No telling what might topple the next government. So why take chances?
North Korea's state-owned TV station--there is no other kind there--apparently carries a BBC show called "Garden Secrets." (We didn't know Pyongyang allowed BBC shows on air until we read this story.)
"Garden Secrets" is what you might expect: a gardening show along the lines of "Martha Gardens" in this country.
If there still are secrets in "Garden Secrets," it would be very much a poser. Especially since the episode North Korea allowed on the airways was from 2010. But the regime in Pyongyang felt the need to censor it, anyway.
The host of the program was wearing jeans.
Blue jeans.
Denim.
Comfy pants.
And the North Koreans government can't have that kind of radical, disruptive, revolutionary trouble on its TV sets.
After he found out that his blue jeans were blurred out on North Korean television, host Alan Titchmarsh told CNN: "I've never seen myself as a dangerous subversive imperialist--I'm generally regarded as rather cosy and pretty harmless, so it's actually gives me a bit of street cred really, hasn't it?"
Nam Sung-wook, who works as a professor at Korea University in the sane part of the Korean peninsula, told CNN that there is a Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act on the books above the 38th parallel.
"The act aims to prohibit North Korean residents from imitating foreign countries in various aspects, including how they're dressed and speak," he said. Nose and lip piercings, mullets and branded t-shirts are also outlawed.
And jeans are a symbol of American imperialism. And the North Korean government must fight anti-socialist culture and decadent ideology.
People caught in North Korea doing otherwise--wearing jeans, listening to the wrong music, watching South Korean soap operas--can be punished. To death.
The crazy aunt in the world's attic just keeps getting crazier. Which is why the rest of us need to keep a watch.
A careful watch.