ARTICLE: "In Deep South, North Koreans Find a Hot Market," by Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times, 25 May 2006, p. A3.

This is a stomach churning piece to me, and it's not the first article written on the subject (I recall them as far back as two years ago): how South Korea is turning North Korea into this image of its harmless, country bumpkin cousin. Call it "Song of the North" and come up with your own zippity-do-da soundtrack to cover up the misery north of the DMZ.

I was a kid in the 60s, when we had the natural nostalgia for the 1940s (it's a 20-year cycle in America), and grew up in the 1970s when our collective fascination with the 1950s was at its height. What South Korea is doing now with North Korea is similar, just a weirder, far longer stretch.

As one North Korean defector puts it, "It [a popular retro South Korean restaurant that approximates a bad meal in the North] reminds South Koreans of the 1950s and 1960s, before South Korea industrialized."

I get the dynamic. Hell, there's an old Commie-style restaurant in Norther VA that caters just to nostgalgic ex-Sovs. When the past is truly past, it's pretty funny, in that "Hogan's Heroes" sort of way (not funny haa-haa, but more funny eeeeuw!).

But the past isn't the past in North Korea. It's just a place frozen in time by a forced disconnectedness that leaves millions of its citizens living lives of serious deprivation--and that's not Disney material, frankly.

As the piece says, "Older South Koreans, who still look upon the North as an enemy, want to see images of starving North Korean babies." But alas, the owner of the restaurant in question only puts up pleasant, neutral images.

And yeah, that creeps me out.