The first of December kicks off the Christmas season in Denmark. Christmas is big here, not only because it’s an overwhelmingly Christian country – it’s also one of the most unreligious societies you can find. Also because it’s very dark in the winter – up to 17 hours a day. Families and schoolchildren gather indoors to make decorations and ply other time-tested customs. Companies hold their annual, sometimes a bit profligate parties. The country leads the Western world in candle consumption by a sizeable margin. When you’re biking home during rush hour in the chilly, drizzling rain, the sight of flickering flames in the window reassures you of a cozy haven awaiting with seasonal delicacies and uplifting music.
Truth in food labeling
This strong tradition also leads certain people to defend its sanctity against possible incursions and slights. Thus the criticism that some supermarkets received (DK) from politicians and other cultural watchdogs for advertising items such as “vinterboller” (winter buns) and “vintermedister” (winter sausage). The critics, mostly on Facebook, the leading local forum for debating social and moral issues, assumed that these concoctions had replaced the traditional “juleboller” and “julemedister” (Christmas buns and sausage), presumably to placate the Muslim population that might feel excluded from such majoritarian observances.
The supermarkets were quick to correct that misapprehension. They had been wise enough not to drop the Christmas versions of those goods from the inventory. They had merely added an alternative secular variant. More enlightened commentators and media outlets criticized in turn the traditionalists’ alarm at a nonexistent problem while much more urgent issues such as climate change demanded their attention.
A-caroling we go
Lest anyone think that Denmark’s progressive tendencies have kept it on the straight and narrow politically correct path, however, another incident last week raised a slew of eyebrows and hackles. Bertel Haarder, a former cabinet secretary from the Liberal Party (the center-right mainstream party) and the longest-serving member of Parliament, continued his own Christmas tradition of presenting his colleagues with a humorous homemade song (DK). All in good fun until the last of the eight verses:
A much different hetero is the Hedeager boy:
One wasn’t enough, he wanted two in the mayor’s bed!
He went after them both and grabbed a little too much!
He thought that the Red-Green Party was common property!
BUT why should they be so strict
And prevent Red-Green sex.
Let him take a lovely witch
Home for Christmas!
(my literal translation, sans rhymes)
This rousing finale refers to an event from earlier in the year for which a former member of the Red-Green Party board was convicted of raping (DK) a woman at a gathering in the home of Ninna Hedeager Olsen, Copenhagen’s Deputy Mayor for Technology and the Environment. The victim was judged to have been defenseless because of sleep and alcohol, and the man was also found by the court to have groped the mayor at the same time. The small Red-Green Party (Enhedslisten, a.k.a. the Unity Party) is the furthest to the left in Danish politics. It has advocated the nationalization of private enterprise and other collectivist measures. Multicultural Copenhagen is its prime stronghold, and environmentalism is its strongest position.
No sense of decency?
Outrage ensued across almost the entire political spectrum. WTF was he thinking – joking about rape and referring to the victim as property and a witch to boot! It sounded like he even approved of the assault. Haarder had a single supporter in the parliamentarians’ email thread (DK), from the Danish People’s Party’s, the most strident proponents of Danish family values (“Get with the Christmas spirit!”). Haarder made a rather mild apology saying that he was sorry if anyone was hurt by the verse and he had never intended to condone or make fun of rape. A party spokesperson reiterated his disavowal of any disrespectful intentions.
The 75-year-old Haarder has often extolled Christianity and traditional cultural values and played the moral watchdog himself. That an intelligent, well-educated, respected high officeholder could be so tone-deaf (while being a prosodic craftsperson) to the growing sentiment about rape culture tells us something about this country. It has seen the arrival of identity and diversity politics, but it is not yet under great pressure to conform to intersectional ideology. It’s nevertheless surprising that none of Haarder’s aides forwarded him the #metoo memo. His freewheeling boorishness prompts a comparison to the U.S. Troll in Chief, who has done more than anyone else to lower the standards of decorum for the highest ranking officials. Few others have achieved the cultish devotion that grants him virtual immunity, however.
Poetic licentiousness
It’s unlikely that Haarder was influenced by Trump, though. He’s been cranking out these songs since Trump started playing with his daddy’s money in New York real estate market. He just got carried away with his composition. He was thinking as a poet, not as a politician who consults his spin doctors and their polls, and reveling in a saturnalian tradition that is not above a touch of bawdry. The perp’s covetousness must have offered a tempting opportunity to exploit the trope of abolishing private property, but did he really wish to characterize the event as typical of an entire political party’s style of sex – to wit, a drunken orgy – hinting at its origins in the hippie-communist milieu decades ago? Such an indiscretion, at the expense of an unconscious woman, shows that while Scandinavian social democracy might serve as a model for economic progressivism, it offers less inspiration for the cultural warriors battling sexism and other abuses of the patriarchy.
In the interest of fairness, it should be noted that the convicted rapist is appealing his sentence on the grounds that he believed the victim had been awake, although that would not exonerate him from the charge of indecent exposure to Mayor Hedeager Olsen, who took an extended sick leave after the incident. During that time she was spotted serving draft beer at an inn run by a friend, for which she is being investigated for a violation of labor market rules.
Cheers (in moderation), holiday revelers!
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