The museum of characteristic things

A piece in today's New York Times suggests that thousands of disposable AM radios air-dropped into North Korea could turn the populace against the ruling class:

Advocates of smuggling radios into the North, mostly human rights and Christian church groups, say their effort is aimed at ensuring that someone is indeed listening. Even if only a tiny elite tune in, they say, the effect can be powerful.

"The populace will suffer a kind of psychological collapse when they learn what has been done to them and what the real world is really like," predicted Radek Sikorski, who grew up listening to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe in communist Poland and now works at the American Enterprise Institute.

That psychological collapse is described in a Samuel R. Delaney novel that offers a paranoid, dystopian view of a world where everyone has been somehow deluded into thinking there is a horrible, eternal war going on. (I think it's The Fall of the Towers but I'm not sure.) The delusion is somehow broadcast into everyone's minds by some horrible machine invented by the aliens or whoever is bent on keeping everyone in submission. Along the way, the machine is destroyed, and everyone is suddenly enlightened as to the true nature of reality, at least to the extent that they realize the eternal war was just a delusion. But instead of feeling liberated, everyone is very depressed. First because their whole world has changed; even if the new reality is better than the old, it's still a shock. Secondly, they have to face the fact that they were suckers all their lives. I can't think of any better description than what they're predicting for North Korea if, someday, the Kim regime falls.

Also in today's New York Times, a visit to "Tchaikovsky's boyhood piano, the instrument of the Russian composer's first serious work." This made me think there should be a museum of objects characteristic to their famous users -- instruments they used to achieve their best work. For example:

Nixon's tape recorder

Elvis' Brylcreme

Kathy Acker's vibrator

Marilyn Monroe's brush used to tease her hair

J. Edgar Hoover's X-acto knife

A hand puppet from Michael Jackson's bedside table

from Dean Martin's dressing room, a box of tea, used to brew the fake "whiskey" he carried onstage

from Sylvia Plath's kitchen, a can of E-Z Off

from Tina Turner's dressing room, an economy-sized bottle of Aleve

and the object I would most like to have: the copy of "Leaves of Grass" inscribed to Monica Lewinsky by Bill Clinton.