Kim threatens to unleash hydrogen bomb
NORTH KOREA raised the spectre of detonating a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean as Kim Jong-un made an unprecedented personal statement lambasting Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged dotard”.
The US president fired back by calling the North Korean leader a “madman” as tensions rose to new levels, with Japan bracing itself for a nuclear warhead flying over its territory.
Analysts view with dread the prospect of such a missile exploding accidentally over the US ally, which they fear could lead to nuclear conflict. The threat came amid a dramatic escalation in the war of words between Washington and Pyongyang with Mr Kim saying Mr Trump would “pay dearly” for threatening to destroy North Korea.
“Action is the best option in treating the dotard who, hard of hearing, is ut- tering only what he wants to say,” Mr Kim said, warning he would “tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire”.
Mr Trump tweeted: “Kim Jong Un of North Korea, obviously a madman who doesn’t mind starving or killing his people, will be tested like never before!”
♦ Iran yesterday unveiled its latest ballistic missile capable of reaching much of the Middle East, including Israel, as its president vowed Tehran would press ahead with its weapons programme in defiance of the US.
The world’s most dangerous playground squabble is escalating. Day by day, the insults grow more childish. On Tuesday, Donald Trump nicknamed Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man”. Kim retorted that Trump was “mentally deranged” and a “dotard”. Trump countered that Kim was “obviously a madman”.
Here’s an exclusive preview of the next week’s geopolitical developments.
Sunday
At a rally in Michigan, President Trump makes a controversial allegation about the North Korean leader’s private life.
“Kim Jong-un kissed a girl,” claims the President. “He totally kissed one. I saw him. They were holding hands. They were holding hands and he kissed her. I have it on very good authority that he goes round to her house and they play with her dollies and they have a tea party with her dollies and he holds her hand and he kisses her. I bet he wants to marry her. That is so gay. Kissing girls is so gay.”
Monday
In a live address on North Korean state television, Kim Jong-un rejects any suggestion that he kissed a girl, and claims his sources have uncovered damaging intelligence about the US president.
“Donald Trump smells,” announces the supreme leader. “He smells very bad. When he walks into a room, everyone holds their nose and says, ‘Ugh, yuck, what’s that smell? That smell is yucky.’ And then they all look at Donald Trump and point at him and say: ‘Ugh, it’s you. You smell, Donald Trump.’ And then Donald Trump cries and runs home to his mummy. He is very smelly.”
Tuesday
In an exclusive interview on Fox News, President Trump denies that he is smelly, and questions the North Korean dictator’s fitness for office.
“Kim is a girl’s name,” says the President. “It is totally a girl’s name. It’s a name you would give to a girl. Is he a girl? I think he’s a girl. I think he’s a big girl. Kim is a girl’s name. I think he’s a girl.”
Wednesday
Everyone dies. My wife and I want to teach our three-year-old son the alphabet. First, though, we’re having to relearn it ourselves. The alphabet has changed since we were at school. These days, children are taught using a system called phonics. This focuses on the sounds letters make, rather than their names. So when we point at the letter A, we have to remember to tell our son that it’s “ah”, rather than “ay”. B is “buh”, rather than “bee”. And so on.
He enjoys it, and asks us to say words that begin with a given letter. We ask him to think of words that begin with that letter, too. It’s a fun little game. But I think we’ve found two small drawbacks. First, our son can’t pronounce the R sound. He pronounces it like W. The other day, my wife asked him what words begin with “wuh”. He thought carefully. Then his eyes lit up in triumph. “WABBIT!” he shouted. Then: “WAINBOW!”
You can’t say he’s wrong. To him, those words do indeed begin with “wuh”.
The other problem with this method of teaching is that it doesn’t seem to take into account certain accents. We live in Gravesend, Kent. I asked my son what words begin with “fff ”.
He pondered for a moment, then held up his thumb, and shouted: “FUM!”
There are certain words in English a writer can no longer use. This is because they belong to someone else. He didn’t coin them – but he owns them.
Grimly. That’s one. You can’t write “grimly” without sounding as if you’re trying to copy him. Same with more or less any mildly unusual adverb: quaintly, contentedly, unanswerably, limply. Unusual, Latin-derived verbs: those are pretty much all his, too. Adduce, adumbrate, pullulate, expatiate. As for adjectives, he owns all the superior ones – the lofty, languid, superior ones. The moment your eye sees them on the page, your ear hears them in his bored, smoky drawl. Desultory. Pitiless. Quotidian. Sublunary.
The owner of these words is Martin Amis, whose latest collection of essays, The Rub of Time, was published on Thursday. Something has happened to attitudes towards Amis. In the 1980s it was almost heresy to criticise him. These days it’s almost heresy to praise him – in particular on the Left. Partly this is because of a couple of wild misfires (Yellow Dog, Lionel Asbo), and partly because of certain comments he’s made about Islam, and the intellectual shortcomings of Jeremy Corbyn.
But I think there’s something else to it. In a lot of the criticism of Amis you can hear a prickliness, a resentment. The sort of resentment that the ordinary kids – not the bottom of the class, but the middling kids, the honest triers – feel towards the school swot. He makes them feel bad about themselves, this know-all, this teacher’s pet. Showing off like that. Thinks he’s so much better than the rest of us. And so how gleefully they hug themselves when, at last, he gets an answer wrong. Ha! Teach him. Not so clever now, eh, smarty-pants.
No other living novelist, though, has Amis’s powers of lurid evocation, his fluorescent vividness. I wasn’t keen on The Pregnant Widow (2010), but read this line of description from it.
“And great drunken bees, throbbing orbs that seemed to carry their own electrical resonance; when they collided with something solid – tree bole, statuary, flowerpot – they twanged back and away, the positive charge repelled by the positive.”
That throwaway line captures bees – the way they look and sound and move – exactly. And it’s instantly recognisable as his. “Throbbing”, “resonance” and “twanged” are another three words that belong unmistakably to him.