Sackcloth and Asses

     It seems we have reached peak IDIOCRACY (or maybe not.). You may have heard that Dennis Rodman (a man who actually married himself) turned on the water works on Chris Cuomo's show the other day. He began bawling because when he came back from North Korea five years ago, he said he had a special message from Kim Jong Un to give to President Obama. Obama knew that nothing of any importance would be given from one world leader to another to someone who wasn't at least an ambassador or administration official, so he ignored Rodman. He's still weeping about it, apparently.

      History lesson, just to show you the difference between our current day and age and that of a bygone age:
     In 1962, just a couple of months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy sent Robert Frost to the USSR as a cultural envoy. He eventually met with the vacationing Nikita Khrushchev, then the Soviet General Secretary. It was plainly just window dressing, as are all cultural missions. Perhaps because of the personal enthusiasm of Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Frost had an inflated sense of the mission's and his own importance on the international stage.
     But when Frost returned, he too, publicly said he had an important message from Khrushchev to give to Kennedy. Kennedy ignored Frost (the man who'd delivered the inaugural poem just the year before), also knowing no world leader would entrust a message of any importance to another with a mere civilian. But we didn't see Robert Frost doing the sackcloth and ashes bit on national TV, did we?

      This is the stark difference between our time and that one. Back then, for good or bad, we had grown men running this nation and this world, not manchildren who wept or raged on Twitter the minute their feelings got tweaked. This is what the Age of Trump has reduced us all to- Either enablers such as Rodman or horrified, impotent witnesses. And this is what passes for part of the international discourse- Overrated basketball players and professional performance art clowns with pierced pusses playing at diplomat and bawling on national TV wearing MAGA hats and tee shirts reading Potcoin.com on them.
     And the sad thing is, if the day ever comes when North Korea and the United States ever diplomatically recognize each other, I can perfectly imagine this assclown being nominated by Trump, a guy who brought Sarah Palin, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent into the Oval Office at the same time, to be our first Ambassador to NoKo.