Were you aware that North Korea now has a youtube channel?  The channel consists of what you might expect it to consist of.  There is also now a North Korea facebook page, and a North Korea twitter account.

Reportedly, the content of the page is meant to praise and honor North Korea, as well as condemn and ridicule South Korea and the U.S. Officials in South Korea are currently investigating the page to determine if it’s actually run by the government. If they do determine that the North Korean government is behind the page, South Koreans will be blocked from viewing the page (as they are currently blocked from North Korea’s Twitter page).

Well, it gives some people an excuse to jump to the file photo:

Where we see Kim Jong Il inventing the Internet.  Or, leading the Youth on the March.

There is something odd working here.  Back when Bill Clinton negotiated the release of those American hostages, I looked to google images for the photo ops — typing “Clinton” and “Kim Jong Il”.  It happened to be in the brief amount of time this became news and before the photographs became widely available.  So, when I looked up “Clinton” and “Kim Jong Il” in google, what showed up in the #2 slot?  An image from this website from an earlier Hillary Clinton quip about Kim Jong Il.

In the case of the narrative regarding the President — whoever that president might be — it’s always a little odd to see the same general poses, reusable for a little date.  At once the moment is trapped in time at a specific date, but if so — why can the photograph be pulled back up for the next time someone has need for a photograph to make a point of reference — say, a 44 percent approval rating and the President “At a moment of Uncertainty”, or —

Really, if not for the graying hair that comes with the job, I would think the President could just spend the first week in office throwing up a bunch of photographs for later use for the Press — expressions that match the natural narratives that follow “Decisions” and “Travails” and “Triumphs” and “Defeats”.  That being put aside, he (or she) would no longer have any use to be photographed.

Things become a little more interesting.  Yesterday I saw the classic Obama under Halo (seal of the president) image I’d become so familiar with ( a minor obsession of mine during the Bush Administration) — for a story about the rising percentage of Americans believing Obama a Muslim.

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