Rodman on North Korean gulags: “We do the same thing here.”

Update: Video:

OH, AND HE ALSO SAID, “DON’T HATE ME”:  Hearing those words makes me wish we could fast-forward through whatever remains of Dennis Rodman’s biography and go straight to the perfect epitaph.  One of the drawbacks of our age is the constant mind-rape we endure from the forcible penetrations of unwanted information.  I’ll eventually die regretting all I know about Dennis Rodman because so many people enjoy watching the moral and financial despair of other people.  Thanks to those people, I now know enough about Rodman to expect no more than that he would have appropriated some small portion of his diminished wealth toward the employment of adult supervision.

Lacking this, it was only incidental that Rodman stopped in Pyongyang on his long journey toward self-destruction, but I’m glad that this stop was the thing that made him the next-most-hated ex-athlete in America, after O.J.  Even more than Bill Richardson and Steve Schmidt before him, Rodman is unwittingly teaching us why North Korea deserves to be a global pariah. Dennis Rodman may be the only man in America who could damage Kim Jong Un’s reputation by association, not so much because he’s a human train wreck but because his presence amid so much death and suffering represents the inequality, extravagance, and frivolity of its regime. It invites comparisons to Caligula, or to the Bourbon royalty of pre-revolutionary France.

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REUTERS’ COVERAGE of Rodman provides enough context for its readers to be aghast when he says Kim “is like his grandfather and his father, who are great leaders, he is an awesome kid, very honest and loves his wife so much,” just “an awesome kid.”  The AP, on the other hand, makes no reference to the starvation or oppression of the North Korean people in the context of Rodman’s bacchanalian feasting with Kim.

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FREEDOM HOUSE: “History is cluttered with the examples of academics, philosophers, renowned writers, and eminent advocates of humane ideals who have aligned themselves with or apologized for the world’s most despicable tyrants,” said Arch Puddington, vice president of research. “Given this context, Dennis Rodman’s choice to pal around with a leader who oversees one massive, countrywide concentration camp is very much in the minor leagues of dictator worship.”

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HERE IS THE SINGLE MOST THOUGHTFUL THING I’ve read about this story, via Wired. Don’t miss this one. If there’s any criticism I can offer, it’s that the author misses the real source of change in North Korea — the rise of cross-border smuggling and market trading.

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TIME HAS A USEFUL LIST of things it hopes Dennis Rodman learned about North Korea (he hasn’t and won’t, but plenty of Time’s readers will). (hat tip: Commentary)

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EDUCATED PEOPLE SAY THE DUMBEST SHIT SOMETIMES:  If Scott Neuman of NPR really thinks that “a pierced, tattooed and occasionally cross-dressing former basketball star is now one of the West’s leading experts on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un” — and he probably doesn’t — does Neuman now suggest that we should, in deference to Rodman’s cognitive and moral authority, accept that “his country […] love him,” and that “[t]he guy’s really awesome.” It’s a pretty stupid article, even if Neuman was probably making light of Rodman. We’re already oversupplied with superficial drive-by “analysis” of North Korea as it is.

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ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS I’VE LEARNED by studying North Korea is something I’ve learned about us — that our concept of intelligence is linear, simplistic, and flawed, and that knowledge means nothing if you can’t process your facts logically. That’s why a guy who barely graduated from high school can reach a useful conclusion about North Korea based on a few facts, while another guy, whom some academics take seriously as an actual expert on North Korea, can weave a rambling and painfully dull list of obscure irrelevancies, non-sequiturs, distortions, and half-truths into a conclusion that was pulled from the rubbish heap of history and into print without so much as a gentle dusting.

We tend to assign value to each other (and our views) in proportion to education, but the older I get, the more see that the best predictor of success in life is what we call “good judgment,” a combination of impulse control, determination, interpersonal skill, and common sense.  If we can agree that Dennis Rodman lacks all of those qualities, then let’s not call him an “expert” on anything. Similarly, let’s not confuse education for expertise.  The two don’t always coincide.