Basketball Diplomacy
If we bring pro sports to North Korea they will DOMINATE the halftime shows.
I was in elementary school in the mid 1990s, which according
to Wikipedia was something of a magical time for the Chicago Bulls. I was as
oblivious to pro sports then as I am now, but the Bulls were so popular at
school that I still had some sense for the big players. There was Michael
Jordan, the guy from Space Jam,
Scottie Pippen, who had not been in Space
Jam, and then Dennis Rodman, who I always figured was the Bulls’ mascot
drunkenly playing with the team.
I’d seen Dennis Rodman on the news a lot – usually in
handcuffs, once in a wedding dress – and my parents always spoke of him in the
exact same tone they used when the dog had made a mess in the house. “Sophie took a Dennis Rodman in the living
room; have we got any more bleach?” What’s more, every third grader in my
class thought he behaved like a jackass, and you really need to be a special
kind of dipshit for a room full of 9 year olds to think you’re immature.
After his suspension from the NBA in the late 90s, Rodman faded
from the public eye for 15 years or so. No doubt frustrated that his dabblings
in pro wrestling and reality TV hadn’t raised his public profile back to
Chicago Bulls levels, Rodman did what anybody else would do and traveled to
North Korea to become best friends with the country’s basketball-loving
dictator for life, Kim Jong Un.
This generated a lot of controversy because Kim Jong Un has
a pretty good track record of being kind of a dick, what with the famine and
corruption and 200,000 people in forced labor prison camps and everything. But
over the course of several trips to North Korea in the past year, Rodman has
insisted that he’s just trying to ease tensions between the US and North Korea
through sports, and that Kim Jong Un is actually a really nice guy once you get
past the cult of personality and his fondness for publicly executing his family
members.
Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un’s bromance must be pretty
strong because yesterday, during a satellite interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo,
Rodman shouted the journalist down for suggesting that he advocate for the
release of Kenneth Bae, an American sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in
North Korea. Profane and near tears, flanked by a group of increasingly
mortified NBA players who had accompanied him on this trip, Rodman defended his
time in North Korea, saying that his “basketball diplomacy” would eventually
open relations between North Korea and the United States.*
*In his defense, he was pretty drunk at the time.
On some level you just have to admire Dennis Rodman for
thinking that basketball is going to be the thing that’ll fix North Korea. For
more than half a century the brightest diplomats, political scientists, and
statesmen from South Korea, the US, the United Nations, and China haven’t had
any luck, but maybe once the people of North Korea watch a former Celebrity Apprentice contestant dunk on
their national team a few times they’ll come to their senses and let the
capitalism flow in.
Honestly, if I was a North Korean, watching a bunch of NBA
guys playing basketball in my country would just make me more angry at America.
I mean, 10% of the country starved to death in the 1990s and food shortages continue to this day – making these poor people watch a bunch of American athletes in peak
physical condition play a fast paced game of basketball feels sort of like
we’re rubbing it in.
“Hey, you know why
these basketball players are so tall? Because they’ve had adequate nutrition
for their entire lives! Look how fast they can run and high they can jump – I
guess regular, balanced meals give you lots of energy! Don’t you wish you could
do that? Look, I know you haven’t eaten anything but tree bark for the past two
weeks, but check out this layup. Life for you may be a daily struggle to find
enough sustenance to keep your body functioning, but these guys are wealthy
beyond your wildest imagination purely because they’re good at putting a ball
through a hoop.”
Don’t get me wrong – I think sports can be a great way to
foster peace between nations.* But I think that calling what Dennis Rodman is
doing right now “diplomacy” is being a little bit generous. Really, he’s just
taking a vacation in a pretty crappy place – I visited Salem during the
holidays and you don’t hear me trying to pass it off as a diplomatic mission.
*It's also a great way to foster riots, but that's mainly soccer.
Diplomacy, I think, is usually the work of diplomats, and
diplomats are usually not violent alcoholics who used to be married to Carmen
Electra. A US-North Korea basketball game could probably be a good step toward
peace, but you kind of need both countries to be behind that sort of thing for
it to be really effective.
The government of North Korea goes to great lengths to make
sure that all of its citizens hate America. A couple of basketball games are no
match for a robust and pervasive propaganda apparatus, not to mention 60 years
of revisionist history where the United States is responsible for even more
travesties than we actually are.
From what I’ve read, the gist of a lot of North Korean
propaganda is that Western capitalists are lazy, irresponsible buffoons. Instead
of breaking down the barriers between our cultures, I feel like The Worm
stumbling around Pyongyang is probably propping them up.
Truman Capps would still love to see a gritty reboot of Space Jam where instead of aliens it's North Koreans kidnapping NBA players.