Not dead after all

The resurfacing of Kim Jong-Un last week at an event congratulating athletes who had competed in Seoul was welcomed by a distinct relief in news reports.  It could be that any scintilla of stability in the Korean peninsula is to be welcomed and had King Jong-Un been overthrown, the hermit kingdom's intentions could have been more inscrutable (and dangerous).  There is also a grim fascination at how this "most dysfunctional of families" (as one Singaporean analyst told me, even before the lastest Kim ascended the throne) can hold on to power.
It reminds me of China in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period following the fall of the Tang imperium and before the rise of the Song rule, specifically the Later Tang which alone of the Five Dynasties in this 50-year era managed three emperors, the last lasting barely a year.  A warlord to inaugurate the regime, a son as right-hand man to succeed him and a gauche princeling soon deposed by another warlord.  That Jong-Un has not been made to 'jog on' and displayed no diminution of the tyranny practised by his father and grandfather is a little surprising - probably accounted for by imitating his father's 'military first' policy, which abandoned the Juche ideology of Granddaddy Il-Sung.  It is curious mix of the Castro brothers in Cuba - Raúl succeeding Fidel - and Nicolae Ceaușescu, the first communist to have a monarchical coronation ceremony, complete with sceptre and orb (representing monopoly of force and 'universal' dominion).
'Fat Kim', as he is mocked in South Korea, allegedly had a surfeit of cheese (in much the same manner that King Henry I perished through a surfeit of lampreys and the worthless King John met his end through a surfeit of peaches) to prompt his month-long absence.  Allegedly his girth had made his ankles crack, hence his limp in the last posted appearances before his vanishing act.  This suggests a steady degeneracy in the dynasty - Il-Sung, the former guerilla leader, maintained a trim figure, Jong-Il was like a sodden tennis ball and Jong-Un approximates to the Blob from Marvel Comics.  Kublai Khan suffered from the change from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle.  Gout in later life meant his feet became swollen and he needed to wear shoes sewn from Korean fishskins (something for Jong-Un to consider?). Kublai's size increased to the extent that he needed to be carried around on an elephant palanquin.  Other incapacitated rulers throughout time had to be transported in a litter.  For Jong-Un, the dustbin of history beckons.