1864 published a paper using the term pseudochromesthésie (or pseudochromesthesia) (false colour-sensation) which enjoyed general adoption before being supplanted by synesthesia.

However, although the scientific study may have been embryonic, the idea was not and three lines from Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) sonnet Correspondances (Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857)) are illustrative of what was a common technique from the factory floor to the academy:

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,

Those translating Baudelaire into English did take a few interpretative liberties with his work but the synaesthetic imagery (mostly) was preserved:

The scents and colours to each other respond.

And scents there are, like infant's flesh as chaste,

As sweet as oboes, and as meadows fair,

Cyril Scott (1879-1970), Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil (1909)

Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.

Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,

Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;

F.P. Sturm (1879-1942), from Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, edited by Thomas Robert Smith (1880-1942) (1919)

sound calls to fragrance, colour calls to sound.

cool as an infant's brow some perfumes are,

softer than oboes, green as rainy leas;

Lewis Piaget Shanks (1879-1935), Flowers of Evil (1931)

Perfumes there are as sweet as the music of pipes and strings,

As pure as the naked flesh of children, as full of peace

As wide green prairies

George Dillon (1906-1968), Flowers of Evil (1936)

So are commingled perfumes, sounds, and hues.

There can be perfumes cool as children's flesh,

Like fiddIes, sweet, like meadows greenly fresh.

Roy Campbell (1901-1957), Poems of Baudelaire (1952)

Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,

Sweet as oboes, green as meadows

William Aggeler (1904-1974), The Flowers of Evil (1954)

Perfumes and sounds and colors correspond.

Some scents are cool as children's flesh is cool,

Sweet as are oboes, green as meadowlands,

Jacques LeClercq (1891-1971), Flowers of Evil (1958)

Perfumes, colors and sounds answer one another.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,

Sweet as oboes, green as prairies

Wallace Fowlie (1908-1998), Flowers of Evil (1964)

So perfumes, colors, tones answer each other.

There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh,

Soft as oboes, green as meadows,

Geoffrey Wagner (1927-2006), Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (1974)

So perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond.

Odours there are, fresh as a baby's skin,

Mellow as oboes, green as meadow grass,

James McGowan (1938-2014), Flowers of Evil (1993)

Perfumes, colours and sounds respond.

Odours fresh as the skin of an infant,

Sweet as oboes and green as a meadow,

Beverley Bie Brahic, Invitation to the Voyage (2021)

Wassily Kandinsky, color, shape and music

Winter Landscape (1909), oil on cardboard by Wassily Kandinsky.

In Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866–1944) particular synesthesia, color and music inextricably were tangled and so precise was it that he associated each note with an exact hue and it was so intrinsic to his being that he once observed: “…the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble.”  It meant his experience of music was heightened, indeed defined, by the range of visual perceptions which shifted with every note.  The music of Richard Wagner (1813–1883) has had its consequences, good and bad, and it was his vivid visual response to a performance of Richard Wagner's (1813–1883) Lohengrin (1850) at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre that he abandoned his successful career as a lawyer and devoted himself to the painting which had been his hobby.  Accepted as a student at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, he later described the Wagnerian transformation of his life: “I saw all my colors in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.”  Wagner has led astray a few troubled souls but he guided Kandinsky along a good path; the world can gain much from having more artists but probably has enough lawyers.

Composition VII (1913), oil on canvas by by Wassily Kandinsky.

Whether Kandinsky would have become an artist had he not been a synaesthete can't be known but music certainly drew him to become a certain sort of painter.  His path artistic path he explained by saying: "A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art."  Music he called "the ultimate teacher" and it critical to the development of especially his abstract works; noting the way the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) had abandoned tonal and harmonic conventions in his compositions, he rejected the figure or recognizable object in favor of shapes, lines, and discordant colors which he deployed overlaid on texture to create a rhythmic visual experience which as closely as possible emulated in a two-dimensional space the emotional response he’d experienced when hearing the sounds.  Unsurprisingly, Kandinsky gave many of his paintings musical titles, such as Composition or Improvisation and it wasn’t unusual for critics to use phrases like “Kandinsky’s symphony of colors”.  Kandinsky also perceived color also had the ability to touch the feelings of the viewers, yellow able to disturb while blue awakened the highest spiritual aspirations.  That may have been mapping his experience as a synaesthete on to those not able to enjoy the gift but it was certainly an insight into his visions.  In 1911, Kandinsky published Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) in which he defined the three types of painting: impressions, improvisations and compositions.  Impressions were based on an external reality while improvisations and compositions depicted images summoned from the unconscious, compositions the more formal of the two.  The treatise is one of the landmarks in the theoretical foundations of abstraction and remains an important contribution to an explanation of the techniques with which art can be constructed in an attempt to evoke psychological, physical, and emotional responses.

Improvisation 35 (1914), oil on canvas by Wassily Kandinsky.

As well as the works in which he explored the implications of his synesthesia, Kandinsky painted in other styles including Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstraction, Landscape, Cityscape, Genre, Marina and Allegory.  Although he did paint people in recognizable form (including self-portraits), had Kandinsky painted Lindsay Lohan he’d likely not have been drawn to depicting her in a realistic likeness, attracted instead by the colors he’d have associated with the metaphorical “sound” of her once tempestuous lifestyle and the actual sounds of the music she created.  Quite what might have been colors and shapes of the involuntary visual experience he’d have enjoyed while hearing of her adventures or listening to her tunes is of course speculative but in his 1911 treatise he did map out a quite strict vocabulary linking specific colors to musical instruments and emotional states.  From that would emerge a constellation of colored planes and rhythmic lines, a Lohanic portrait best assessed as a musical composition, visual elements corresponding with timbre, pitch and rhythm.

Black Lines I (1913), oil on canvas by Wassily Kandinsky.

From his visual lexicon, it’s possible to imagine how a visual symphony of Lindsay Lohan might have appeared, her distinctive red hair drawn not as naturalistic strands but, because of the his association of vermilion with the sound of a trumpet, (someting cross-cultural, Dr Johnson (Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)) once describing the color scarlet to a blind man as “the clangour of a trumpet”) there’d likely have been intense, sharp, angular geometric structures or aggressive, flaming slashes of red slicing across the canvas.  Thematically, it would be a “loud” work, suggestive of something sudden and explosive but there would also be “quieter” elements, Kandinsky associating a light, powder blue with the sound of a flute and ultramarine or cobalt with that of a cello or the deeper tones of an organ.  There might have been interlocking concentric circles and smooth, floating curves of blue weaving through the sharp red angles, the “cool” blue tones not balancing but clashing with the “hot” reds, representing both the rhythmic layers of her music and the more melancholy undercurrent of a life lived under the microscope of the tabloid press.  Superficially incoherent because of fragmented geometric shapes and intersecting diagonals, the tension between colors would have created an emotional dissonance, visual “chords” at once seductive and unstable.

Violet (1923), colour lithograph by Wassily Kandinsky.

It’s likely Kandinsky would have been unable to resist so obvious an artistic possibility as Lindsay Lohan’s famous freckles, representing as they do in music a staccato percussion.  On canvas, this would have been translated into a scatter plot of sharp dots peppered not in a defined pattern but randomly, as naturally as they appear on skin.  Kandinsky thought dots (in the sense of “representations of points”) as the ultimate minimalist entity implying a sudden, sharp beat or a silent pause; either way, there would be a spray of rhythmic, percussive dots jumping across the canvas, one’s interpretation of that an element in deconstructing the whole.  While his techniques were multi-layered, he did claim in one aspect there was simplicity because: "Everything starts from a dot."  Shapes being signifiers of an inherent spiritual weight, there would have been triangles because he imagined them as possessing aggressive, forward-moving energy; they would appear with circles representing the soul and peace.  The darkness in her life would have been conveyed by chaotic, clashing black lines and there would also be yellow, a color the artist described as “frenzied” and capable of “violently bothering" the viewer.  All this would typically be “played out” by interactions on the “charged, expectant silence” of a solid, white background.  A viewer would perhaps not recognize even a hint of a human presence and the work would be understood only if the title made explicit Lindsay Lohan was the subject.  Even then, some notes from the artist would be helpful because, while a set of emotional and musical impulses orchestrated in color would be a familiar language to other color-music synaesthetes, the level of abstraction would for others make it mysterious and probably weird beyond immediate understanding.

Dynasty

Dynasty (pronounced dahy-nuh-stee (US English); din-uh-stee (UK English)

(1) A sequence of rulers from the same family, stock, or group.

(2) The rule of such a sequence.

(3) A series of members of a family who are distinguished for their success in business, wealth creation etc.

(4) In sport, a team or organization which has an extended period of success or dominant performance (technically unrelated to family links or even and great continuity in personnel).

(5) As used specifically in East Asian history, the polity or historical era under the rule of a certain dynasty.

1425-1475: From the Middle English dynastia, from the Middle French dynastie, from the Late Latin dynastia, from the Ancient Greek δυναστεία (dunasteía) (power, dominion, lordship, sovereignty) from dynasthai (have power), of unknown origin.  The adjective dynastic (from 1800) is used when speaking or, relating to or pertaining to a dynasty; dynastical attested since 1730.  A dynast (hereditary ruler) is from the 1630s, from the Late Latin dynastes, from the Greek dynastes (ruler, chief, lord, master).  The synonyms include house & lineage.  Dynasty & dynast are nouns, dynastic & dynastical are adjectives and dynastically is an adverb; the noun plural is dynasties.

The word is widely used of the ruling families of nations associated with royalty (Hapsburg dynasty, Romanov dynasty, Hohenzollern dynasty etc) and remains the standard term in the historiography of Imperial China (Ming dynasty, Qing dynasty, Song dynasty, Tang dynasty, Yuan dynasty etc).  In political science it’s a popular use (verging on a slur) to describe the political arrangements concocted when a ruler attempts (sometimes with success) to pass the office (and thus their country) to a descendent (usually the eldest or most demonstrably ruthless son), examples including the Congo, Syria, Cambodia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Sometimes, polities organized in this manner can give rise to what is known as a subdynasty (which seems never to hyphenated), an idea borrowed from European history when royal families routinely would provide offspring to serve as kings of other states, thereby creating a new dynasty; sometimes this worked well, sometimes not.

In politics, families which some characterize as appearing dynastic can be very sensitive to anything which seems even to hint at the suggestion and the Lee family in Singapore is the standard case study.  Between the rule of Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015; Prime Minister of Singapore 1959-1990) and that of his son Lee Hsien Loong (b 1952; Prime Minister of Singapore since 2004-2024) there was gap of over a dozen years (which must not be called an interregnum) and there was of some interest in whether a similar mechanism would be engineered to enable a third generation to assume office, the previous successor designate having been removed from the plan because of “some unsuitability”.  According to certain Western commentators, Mr Lee delayed stepping down from the premiership (to become "Senior Minister", the same path taken by his father and not wholly different for the approach of Benedict XVI (1927–2022; pope 2005-2013, pope emeritus 2013-2022)) so a “long runway” cold be laid onto which the next prime minister can emerge (the word “runway” used in the modern sense of the “catwalk” on which models strut their stuff rather than anything to do with aviation).

Something in common: Lee Hsien Loong and Klyie Jenner.

As things turned out, in 2024, Lawrence Wong Shyun Tsai (b 1972) became the city state's fourth prime minister.  While Li Hongyi (b 1987; first-born child of Lee Hsien Loong), has disavowed any interest in a political career, there’s still plenty of time and if, in the fullness of time, “drafted” by the ruling PAP (the People’s Action Party which has been in power since independence in 1959), he may feel it his duty to be “be persuaded”.  Li Hongyi may however believe his lineage is too great a disadvantage to overcome.  Earlier, Lee Hsien Loong dismissed suggestions his stellar career (becoming at becoming at 32 the youngest brigadier-general in the history of the Singapore military and prime minister at 53) owed anything to family connections, claiming being the prime minister’s son actually hindered him because people were so anxious to avoid accusations of favoritism.  Interestingly, entertainment personality Kylie Jenner (b 1997) made much the point, claiming it was belonging to a famous family which saw her denied some modelling work.  The Lee family though do seem unusually sensitive to suggestions the scions might unduly benefit from the connection, the Financial Times in 2007 even having to apologize for having published not anything libellous (actually easily done in Singapore) but simply a list of Lee family members appointed to high positions in the state.  The current derogatory slang is “nepo baby”, a clipping of "nepotism baby", a term one is unlikely to read in the Singaporean press.

Kim I, II & III: The Kim Dynasty, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka North Korea)

Kim I: Kim Il-Sung (1912-1994; The Great Leader of DPRK, 1948-1994, left).  Like his descendants, The Dear Leader and The Supreme Leader, The Great Leader enjoyed food.  He’s pictured here at lunch with another foodie, comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader, 1924-1953, right).

Kim Il-Sung held an array of titles during his decades as the DPRK’s dictator, the proliferation not unusual in communist nations where the ruling party’s structures are maintained alongside the formal titles of state with which governments conduct relations with foreign powers.  In office for a remarkable 45 years, he was designated premier (head of government) between 1948-1972 and president 1972-1994.  He was head of the WPK (Workers' Party of Korea) between 1949-1994 and in that role successively was styled as Chairman (1949-1966) and General Secretary (after 1966).  During his 45-year rule, there were ten US presidents, six RoK (Republic of Korea (South Korea)) presidents, nine British prime ministers and ten Australian prime ministers.  He tenure in office also spanned the era of the Soviet Union from its apotheosis under comrade Stalin to its collapse in 1991.  Being dead however proved no obstacle to The Great Leader extending his presidency, the collective office Chuch'ejosŏnŭi yŏngwŏnhan suryŏng (Eternal leaders of Juche Korea) created in 2016 by the insertion of an enabling line in the preamble to the constitution.  What this amendment did was formalise the position of The Great Leader and his late son comrade Kim Jong-Il (1941–2011; The Dear Leader of DPRK 1994-2011)) as the “eternal leaders” of the DPRK.  Juche is the term used to describe the DPRK’s national philosophy, a synthesis of The Great Leader’s interpretation of (1) Korean tradition and (2) Marxist-Leninist theory.

Funeral cortege of The Great Leader, 1994.

It was an interesting move.  Constitutionally, the office of president in its executive form was codified only in 1972; prior to that the role of head of state had been purely ceremonial and held by trusted party functionaries, all power exercised by The Great Leader in his capacity as premier and WPK general secretary.  However, merely by being president The Great Leader vested the office with such an aura that upon his death in 1994, the position was left vacant, The Dear Leader not granted the title.  That nuance of semi-succession for a while absorbed the interest of the DPRK watchers but attempts to invest the move with any significance abated as DPRK business, though in the more straitened circumstances of the post Soviet world, continued as usual.  The constitution was again revised in 1998.  Being a godless communist state, no fine theological points stood in the way of declaring The Great Leader the DPRK’s "Eternal President", the latest addition to the preamble declaring:

Under the leadership of the Workers' Party of Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Korean people will hold the great leader Comrade Kim Il-Sung in high esteem as the eternal President of the Republic.

The constitution, as revised and promulgated after the death of The Dear Leader, again referred to The Great Leader as "Eternal President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea" but in 2016 (The Dear Leader having apparently been dead for what must have been judged a decent duration), another amendment to the preamble changed the administrative nomenclature of executive eternity to "eternal leaders of Juche Korea", the honor now jointly held by the leaders great & dear, one dead, one alive.  It was another first for the Kims.

Kim II: Kim Jong-Il (1941–2011; The Dear Leader of DPRK, 1994-2011) in Prussian blue pantsuit, 593 Military Unit's Commander School (secret location undisclosed), 21 June, 2010.

DPRK generals wear big hats and always carry a notebook in case the closest Kim says something interesting.  They write it down and because every thing said is interesting, all in the entourage go through many notebooks.  DPRK watchers have concluded that because of the nature of the regime, it's unlikely any of these notebooks have been discarded so there must be a large number of them stored around the country. 

As a political construct, the DPRK is best thought of as a hereditary theocracy because what's expected of citizens is not mere veneration of the Kims but a form of worship.  Although opaque, its dynamics are now better understood but when in 1994 The Great Leader died, neither within the country nor beyond was there wide understanding how much of the power structure he controlled had passed to The Dear Leader.  Following the collapse of the Soviet Union which had provided the DPRK with much financial and other aid, the economic circumstances were hardly propitious but there seems never to have been any doubt about the formal succession, The Dear Leader having been anointed for more than a decade.  The DPRK’s propaganda machine, while not in the conventional Western sense having a middle class to be made “quite prepared”, did have the had the rest of the country to work on and for years Kim Jong-Il had gradually been eased into photo opportunities with The Great Leader, eventually making even solo appearances, sometimes in the role of Supreme Commander of the KPA (Korean People's Army) to which he’d been appointed in 1991, despite having no military background.  However, given most of the generals and admirals (despite their impressive display of decorations and other medals) also have little experience of active combat, this was less of a problem than it might have seemed.

There must in the mind of the Great Leader been some concerns a dynasty might not evolve because, perhaps now aware of his own mortality, The Great Leader in the years before death made the effort to "clear the decks" for the succession, purging the military and civilian ranks of any difficult types who might prove potential obstacles in the path of Kim Jong-Il's ascent.  Some of the purged went into enforced retirement while the deaths of others (presumably suspected recalcitrants) was announced although that may have been a coincidence; the DPRK may be a theocracy but its military and political elite are gerontocracies so senior figures dropping dead from old age is not rare.  Anyway, the path was smoothed and, the military command settled, in 1992, The Great Leader announced Kim Jong-Il was now in charge of all the DPRK’s internal affairs.  Curiously, shortly after that, the media began using of him the honorific “Dear Father” instead of “Dear Leader” but for whatever reason, all official communications soon reverted to the latter which first had appeared a couple of years earlier.

Kim Jong-Il with the judging committee at the annual "DPRK Biggest Watermelon Competition", Pyongyang, August, 2010.

Despite all the dynastic help, indications are it took The Dear Leader sometime fully to assert his authority.  Seriously weird it may appear but, the WPK is just another political party and it too has factions; in the difficult post-Soviet environment of the 1994 succession, DPRK-watchers detected signs of genuine internal debates about how to deal with the economic problems faced.  The adjustments frankly didn’t go well for many North Korean citizens (some of whom starved to death) but while The Dear Leader may not have learned much economic theory, he proved adept at consolidating his power, adopting the Songun (military first) policy, granting the military priority in resource allocation and political influence, not out of any concern about foreign invasion but to ensure the loyalty of what was, in effect, a giant police apparatus tasked with protecting the Kim dynasty from "problems from within", the slightest hint of dissent met with the "good, hard crackdown" which is a signature tactic of dictatorships in managing their highest priority: regime survival.  Secure in office, spasmodically, The Dear Leader did attempt the implement the odd economic reform but the results were not impressive; despite that, efficient internal repression ensured the family's business as usual continued.

Dynastic family planning.

Kim Jong-Il shaking hands with Japanese-born singer Ko Yong-hui (aka Takada Hime, 1952-2004) circa 1972.  She became his consort and would later give birth to Kim Jong-Un.  Within the DPRK, her name must never be spoken and she's referred to only by honorific forms, the most commonly used being: “The Respected Mother who is the Most Faithful and Loyal 'Subject' to the Dear Leader Comrade Supreme Commander”.

By 1997, The Dear Leader sufficiently was entrenched in power to engineer his appointment to The Great Leader's old post as General Secretary of the WPK and, a year later, a constitutional amendment declared his role as chairman of the NDC (National Defence Commission) was "the highest post of the state", presumably among those still alive because the same constitutional reform proclaimed The Great Leader to be the DPRK’s "Eternal President".  Complicating things further, the Dear Leader's career progression was mapped onto the 2012 constitutional amendments in which The Dear Leader’s had been declared "Eternal General Secretary of the WPK and Eternal Chairman of the National Defence Commission".  In any other country this may have been thought an anomaly to be clarified but in the DPRK it's all part of the mystique of the personality cults of the Kims.  In 2016, after a decent period of mourning, the new title "Eternal Leaders of Juche Korea" was created and conferred on both The Great Leader & Dear Leader, the internal logic again perfect.

The reputation of the DPRK as a hermit state cloaked in secrecy is not wholly undeserved but what was published by the energetic and highly productive KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) was an official biography of The Dear Leader and it must from his earliest years have been obvious he was extraordinary.  He was born inside a log cabin beneath Korea’s most sacred mountain and in the moment of delivery, a shooting star brought forth a spontaneous change from winter to summer and there appeared in the sky, the biggest, brightest rainbow ever seen.  The Dear Leader turned out to be not subject to bowel movements, never needing to defecate or urinate (although evidence suggests this is not a genetic characteristic of the dynasty and not shared by his son & successor).  He had a most discriminating palette so prior to his meals being prepared, several staff assiduously by hand inspected every grain of rice to ensure each was of uniform length, plumpness, and color, The Dear Leader eating only "perfect" rice.  Although he only ever played one round of golf and that on the country’s notoriously difficult 7,700 yard (7040 metre) course at Pyongyang, he took only 34 strokes to complete the 18 holes, a round which included five holes-in-one.  Although the scorecard was verified by all 17 of the bodyguards on duty at the course, experienced golfers have cast doubt on the round of 34 (not commenting on the holes-in-one) but the diet of individually inspected & polished grains of rice was thought "at least plausible".  

Funeral cortege of The Dear Leader, 2011.

The funeral cars were 1975 or 1976 Lincoln Continentals, built by Moloney Standard Coach Builders on an extended wheelbase.  Lincoln experts say it's a different car to the similar model used in The Great Leader's funeral, the dynasty said to own several and it's believed they were obtained "through sources in Japan".  Nor are the big Lincolns are the only machines of note in the state mews.  Uniquely, the Kim dynasty is the only family believed also to own a brace of Mercedes-Benz 600 (M100; 1963-1981) long-roof Landaulets, only twelve of which were built.  Fittingly, these variants with an extended length folding top casually are known as the "presidentials" but the factory never officially used the designation.  There were also 47 "standard" Landaulets with a shorter fabric soft-top.  

The Kims certainly are the subjects of some of the most elaborate personality cults ever but it’s not only the DPRK administration that creates retrospective honours to acknowledge the uniqueness of a special individual. George Washington (1732–1799; POTUS, 1789-1797) will forever be the first POTUS so that distinction was always secure but he retired from the army as a lieutenant general; that others since have been appointed to more senior ranks did disturb some in the military, concerned his primacy in the hierarchy wasn’t adequately honoured.  Perhaps surprisingly, in the US military, the system was finalized only this century and prior to 1944, the matter of stars and titles for generals had been a little confused, the whole order of precedence in the army since the Declaration of Independence only properly codified with some retrospective creations in 1976 and 2024.  Historically, the most senior rank in the US Army had been lieutenant general with first significant change effected in the post Civil War (1861-1865) era when the rank of “General of the Army” was gazetted and while nominally a four star appointment, structurally, it was the equivalent of what would in 1944 be formalized as five star rank.  However, in 1866, the significance of the title “General of the Army” was it reflected the appointee being the general with authority over the whole army which meant there could be only ever be one in active service.  In other words, that meant the four star general was commander-in-chief of the army and the paperwork had years earlier been prepared for Washington to be raised thus but this was never done because of concern among lawyers it might set a precedent and be seen to impinge upon a president’s authority as commander in chief of all forces.  Indeed, although later the US military would use titles such as “Commander in Chief, US Pacific Command”, Donald Rumsfeld (1932–2021: US defense secretary 1975-1977 & 2001-2006) in 2002 ended the practice (and use of the acronym CINC) by re-asserting there was in the US: “only one commander in chief in America - the president”, spelled out in Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States."  The matter of civilian authority over the military was one of the founding principles of the republic.

The next change came when General John "Black Jack" Pershing (1860–1948) who had commanded the US expeditionary forces in World War I (1914-1918) was in 1919 appointed to the then unique rank of “General of the Armies of the United States”.   At the time, the war was known as the "World War" (a suggestion by Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924; POTUS 1913-1921)), the vast and bloody conflict already regarded as “the war to end all wars” and the feeling was the conflict had in scale and awfulness been unique so some special recognition was deserved.  Interestingly, although Wilson is by some credited with the coining, he was only the populariser, his status as POTUS vesting "World War" with an undeniable authority.  The term had however previously used by others, the deliciously wicked W.M. "Billy" Hughes (1862–1952; prime minister of Australia 1915-1923) including the phrase in a letter in 1915 sent to all Australian males aged 18-45 urging the enlistment in the military and he called the conflict then raging "world war" despite the US not then being a belligerent.  Despite all that, Pershing remained a four star general and confusingly, when the spate of five star appointments was made between 1944-1950, the old wording “General of the Army” was revived with the pecking order based on the gazetted date of appointment to the rank which no longer implied an individual having authority over the entire army.  There have since been no five star creations (although many other armies have continued to appoint field marshals which is the equivalent).  In the US, some historians and many in the military fretted over the untidiness of it all and in 1976, George Washington formerly was gazetted “General of the Armies of the United States with rank and precedence over all other grades of the Army, past or present”, meaning he will for all time be the US Army’s senior officer.  In 1944, there was also an amusing footnote which, according to legend, resulted in the decision to use the style “general” and not “marshal” (as many militaries do) because the first to be appointed was George Marshall (1880–1959; US Army chief of staff 1939-1945) and it was thought “Marshal Marshall” would be a bit naff, something Joseph Heller’s (1923-1999) character “Major Major” in Catch-22 (1961) would prove.  So, retrospective adjustments to hierarchies are not unique to the DPRK.

Kim III: Kim Jong-Un (b circa 1982; The Supreme Leader (originally The Great Successor) of DPRK since 2011).  The Supreme Leader is pictured here with South Korean foreign minister, Chung Eui-yong (b 1946).  In the North, the KCNA refers to South Korea as "the puppet state" [of the US].

Inheriting the family business, the country and its population at a much younger age than The Dear Leader, The Supreme Leader, didn’t benefit (or suffer) from the long public gestation period his father was provided by The Great Leader.  It was in 2009, about two years before The Dear Leader’s death that the media began reporting the youngest son was to be the DPRK’s next leader although at that stage, he was referred to as The Brilliant Comrade, the honorific The Great Successor not adopted until after The Dear Leader’s death and it was soon replaced by The Supreme Leader.  For whatever reason, and the speculation and conspiracy theories are many, Kim III more quickly assumed his panoply of offices and titles than his immediate ancestor.

The Supreme Leader leads the bowing ceremony before the portraits of the Great Leader (left) and Dear Leader (right), 9^th Congress of the WPK (Workers' Party of Korea), April 25 House of Culture, Pyongyang, 19-25 February 2026.  Unanimously, delegates paid tribute to the Supreme Leader and declared it the “best congress ever”.

Portraits of the Kims are of great significance to the regime.  In August 2023, with tropical storm Khanun bearing down on the DPRK coast, state media issued instructions that all citizens must “with urgency” and “at any cost” focus on “ensuring the safety” of items depicting the three members of the Kim dynasty.  Presumably because they would be more susceptible to the storm’s heavy rain and strong winds than sturdier objects like statues, the Rodong Sinmun (official newspaper of the ruling WPK) emphasized citizens’ “foremost focus” must be ensuring the preservation of portraits of the Kims although they did caution the need also to safeguard the large number of statues, mosaics, murals and other monuments to the dynasty which has ruled North Korea since its foundation in 1948.

Meeting of the WPK to commemorate the Supreme Leader’s tenth anniversary of his assumption of leadership of the party, Pyongyang, April 2022.  The Supreme Leader’s portrait is displayed in an oval which is not unusual in the iconography of the DPRK's Kim personality cult.

The order was an interesting insight into the way the regime regards the symbolism of representational objects as a part of its legitimacy but they have set the population an onerous task given the sheer volume of portraits which exist.  At least one each of the Great Leader & Dear Leader are known to hang in every house, café, bus, train carriage or shop and in larger public buildings there might literally be dozens.  In whatever form, the depictions are regarded as not merely symbolic but as sacred icons; just as every citizen must be willing (anxious even) to die protecting the leader, so must they be prepared to sacrifice themselves to save his portrait.  It's never been revealed whether any of the Kims read Oscar Wilde's (1854–1900) The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) but if so, they've learned well. 

Coriaceousness on legs: The Supreme Leader in body-hugging black leather.

Fashionistas note the perception of black as a “slimming color” but caution the effect is attained through the interplay of optics, contrast perception and even cultural expectations rather than the color’s inherent properties.  Done well, it can work but success depends on design and fit; there are limitations so expectations have to be “realistic”.  Essentially, what use of solid black can do is: (1) Reduce visible contour information (although something really shiny like patent leather can make things worse) because less light is reflected, meaning shadows, folds and changes in body shape appear less are less visually distinct, details to some degree “flattened out”; (2) Minimize edge definition and contrasts in hues, human vision (for sound evolutionary reasons) drawn to highlights & boundaries so while light-colored fabrics generate stronger visual cues of volume and curvature, these black tends to suppress; (3) Exploit a trick from visual art in which darker tones appear to “recede” while the lighter “advance”.  The technicalities however operate in conjunction with the long-established cultural expectation; because the notion “black is a slimming color” has become a popular orthodoxy, viewers perceptions can be “pre-conditioned” and appearances interpreted accordingly.  Fashion critics suggest the effect is overstated and all else being equal, design and the quality of fabric is much more significant than the color, a well-cut garment in a light shade able to be more “slimming” that anything ill-fitting or of poor design in black.  They note the effect anyway can to some extent be achieved with other solid, dark colors (Prussian blue, charcoal, deep olive etc) because again, the uninterrupted expanse reduces visual segmentation.  Perceptions are also sometime gleaned from professional photography with angles and lighting optimized whereas IRL (in real life) there’s movement so expectations must be tempered down to the art of the possible.

Official portrait of the Supreme Leader, issued by the KCNA at 7th Congress of the the WPK, 6-9 May 2016, April 25 House of Culture, Pyongyang.

Announced by the KCNA on state television as The Great Successor, The Supreme Leader was appointed General Secretary of the WPK, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and President of the State Affairs Commission, followed soon afterwards by a promotion to the army’s highest military rank, Marshal of the Korean People's Army, adding to his position as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces (exactly the same constitutional arrangement adopted by Hitler as commander-in-chief of both OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres (High Command of the Army)) and OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command of the Armed Forces)).  Great minds do think alike.  Confusingly, having already morphed from The Brilliant Comrade to The Great Successor to The Supreme Leader, references also appeared calling him The Dear Respected Leader but thankfully the proliferation seems now to have stopped and for more than a decades it's been "The Supreme Leader" all the way.  In office, he has pursued 병진 (byungjin (literally "parallel development")), a refinement of The Great Leader’s policy simultaneously to develop both the economy and the military, his particular emphasis in the latter a focus on nuclear weapons and inter-continental delivery systems.  It may be an attempt to avoid the problems inherent in the “Waffen und Butter” (guns and butter) programme pursued seriously by the Nazi regime (1933-1945) only by as late as 1938, the latter element loosing resource allocation after 1943 as fortunes turned in World War II (1939-1945).

Kim Jong-Un, looking through binoculars across the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), observing the “provocative maneuvers” of the South Korean Army.  DPRK generals wear famously large hats.

While Kim III is no longer referred to as The Great Successor, there have been great successes.  Despite Western propaganda, there are elections in the DPRK and when The Supreme Leader sought a seat in the Supreme People's Assembly, there was a record turnout of voters and he received 100% of the votes cast.  Although it’s hard to determine the veracity of many of the reports, it’s suggested also he’s an innovator in matters of military discipline, new methods used by firing squads said to include flame throwers, and anti-aircraft cannons, both said to make quite a mess although it's difficult to know how high is the body count, some reported executed later turning up alive and well.  Worth a mention though is the assassination in 2017 of his exiled half-brother Kim Jong-Nam (1971-2017), killed with the nerve agent VX while walking through Kuala Lumpur International Airport, a novel twist on the extra-judicial execution being the use of two aspiring starlets to deliver the toxin; they believed they were being filmed as part of a reality TV show (as assassinations go, genuinely that was innovative and yet another first for the Kims). Most celebrated has been the nuclear programme and the increasingly bigger and longer-range missiles paraded from time to time.  Underground nuclear tests being hard to monitor, it remains unclear whether some of the devices tested are the long de rigueur plutonium weapons or, for the first time since the one-off A-Bomb used in Hiroshima in 1945, made using uranium.  Most impressively, the KCNA reported an almost complete success in the DPRK for some time avoiding outbreaks of COVID-19 with no cases reported in the republic so, on any basis of calculation, The Supreme Leader supervised the most successful COVID-19 strategy on Earth.  Unfortunately, because of neglect by lazy and incompetent officials (who were executed with the next two generations of their families consigned to labor camps) an outbreak did happen and the DPRK's borders remain almost wholly closed, only small number of carefully vetted tourists from Russia and the PRC (People's Republic of China) permitted entry for carefully supervised visits.   

The Supreme Leader has also at times drawn the interest of the pro ana community because of his weight loss has at times been striking and achieved before the general availability of GLP-1s (glucagon-like peptide-1).  Whether his motivation was (1) concerns about his health, being a bit chubby, (2) a wish to look more sexy and attractive to younger women or (3) display solidarity with his subjects, many of whom were suffering food shortages, his weight-loss regimes have on occasions been an obvious success, experts estimating (on the basis of photographic evidence), as much as 25-30 kg (65-80 lb) may have be shed.  That was commendable but did elsewhere create a problem for the small number of people in the entertainment business working as as Kim Jong-il impersonators, some of whom sought guidance from the pro ana community.  For security reasons, the regime employs "Supreme Leader body doubles" (doppelgangers) and it's not known if, during his "slim phases" they're starved until the meet the required dimensions or simply shot and replaced with thinner models.  Conspiracy theorists in the West did speculate the "slimmed down version" may really be a body-double who was paraded for the cameras just to assure hungry citizens the Supreme Leader was sharing (at least to some extent) their deprivations.  The KCNA does have "a bit of previous" in being "economical with the truth" so who knows?  However, regardless of his weight, The Supreme Leader seems in such rude good health that, still barely 40, he may well rule the DPRK even longer than his grandfather’s 45 years.  Ever since the demise of the USSR in 1991, analysts have been predicting the imminent demise of the communist regimes in both Pyongyang and Havana but they seem to muddle through, the DPRK of late enjoying new sources of foreign exchange, branching out from industrial-scale drug production and the smuggling of oil and minerals to the new field of cybercrime; even in the niche market of fake news they're said to run a small operation.

Doppelgangish.

US actor Elizabeth Gillies (b 1993) appeared as Fallon Carrington in the television drama Dynasty (2017–2022), a revival of the 1980s soap opera; it was shown in the US on the CW Television Network (episodes streamed internationally on Netflix the next day).  She appeared (far left) in Ariana Grande's (b 1993) music video Thank U, Next (2019), taking the part of Lindsay Lohan in the segment which was a homage to Mean Girls (2004).  While not technically a doppelganger, the degree of resemblance was sufficient for the theme to work.  The concept of Ms Grande's Thank U, Next could be applied to the DPRK's succession model ("just one Kim after another" as it were).

An artist’s depiction of how a statute in bronze of Daniel Andrews might be cast.

News the ALP (“Australian Labor Party” although more cynical souls prefer “Agitprop, Lies & Propaganda”) government in the Australian state of Victoria was allocating some Aus$134,000 (US$95,000) to erect a bronze statue of Daniel Andrews (b 1972; Premier of Victoria 2014-2023) was greeted by most taxpayers with a resigned indifference although at least some presumably would have preferred attention be devoted to violent crime, crumbling transport infrastructure and the troubled health system.  However, from the usual suspects in the commentariat came the predictable critique that given Victoria’s debt level and other acknowledged "issues", this might not be the most propitious moment to announce so much (borrowed) money was being spent for the aggrandizement of the politician under whom so much debt was accumulated and billions apparently squandered.  Unimpressed by such carping, Premier Jacinta Allan (b 1973; Premier of Victoria since 2023) defended the move, calling Mr Andrews “a fantastic premier” and didn't bother to deny suggestions her government was so resigned to losing the next election the focus had shifted to looting the exchequer for funds to build monuments to themselves.  Nor did she refer to analysis concluding the last ALP administration (under John Cain (1931–2019; Premier of Victoria 1982-1990) & Joan Kirner (1938–2015; Premier of Victoria 1990-1992)) had left the state in an even worse financial position so maybe she really has stopped trying.  Politically, though, she must find the similarities striking: a woman handed the job because the situation is hopeless and all that remains is for her to go down with the sinking ship, most of the men having already taken to the (taxpayer-funded) lifeboats.  In feminist theory, the phenomenon is known as the "glass cliff", exemplified by the recent investiture of a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury; were it possible for the job still to be done, the Anglicans would have appointed the 106^th man rather than the first woman.  

A visiting tour group of Australians from Victoria bow before the three statues.  As the bronze of comrade Dan's statue weathers, it will appear in the same, darker hue as his illustrious comrades.

However, the announcement from Melbourne was described as “long overdue” by Kim Jong-Un who in 2023 presided over the unveiling of a statue of Mr Andrews, erected on a plinth beside those of Kim Il-Sung & Kim Jong-Il.  The three statues, cast in bronze and 22 metres (72 feet) high, stand as the centre-piece of 만수대대기념비 (Mansudae Grand Monument), a complex in central Pyongyang at which have been erected over 200 other (appropriately smaller) statues of figures from the DPRK’s heroic past.  At the unveiling ceremony, 10,000 invited citizens were able to enjoy listening to an untypically brief oration by the Supreme Leader before two hours of extracts from speeches by Mr Andrews (in the original English, followed by a Korean translation) were broadcast over loudspeakers.  Topics covered by Mr Andrews included “modern techniques in debt management”, “fiscal discipline” and “locking citizens in tower blocks for their own good”.  At several points, the broadcast was for some minutes paused so citizens could applaud.  Unfortunately, the outdoor ceremony was conducted on what proved to be Pyongyang’s coldest day in 44 years and several dozen in the audience died after succumbing to hypothermia while there were at least hundreds of cases of frostbite but the KCNA reported interviewed survivors saying that was a small price to pay to be able to hear in his own voice the thoughts of the one they called “The Great Leader of Victoria”.  Closing the ceremony from his double-glazed, centrally-heated, booth, the Supreme Leader concluded things with words that were at once inspiring and modest: “For a thousand generations, the people the eternal nation of the DPRK will honor the memory of comrade Daniel Andrews and his untiring assaults on decadent bourgeois values such as freedom of assembly, privacy and free speech.  Comrade Dan was the great dictator that I aspire to become and deserves to stand on the plinth next to our Great Leader and Dear Leader.  If I can do to the DPRK what comrade Dan did to Victoria, perhaps one day a statue of me will be placed on the plinth.”