The funniest response I saw this past week to the escalating war of words between the leaders of the US and North Korea was the fake story by satirical site The Borowitz Report that ‘in what some security experts fear could be a high-stakes war of Elton John lyrics, minutes after Donald Trump called Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man,” the North Korean dictator responded by calling Trump “Honky Cat”.’

‘As he issued the Elton John-based attack,’ the TBR non-story continued, ‘Kim warned that he had an extensive collection of the singer-songwriter’s albums and was prepared to weaponize every lyric in them.’

Seriously, though, for those of us to whom words aren’t just lyrics but a matter of life and death, Kim Jong-un’s actual response to the ‘Rocket Man’ epithet was to call Trump ‘mentally deranged’.

A claim that came as most curious indeed from a man who is himself so dangerously deranged as to constantly threaten to blow South Koreans, Japanese, Americans or any other people within de range of his missiles to kingdom or rather Kimdom come.

Not to mention such a mortal enemy of formerly respectable words as to try and pass-off his totalitarian dictatorship as not only the ‘People’s’ in the same lying way as his big brother and chief sponsor China does, and other such anti-people pleasure-spots as Libya do, but as ‘Democratic’ into the bargain.

But even such a wrong-un as Jong-un is, as far as I’m aware he’s smart enough to avoid using the word that, thanks to both Donald Trump and Islamic terrorists, has been most recently been in the wars: ‘great’.

The very thought that such a loose cannon as the loud-mouthed and pathologically-lying President Trump can make America great again has become as much of a joke as the contention that any God worthy of the name could possibly need gangs of cold-blooded killers to demonstrate his, her or its alleged greatness.

Just as the same or any other God would surely not see the need to glorify his/her/its greatness by choosing such highly-suspect earthly representatives as the leaders, or rather misleaders and bleeders, of most if not all of the world’s self-styled ‘religious’ nations.

Like, to name just a few of those currently making a mockery of the their various religions, Buddhist Myanmar with its murderous assaults on its Rohingya minority; the majority-Catholic Philippines with its extra-judicial killings of ‘suspected’ drug traffickers and users; and Muslim Umno/BN-dominated Malaysia, with its massive 1MDB swindle and money-laundering scandal, not to mention literally countless other corruptions and associated crimes.

I’m also tempted to make the point that North, or given its total lack of any contribution whatever to the world or the human race, Nought Korea is a similar disgrace to atheism.

But on second thoughts even Communism can be counted as a kind of religion or at least anti-religion, and Kimism as a quasi-religious dynastic cult.

And I have to say that in my own country, Australia, though concertedly secular in theory and largely so in practice, Christianity, both fundamentalist and otherwise, wields too much influence in government for words.

Or at least in the current federal government, led as it is by a party that calls itself Liberal, but whose ‘right’ wing is so religiously and in every other way wrong that it’s hell-bent on keeping the ‘con’ in ‘conservative’.

Preaching ‘fairness’ while pandering to predatory banks and other big, or, if you prefer, pig business interests; promising comprehensive tax reform but delivering relief solely to the most prosperous; pretending to support clean energy while promoting polluting fossils fuels; preferring the profitability of commercial media owners over the protection of public broadcasting; and putting every possible obstacle in the path of such social reforms as marriage equality.

But if the word ‘liberal’ has had its true meaning stolen, and ‘coalition’ has come to signify concerted political collusion in favour of coal, at least ‘democracy’ here in Australia, however dimocratic or even dumbocratic as it appears at times, has yet to decline into domocracy, dermocracy or outright doomocracy as it so lamentably has in Malaysia and so many other countries.

That said, however, true government of the people, by the people, for the people is forever under threat everywhere. Which is why it’s vital that we all stay united in waging our war of words, or in the case of Zunar and our other cartooning colleagues, of words and pictures, against the forces of falsehood and fraud in North Korea, Malaysia, Australia, the US or wherever else we find them.