Vladimir Putin Is the Che Guevara of the Exhausted Muscleman Set

On Monday, Mickey Rourke, the former wrestler, actor, and muscleman, 

bought a Vladimir Putin T-shirt at a mall in Moscow:

When asked for a comment on Putin, Rourke, who seemed tired, employed a metric familiar to all machos. “I met him a couple times,” Rourke said. “He looked me right in the eye. I think he’s a good guy.”

Rourke wasn’t the first American buff to dress in Putin recently.

On Saturday, Steven Seagal, the action star whose films include Executive Decision and Today You Die, picked up a Vlad T-shirt after performing in a rock concert played for a crowd of Russian nationalists in Sevastopol:

This is partly about celebrity advocacy: Seagal has expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin and supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea. And at Saturday’s concert, the flag of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic reportedly flew onstage.

But it’s also about something else. Like the stoner in your high-school class with the Che Guevara T-shirt, these men are iconoclasts in search of an icon.

“I don’t give a fuck about the politics,” Rourke said.