Long before Dennis Rodman's most recent trip to North Korea, his status as an incorrigible twit was pretty much beyond doubt. His blow-up on CNN this week, followed by the news that he had sung 'Happy Birthday' to Kim Jong-un—lover of American basketballers, executioner of uncles — was merely the cherry on the fruitcake.
The self-styled "basketball diplomat" is hardly the first celebrity to have befriended a dictator, of course. He's not even the first to have sung a dictator 'Happy Birthday'. Last year, Jennifer Lopez sung the tune to Turkmenistan's Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov — who had recently been re-elected to the presidency with a telling 97 per cent of the vote — on the advent of his 56th birthday celebrations. (J-Lo has in fact made quite a habit of performing for despots and oligarchs throughout Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia.) In 2011, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Hilary Swank and The Voice's Seal attended the 35th birthday of Chechen strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, who is famous for, among other things, telling the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya that her investigations into human rights abuses in the Russian republic rendered her "an enemy - to be shot," which she later was. ("Happy birthday, Mr President!" Swank swooned.) In 2007—a bumper year for such performances — Nelly Furtado put on a private concert for Muammar Gaddafi and his family and Elton John performed at the birthday party of Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev's son-in-law. The list goes on.
Some of these performances can be put down to naivety. Swank argued that she was unaware of Kadyrov's human rights record before she rocked up in Grozny to party with him. Beyoncé and Mariah Carey claimed not to have known who'd hired them when they performed at various Gaddafi family functions prior to the 2011 Libyan uprising. But even more of them can be put down to greed. Lopez received $1.5 million for the Berdimuhamedov bash. In 2009, Sting received more than £1 million to perform at an "arts festival" run by Gulnara Karimova, whose father, Uzbek president Islam Karimov, has been accused of killing terror suspects "by immersion in boiling water". Go to a dictator's birthday party, read the script, perform a few tunes, collect some blood money. It's a gig like any other, at least until it's revealed, as Elton John's was, by WikiLeaks or until a video of it is leaked, as Swank's was, on YouTube.
While most of these celebrities went on to make amends for their actions—Swank and Beyoncé donated their fees to charity, Lopez expressed regret but kept hers—Rodman has thus far only apologised for losing his temper on television and implying that US missionary Kenneth Bae deserved to be locked up in the country. ("It had been a very stressful day," he said. "I had been drinking.") He has offered no apology for his relationship with Kim, who he last week described as his "best friend" and a "great leader". Indeed, what makes the basketballer's perceived transgression so perverse to Western eyes is the apparent love he has for his host, which helps to explain, if not excuse, his flagrant dismissal of the regime's abuses and his inability to see how his presence in the country plays into the hands of its rulers without at all benefiting its people.
But Rodman's useful idiocy, Swank's useful naivety and Lopez's useful avarice are merely the most ostentatiously distasteful examples of a tendency so widespread amongst celebrities that it has become practically invisible in its more commonplace, though equally unpleasant, forms.
Henry Kissinger has long employed the glamour of Hollywood and the fashion industry, and the apparent respectability of New York society, to divert attention from both his own criminality and his complicity in the criminality of others elsewhere. Between deliberately scuttling the 1968 Paris peace talks between North and South Vietnam, conducting an illegal air war over Cambodia and Laos, helping to plan Pinochet's coup again Allende and giving Suharto the green light to invade East Timor, Kissinger could be found dining with the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Diane von Fürstenberg or else wooing those such as Diane Sawyer, Candice Bergen, Jill St. John and Liv Ullman. And such liaisons, rather than his actions on the world stage, were more often than not the story. In the course of a swooning Women's Wear Daily profile from 1971— the same year he supported Pakistan's mass murder of Bengalis, using US weaponry, in what is today Bangladesh — Kissinger was variously and nauseatingly referred to as the "sex symbol of the Nixon Administration," " Washington’s greatest swinger," "Cuddly Kissinger" and the "Playboy of the Western Wing." (An old joke: "Mr. President! The Secretary of State's in the broom closet with your wife!" "Kissinger?!" "No, sir! F---ing her!") Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kissinger hobnobbed with a line-up that included Dolly Parton, Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters and Oscar de la Renta. Last year, he appeared in a Colbert Report sketch, calling security on Stephen Colbert as Colbert danced around the old war criminal's office to the Daft Punk song 'Get Lucky'. Not for nothing did Howard Zinn once say that the most appropriate punishment for Kissinger and his ilk would be to "hold them up to the world, shame them, and ban them from dinner parties."
Barack Obama, were he to be similarly sentenced, might be banned from visiting Hollywood altogether. After the moral disaster of the Bush years, it was hardly surprising when hundreds of well-meaning celebrities lined up to support the Democratic senator from Illinois and his promise of change they could believe in. What is inconceivable is the manner in which, after witnessing the escalation, codification and normalisation of precisely the kind of Bush-era programs that once so incensed them — targeted killing, extraordinary rendition — so many lined up to support him again. At least Beyoncé was ignorant of Gaddafi and his crimes when she performed for his family in St. Barts in 2009. But Obama was on the record as having ordered the summary execution of at least three US citizens, including a 16-year-old, and had killed countless Afghan, Pakistani and Yemeni civilians besides, long before she performed the national anthem at his second inauguration. Like countless other celebrities and entertainment industry titans, she also donated to his campaign. From George Clooney, Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee to Jeffrey Katzenberg, Anna Wintour and Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood's liberal establishment practically fell over itself in its rush to bankroll—to ensure and become complicit shareholders in—another four years of drone strikes, night raids and undeclared war in countries all over the world.
However ill their intentions or asinine their tastes, Karimov, Kadyrov, Kim and the rest are ultimately trying to mimic behaviour they have seen performed with more subtlety elsewhere. It's a two-way street: power employs the lustre of celebrity to sanitise, sanctify and sell itself while celebrity denies its own inherent vacuity by associating with power. But while monsters and madmen enlist morons and has-beens in order to appear universally loved and respected, savvier operators have more presentable idiots lining up to provide the requisite sheen. And while our reaction to the first group is, quite rightly, disdain and condemnation, our reaction to the latter, too often, is silence or else rapturous applause.
Matthew Clayfield is a freelance foreign correspondent who covered the 2012 Russian presidential election from Moscow.
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