Four years after an irrational biological error that made Kim Il Sung non-functional, a constitutional revision has anointed the greatest of leaders as the eternal president of North Korea. Last Sunday, the newly elected eternal president addressed the Supreme People's Assembly. From a slow moving tape, his eternal voice reached out to every disciple of the world's only non-living president. On the fiftieth anniversary of its existence, North Korea has done the most literal translation of Marx's famous spectral imagery.

Also, no other communist regime is as qualified as the Hermit Kingdom to be the living -- sorry, non-living -- embodiment of socialist nirvana. At this moment of ideological glory, the eternal Kim's son, Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, the living manager of power(that is the magic of Henessey), is only the biologically active frontman of the reigning spectral father. So, North Korea has written the perfect ghost story of communism.

It is a sad fairytale, too. Born out of the Korean war, sustained by socialist slogans and enriched uranium, North Korea is a rusted monument to communist perversion. The late Great Leader Kim, currently the eternal president, believed that socialist salvation meant mass starvation. Juche, the Kimology of self-reliance, will forever be remembered as the socialist euphemism for `slow death in the cause of the leader'.

Kimdom is still inaccessible. For its people, the world beyond the great wall of socialist protection is an idea interpreted by the commissars of truth. The leaders tell them that their country is the communist Xanadu. Once in a while, the smuggled images of deprivation and indoctrination expose the lies of the secret state. But it is a socialist state, and it has to prove its cultural superiority. So it sends submarinesto the waters of the eternal enemy, South Korea. It kidnaps. It bombs the enemy's airliner.

War is peace in the Hermit Kingdom. Nuclear blackmail is a way of survival. The cult of the great leader is a national necessity. Everything, everybody, except the leader is an abstraction.

Now even the leader is an abstraction. Perhaps, North Korea has achieved communist perfection. Look around, and you are unlikely to see dead leaders taking the masses to the kingdom of justice. Lesser communists, the living ones, are postponing mortality. In places like Havana, the dead ideology is being preserved by the living leader of a distant romance. In Beijing, it is much more complex. When the old men say celestial mandate, it has nothing to do with Mao or Deng. The dead leader is only a slogan in the supermarket.

And the spectre is rather young, and it haunts only Tiananmen Square. In the subrural Soviets of Bengal and Kerala, the leaders have proved that they can live on borrowed slogans, with dead minds. Ifcommunism is the most engrossing ghost story of this century, the Hermit Kingdom is the eternal glory of the Dead Man.