In the hermit kingdom of North Korea, where the sun rises only when the Kim family grants it permission and the clouds are presumably filled with state-mandated cotton candy, a vice-premier has found himself on the wrong side of a barnyard metaphor. Kim Jong-un, the world’s most famous enthusiast of high-waisted trousers and ballistic phalluses, has dismissed Yang Sung-ho for the heinous crime of causing ‘confusion’ at a factory modernization project. In the linguistic tradition of a man who views his citizenry as a collection of particularly obedient ants, Kim likened the official to ‘a goat yoked to an ox cart.’ It is a masterful stroke of agricultural-industrial poetry that perfectly encapsulates the absolute futility of attempting to run a 21st-century economy with 14th-century psychology.

To the uninitiated, the firing of a vice-premier in Pyongyang is about as surprising as a sunrise, yet it serves as a delicious appetizer for the upcoming Workers’ Party Congress. This event, the first in five years, is North Korea’s version of a corporate retreat, minus the trust falls and plus the very real possibility of execution for hitting the wrong key on a spreadsheet. The Congress is a propaganda spectacle designed to review past projects—which, given the state of the North Korean economy, likely involves a lot of creative accounting and pointing at empty warehouses—and to establish new political priorities. In this theater of the macabre, Yang Sung-ho was simply the lead actor who forgot his lines in a play where the script is written in the blood of the disappointed.

The ‘goat yoked to an ox cart’ imagery is particularly telling. It suggests an official who was perhaps too small for the heavy lifting of Kim’s industrial fantasies, or perhaps someone who simply couldn't keep pace with the frantic, illogical demands of a regime that expects state-of-the-art manufacturing to emerge from the ether. The ‘confusion’ cited at the factory project is the natural byproduct of a system where reality is a secondary concern to the ego of the Supreme Leader. When you demand the impossible, the only possible outcome is confusion, followed swiftly by a purge. It is the circle of life in a necrocracy where the ghost of Kim Il-sung still technically holds office, presumably because even in death, he’s terrified of being called a goat.

Predictably, the global reaction to this news falls into the usual, tiresome camps. On the Left, we see the performative hand-wringing of those who view North Korea as a tragic victim of Western imperialism, ignoring the fact that the regime treats its own people with the same affection a bored child shows a magnifying glass and a beetle. They will argue for more ‘engagement,’ as if a few more diplomatic dinners will convince Kim that agricultural metaphors are not a viable basis for economic policy. On the Right, we have the moronic chest-thumping of the hawks, who use every reshuffle in Pyongyang as an excuse to demand more missiles, forgetting that their own economies are often held together by the equivalent of duct tape and prayers to the fossil fuel gods. Both sides are equally useless, treating the suffering of millions as a rhetorical prop in their own domestic slapstick routines.

The reality is that the upcoming Party Congress is nothing more than a cosmetic overhaul of a sinking ship. Reshuffling officials in North Korea is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, if the Titanic were also on fire and the captain were insisting that the iceberg was actually a socialist miracle of cold water storage. Whether the new officials are oxen, goats, or particularly determined hamsters, the result will be the same. The modernization projects will continue to falter because you cannot build a modern world on a foundation of terror and agricultural insults. The ‘confusion’ will persist because the entire state is built on the fundamental confusion that one man’s whims are equivalent to the laws of physics.

Yang Sung-ho is now presumably contemplating his future in a place where the air is thin and the soup is metaphorical. He is the latest casualty in a system that requires a constant supply of scapegoats to explain why the utopia hasn't arrived yet. The irony, of course, is that the entire regime is the goat yoked to the ox cart of history—a stubborn, bleating relic trying to pull a heavy, archaic weight toward a horizon it will never reach. But as long as the spectacles are grand and the metaphors are colorful, the world will continue to watch, entertained by the absurdity while ignoring the stench of the barnyard.