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Radios are fixed so they can receive only the one acceptable station, and a loudspeaker is installed in every home. The display case in a hotel bookstore features 114 different works, all by Kim Il Sung or his son and heir apparent, Kim Jong Il. Martial music is piped in throughout the country, even in the bus taking passengers from airplane to terminal; by daybreak, when workers march to their jobs, a fast, furious female voice is already shouting exhortations from a hidden amplifier in the street.
In the midst of this rule-bound spartanism, every visiting foreigner is taken to see the showcases of "social construction": the Tower of the Juche (self-reliance) Idea, embellished with carvings of the kimilsungia flower; a 70-ft. bronze statue of the Great Leader, before which women mutter prayers; an Arch of Triumph larger than Paris' Arc de Triomphe. Subway stations are opulent, with fireworks-shaped chandeliers, granite pillars, 250-ft. mosaics, and marble passageways and platforms. Yet many of the imperial structures have a slightly wistful, wasteful air: the enormous 150,000-seat May First Stadium, built in the stillborn hope of a role as co-host of the 1988 Summer Olympics, for example; or the 20,000 new apartments along Kwangbok (liberation) Street that were built to accommodate foreigners but remain largely uninhabited.
For North Koreans, however, the ranks of modern towers are a source of pride, concrete proof of how much they have achieved since they began rebuilding their country from the rubble of the Korean War. "New York, Paris, are better than us, more beautiful," concedes a government guide. "But 40 years ago, New York, Paris, were the same." The nation "so rich in silver and in gold," as its national anthem proclaims, has enough resources to build $500 million stadiums, but its citizens must get by on about $50 a month. "These people have hard currency -- they are not so hopeless as ((the people in)) many other countries I deal with," says a European who is in Pyongyang to reschedule a debt that has gone unpaid for 14 years. "But they just use it on monuments, more monuments -- unusable things."
The visitor to Pyongyang soon grows accustomed to seeing the world in a different light, as if gazing through the wrong end of a telescope. On North Korean maps, there is no Demilitarized Zone at the 38th parallel, no boundary between South and North; guidebooks, in quoting figures for the country, often cite the numbers for the two parts of Korea combined. In the 1,100-seat auditorium of the Children's Palace, a 500-room extravaganza rich with 2 1/2- ton chandeliers and 50,000 tons of marble, groups of tiny revolutionaries put on a slick hour-long variety show, compulsively smiling while they deliver folk songs like Korea Is One.