Thank you for posting, Patrick. It’s a good reminder that someone we read about (or in my case post about) is a real person. I think just about everyone is grateful that he was allowed to come home safely. I certainly am.

I think all of us, no matter how learned, no matter how wise, and even no matter how experienced, have areas in which we are naive. (I certainly do.) No one can know everything, and we focus our attention on the areas we find the most worthy.

I don’t know if this applies to Merrill Newman, but I know from my own family that the (occasional) innocence of the deep scholar — as in the image of the “absent-minded professor” — has a strange charm.

As he said after his return home, “I’ve… come to the conclusion that I just didn’t understand that, for the North Korean regime, the Korean War isn’t over and that even innocent remarks about the war can cause big problems if you are a foreigner.” He might call himself naive.

But his revised comprehension of the situation is evident in his remark, “To demonstrate that I was reading the document under some duress, I did my best to read the ‘confession’ in a way that emphasized the bad grammar and strange language that the North Koreans had crafted for me to say. I hope that came across to all who saw the video.” And so it did.

When we saw the video of his “apology” it was painfully evident that it was not his own words that he was speaking.

We are very grateful that he has returned home safely.

Bless his heart. He really was naive. If you’re going to visit there, keep your mouth shut, it’s a Communist country and they its government is kind of hair-trigger twitchy against Capitalist Americans, duh.