They flutter behind you, your possible pasts, right? Case in point: one Dennis "The Worm" Rodman. He could have gone into coaching or front-office after finishing his playing career, and carved out a perfectly respectable name for himself, coasting on his NBA Hall of Fame pedigree and a hard-earned reputation as a fearless rebounder.
Instead he decided to embrace his inner weird, go on a bender with the likes of Madonna, and now he's a 52-year-old pineapple-headed buffoon, thinking he can undo generations of psychotic cultural programming in the world's most isolated nation with a basketball game. It's a noble thought, I guess, but so utterly negligent of the surrounding circumstances and context as to negate any good faith Rodman might have intended.
Because this is North Korea we're talking about, and no one really knows for sure the whole picture, there's also a reasonable argument to be made that the Switzerland-educated Kim Jong Un is, by NK standards, more "liberal" or at least comparatively more moderate than his father's and grandfather's henchmen, who make up the inner circle. At the very least this makes for a wide variety of analyses of the public purging and execution of Kim's uncle, Jang Song Thaek.
The thing is, serious analysis is irrelevant to Rodman being sponsored to coach a game in an indisputable dictatorship, a place of almost absurd levels of cruelty, poverty, famine, oppression. It doesn't put Rodman on a par with having lunch with Hitler, not quite, but it's pretty damned ugly, as ugly as Rodman playing Marilyn Monroe to Kim's JFK. This is how he'll be remembered, as a useful idiot to a powerful, murderous man-child. Just embarrassing.
Instead he decided to embrace his inner weird, go on a bender with the likes of Madonna, and now he's a 52-year-old pineapple-headed buffoon, thinking he can undo generations of psychotic cultural programming in the world's most isolated nation with a basketball game. It's a noble thought, I guess, but so utterly negligent of the surrounding circumstances and context as to negate any good faith Rodman might have intended.
Because this is North Korea we're talking about, and no one really knows for sure the whole picture, there's also a reasonable argument to be made that the Switzerland-educated Kim Jong Un is, by NK standards, more "liberal" or at least comparatively more moderate than his father's and grandfather's henchmen, who make up the inner circle. At the very least this makes for a wide variety of analyses of the public purging and execution of Kim's uncle, Jang Song Thaek.
The thing is, serious analysis is irrelevant to Rodman being sponsored to coach a game in an indisputable dictatorship, a place of almost absurd levels of cruelty, poverty, famine, oppression. It doesn't put Rodman on a par with having lunch with Hitler, not quite, but it's pretty damned ugly, as ugly as Rodman playing Marilyn Monroe to Kim's JFK. This is how he'll be remembered, as a useful idiot to a powerful, murderous man-child. Just embarrassing.
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