Former NBA star Dennis Rodman has been dominating headlines lately over his jaunts to North Korea to spend time with his new friend and dictator Kim Jong-un, with him most recently traveling there to play a basketball game for his newfound friend as some sort of trumped up cultural ambassador. Which is all precisely what Rodman wants, he craves attention. Why else befriend a dictator?
Unsurprisingly, Rodman has been quite unwilling to try and use whatever influence he might have in North Korea to get imprisoned American Kenneth Bae freed or even shed light on why he was jailed in the first place. Rodman even blew up when asked about Bae via satellite as if just being asked about it was unthinkable.
Rodman, sitting there smoking a cigar, sided more with North Korea's actions of imprisoning Bae before trying to deflect attention away from his cozy relationship to discuss the other men who came with him to play basketball for the young dictator. Rodman, in his interview on CNN, seemed quite unapologetic about Bae's situation.
Rodman has long been known for his antics, more than anything else, even though he was once a great basketball player who played alongside Michael Jordan during their prime. But that is often not what anyone remembers. It's just his crazy, nearly always negative, antics. He once dressed up in a wedding gown and declared he would be marrying himself as he was a bisexual.
The stunt wasn't an attempt to draw attention to anything, but his own ego.
That seems to be what he thrives on. None of his actions have ever really been positive, he hasn't acted crazy for any good cause. So it's not exactly surprising that he would arrogantly side with a country few people think very nicely of, rather than his own country. It's possible he also hasn't bothered to talk about Bae with Jong-un on the fear that he would be not as strong a friend as he would like to be with the dictator and could be kicked out and then he would lose those headlines and once again no one would care about Rodman. He's too old to play basketball and has been for a long time, so instead of trying to coach or do something positive he seeks antics that will garner him plenty of news headlines, even though it's all negative. But that's really all he wants anyway.
image: Wikimedia Commons
