Via the Blaze, they’re quite the pair: One’s a strangely dressed lunatic who whitewashes North Korea’s crimes against humanity and the other’s Kim Jong-Un. I go back and forth between cringing outrage at seeing an American behave so affectionately towards this monster and halting self-awareness that that means I’m taking something Dennis Rodman’s involved in seriously. They’re really not mutually exclusive, though. You can dismiss Rodman as a kooky attention whore while also believing there are some lines he wouldn’t cross in the name of being “unconventional.” Doing propaganda for the NorKs was, I thought, one of those lines. Every westerner has abundant access to information about what goes on there, and even if D-Rod’s not reading up, someone surely pulled him aside and filled him in when he first started making noise about Kim. He knows. He just doesn’t care, whether for his own publicity reasons or because … he just doesn’t care. That phenomenon is worth taking seriously, even when it comes in a kooky package. And while he may be the worst offender, he’s not the only one. But who knows? Maybe we’ve got it all wrong and this is, a la “Homeland,” a deep-cover infiltration operation that’s going to end with Rodman strangling Kim in his office. Imagine it: “The Dennis Rodman Center for Intelligence.”

As sinister as this is, it’s also unmistakably campy, a sort of cultural photo negative of Marilyn serenading JFK in 1962. There was no way to avoid a camp factor in having Dennis Rodman performing at a state function in a totalitarian state but I didn’t think he’d lay it on quite this thick. It feels like “Olympia” as directed by John Waters. Exit quotation: “I feel a lot of remorse for the guys because we are doing something positive, but it’s a lot bigger than us. We are not naive, we understand why things are being portrayed the way they are. We can’t do anything about that; if we could, we would.”