Dear North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho,
May I call you Ho? OK, good. I know you are a busy man so I’ll get right to the point. It has come to my attention that you are very upset with the rhetoric invoked by our current U.S. president.
Listen. I get it. We’ve all been there. He makes you nervous. I myself have felt as jumpy as a hen on a hot griddle ever since last November.
But, Ho, here’s the thing. You know how every Thanksgiving, there’s always that one redneck cousin who shows up with a jar of his own ‘shine and a Sara Lee pound cake he got from Aldi’s for a quarter and you just gotta let him in because, well, Thanksgiving? That’s our president.
What is Thanksgiving? Oh, that’s when Americans sit around, give thanks for all our many blessings, eat too much turkey and wait for the most racist person in the room to start screeching about snowflake football players. That last part is new this year. Can’t hardly wait.
Anyway, my point is that you need not to take our president all that seriously. That whole “fire and fury” thing? He just stayed up late watching Jackie Chan movies on the Netflix. He doesn’t mean anything by it.
Like your own nut job leader, ours is given to hyperbole. Like how if yours observes someone sleeping while he’s making a speech, it’s not like he’d have that person EXECUTED or anything, right?
Oh, he really did? Whoa.
I promise you our president doesn’t mean half of what he says or tweets. He’s not REALLY going to “totally destroy North Korea.” That’s just something he says. It’s like an expression. We all do it. If I stub my toe in the middle of the night when I’m walking to the bathroom, I say: “Damn! I’m going to totally destroy North Korea!” It’s just an American thing. Pay no attention.
You have nothing to fear because Trump would never want to start a war in your part of the world. It’s too close to his Chinese necktie factories and he would never do anything to risk the lives of all those precious 8-year-old laborers. Believe me.
Ho, I understand that your boss isn’t happy with our president calling him “Little Rocket Man.”
While this might sound like a derogatory term, I can assure you Trump is referring to his favorite children’s book growing up. In the legend of “Little Rocket Man,” a young boy dreams of becoming an astronaut and works very hard to make that dream come true… until he and his family are deported and he becomes a sewer diver in Mexico City. So, “Little Rocket Man” actually is a tribute to the plucky nature of the dreamer. We good?
One last thing, Ho. The rest of us want a diplomatic solution to all this kerfuffle. We don’t want millions of innocent people to die. Not there. Not here. Not ever. That much is true.
Celia Rivenbark is a NYT-bestselling author and columnist. Visit www.celiarivenbark.com.