"Great Leader, Dear Leader: Demystifying North Korea under the Kim Dynasty"
A talk by Bertil Lintner
"Great Leader, Dear Leader: Demystifying North Korea under the Kim Dynasty", published by Silkworm Books, a Chiang Mai-based publishing house, is the title of Chiang Mai resident Bertil Lintner's most recent book. North Korea is to often described in clichés such as "the Hermit Kingdom" and "the World's Last Stalinist Bastion." Journalists who have made it to Pyongyang also seem to have little to report other than that the city's streets are wide and almost empty. Bertil felt there was a real need for a more analytical look behind North Korea's own, seemingly impenetrable Iron Curtain, a book that made sense of it all.
This is Bertil's seventh book. Previously, the Swedish-born author and journalist has written five books about Burma and one about organised crime in the Asia Pacific region. Bertil has been living in Asia since 1975 (and in Thailand since 1980) and has written for the Far Eastern Economic Review and other international publications.
2. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1, Chiang Mai UNIVERSITY, Faculty of Humanities, Room HB7705, 1:30 pm: A talk in English by the French writer and social critic Pascal Bruckner on the Pursuit of Happiness.
Pascal Bruckner has written many books in which he addresses contemporary isues in a critical and unconventional way. In this talk, he will expose his thesis that the contemorary search for happiness is actually a failure of happiness. here is a review of his book on the subject:
(On Pascal Bruckner's book L'euphorie perpétuelle - Essai sur le devoir de bonheur)
FRANCE IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, Tom Bishop
As they went off on vacation, speeding in shiny Peugeots and Renaults along splendid freeways or in the superspeed comfort of a truly remarkable railway system, with ever present portable phones at the ready and a newly discovered internet readily available, the French, habitually given to complaining, are, for once, remarkably happy. And well they might be. France is at peace, prosperous, economically and socially dynamic after years of stagnation, firmly committed to the European Union in which it is a major-and perhaps the most successful-player.
Thanks to endless scandals involving high ranked politicians of both right and left, politics no longer occupies center stage and ideologies, once the heated battleground of the intelligentsia, hardly cause a stir. That a conservatist president, Jacques Chirac, and a Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, share power in what is termed "cohabitation" seems eminently acceptable to most.
How paradoxical then that in this Summer of 2000, a book that fustigates the French for their frenetic pursuit of a vague ideal of happiness and sharply criticizes French society and its values, should be a runaway bestseller. Pascal Bruckner's L'euphorie perpétuelle targets the "duty to be happy [the work's subtitle], that ideology which encourages people to evaluate everything from the standpoint of pleasure and vexation, the validation of euphoria that condemns those who don't subscribe to it to disapproval or to feeling uneasy."
With amusement and dismay, Bruckner challenges the contemporary cult of hedonism wherein a misfortune is not just a misfortune but worse, the very failure of happiness. He ridicules those aspects of our life style which have us run ever faster after an illusory goal of happiness: youth culture ("an ideology of aging nations"), obsession with health, a knee-jerk distrust of the middle class despite the virtual disappearance of the class system, romantic revolutionary ideals and other left-wing mythologies, the conformism of nonconformism, political correctness, the esthetics of kitsch and vulgarity which passes for elegance, the obsession with having fun, the trendy Western infatuation with Buddhism, even the Dalai Lama (for what the author terms his "prefabricated spirituality.") In denouncing the "dictatorship" of the constant quest for happiness, Bruckner takes aim not only at his countrymen but at the Western world in general and, not coincidentally, the U.S., "the archetype of the civilization of happiness,' and indeed the origin of much of it.
Yet his criticism is never hostile. Bruckner not only knows and understands the U.S. well, he is arguably the most outspokenly and intelligent ANTI-anti-American of French intellectuals. If, in L'euphorie perpetuelle, he tacitly accepts the stereotype of American "vulgarity" he turns the tables on it: "Strictly speaking, they [Americans] are the plebeians of the entire world. But it remains to be explained why these plebeians have contaminated the entire world with their way of life and why the American epic has rubbed off on the whole planet to the point of becoming the object of universal imitation. One must recognize then in that vulgarity a formidable energy, a striving whose result is often the creation of a new formS. The strength of American vulgarity is that, swept along by a constructive spirit, it did away with all links to previous models and that, in its excessive parodies of other cultures, it invented something never before seen, a new civilization."
A well-known novelist and social critic, Pascal Bruckner writes in the venerable French lineage of the philosophic essay that analyzes and criticizes contemporary mores. Reflexive and learned in the tradition of Montaigne, he also brings to mind the caustic, provocative wit of Voltaire. To elucidate the present, he ranges over world history and literature (always impeccably documented) in outlining a short history of happiness, that scathingly stresses its utilization by the medieval Church as a promise in the hereafter to compensate for the miseries of life on earth. It is with the American and French Revolutions that man finally becomes accountable only to himself, that is to his fellow men ("Paradise on earth is wherever I am" wrote Voltaire). Bruckner recalls that happiness is inscribed in the Declaration of Independence alongside "life" and "liberty" whereas the French Revolution promised "equality." He forgets perhaps that the American founding fathers guaranteed not happiness itself but merely its pursuit.
Like Montaigne in his Essays and like Voltaire in Candide, Bruckner has only modest ideals to offer in the face of the frantic quest for happiness all around him: an intelligent art of living that renounces the search for Happiness and contents itself with a simpler, more attainable but more fleeting happiness, a "joie de vivre," made up of small, unexpected pleasures, that accepts sorrow and misfortune as a part of life itself. "The 'secret' of a good life," he concludes, "is not to care about happiness, never to look for it as such, to welcome it without wondering whether it is deserved or contributes to the edification of humanity; not to hold on to it, not to regret its loss; to grant it its capricious nature which allows it to appear suddenly on an ordinary day or to disappear in the midst of grandiose situations."
Another leading Paris intellectual said to me dismissively (or enviously) that Bruckner addressed himself only to the French intelligentsia, but this summer on beaches and in the countless French cities and towns that host cultural festivals, thousands of readers turned the pages of this provocative book and found a reason perhaps to wonder how their lives were progressing, whether the upward momentum of the stocks at the Bourse corresponded to their own, and whether there is not more to existence than the perpetual pursuit of happiness.
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