NORTH KOREA, SOUTH AFRICA

Take your pulse, and calm down, my fine Leftist friends. It wasn't so long ago that critics, you and your brethren, raged against entertainers like Paul Simon who trotted off to apartheid South Africa for a quick buck and an exotic vacation. But now the tune is different. More wishing thinking is in the tank, and look, the shark is still circling.

The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout issues a word of caution to those who see a crack in the ice between North Korea and the US. There's no thaw going on here folks. Read a book on despots. Get real.

Now that the New York Philharmonic has paid its long-awaited visit to North Korea, the floodtide of justificatory gush has begun. Lorin Maazel, the orchestra’s music director, intoned that “in the world of music, all men and women are brothers and sisters.” A South Korean newspaper described the trip as “an overture to peace between the North and the United States.” The Los Angeles Times called it “a publicity coup for an institution . . . much in need of a lift.” And Eric Clapton says he’s been invited to play in Pyongyang.

Things are starting to get a little silly here. So before any more 62-year-old rock stars decide to hop the next plane to Pyongyang, allow me to point out five mistaken ideas about the Philharmonic’s concert:

The fact that the audience responded warmly to the concert proves that it was a good idea. “We just went out and did our thing,” Mr. Maazel told reporters, “and we began to feel this warmth coming back. . . . I think it’s going to do a great deal.” Bunk. All it proves is that apparatchiks can be sentimental, too, a fact that the Wagner-loving Adolf Hitler proved long ago. Every North Korean who was permitted to attend that concert was undoubtedly vetted by Kim Jong Il’s secret police. No wonder they wept when they heard the Philharmonic play their national anthem. End of story.

Any direct contact between North Korea and the U.S. is by definition desirable. Not if it makes things worse for the North Koreans — and it may. Kim Cheol-woong, a musician who defected from Pyongyang to the West in 2001, warned the Journal’s Melanie Kirkpatrick that “there will be educational sessions . . . [on] the triumph of Kim Jong Il’s political leadership, which resulted in the fact that even the American artistic group is coming to knock their foreheads on the floor in front of General Kim.”

Read it all.