“April is the cruelest month,” begins T.S. Eliot’s classic modernist poem The Wasteland, which was written only two or three years after the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-19. This year many would agree, not only because of the loss of lives to Covid-19 but also because of the loss of livelihoods and businesses.
Last week the venerable Arnold Busck bookstore chain closed (DK) all of its 29 stores and filed for bankruptcy. Most of the stores have been closed since mid-March, when the lockdown went into effect. Certain locations were allowed to open under special conditions, but it was not enough to save the business, which has not yet received the payments from the government’s rescue package. In any case, the aid would not have been large enough to save the business, which has suffered losses in the past two years because of problems implementing a new IT system. The chain has been a family business since it was founded in 1896.
Cooling their jets
Also last week, SAS announced that it would lay off up to 40 percent of its workforce in Scandinavia. That is the equivalent of 5,000 full-time positions, including 1,700 in Denmark. The government rescue packages allowed the airline to furlough 90 percent of its workers when the lockdown went into effect, and it has received EUR 275 in emergency credit guarantees from Sweden and Denmark. But now it says that it does not expect the industry to return to pre-pandemic activity levels for years and it needs to adjust its staff accordingly.
In a related story, Denmark’s second-largest airport, Billund Airport in Jutland, is almost empty these days. The airport reports that the number of its passengers in April fell a full 99 percent (DK) from the level in 2019. Managing Director Jan Hessellund, says that its fate depends on when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs eases its travel restrictions. Denmark’s borders are closed and all unnecessary travel is discouraged until May 10, when the next phase of the reopening is to begin. The only flights from Billund at present are to Amsterdam and Romania. Air traffic at Copenhagen-Kastrup Airport is down around 95 percent.
Look on the bright side
In 2020 the number of traffic accidents (DK) in the month of March was the lowest since 1985, when the Danish Road Directorate began compiling records. They fell from 248 in 2019 to 159, and the number of traffic deaths fell from 14 in 2019 to 9. The decline is doubtless an effect of the lockdown, which caused a reduction in the number of passenger cars on the road, says Marianne Foldberg Steffensen of the Road Directorate.
With the sharp decline in air travel and a 25 percent drop in road traffic, carbon dioxide emissions will fall (DK) by about one-sixth in Denmark during the current lockdown period running until May 10. That is the result of calculations made by Brian Vad Mathiesen, Professor of Energy Planning at Aalborg University, for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. If energy consumption returns to normal afterward, the reduction for the year would amount to 5 percent of the annual level.
The dark side of the bright side
For Vad Mathiesen, however, the main conclusion to be drawn is that it will be extremely difficult for the country to reach its target of reducing emissions by 70 percent by 2030. It would need to cut emissions by a similar amount every year until then, and it cannot afford to shut down commercial activity to the same degree. Climate Minister Dan Jørgensen agrees that meeting the target will be an enormous challenge and it must be accomplished by innovations in energy production and transport rather than simply by reducing consumption.
I have spent some time lately commenting on left-wing tendencies in Denmark – identity politics and social justice activism. Some might find the coverage unbalanced. Well, a bomb – or at least a bomb threat – last week was a sort of wake-up alarm to let us know that the right-wing stalwarts are not biding their time waiting for the Muslims to pack up and head back to warmer climes. The bomb threat was aimed at an advertising agency that made a video for SAS’s website. The video asked what is actually Scandinavian, that is, what cultural brand symbols from the Nordic countries actually originated here.
“Danish” pastries? No, they’re from Austria. Rye bread? Turkey. Democracy? Greece. Open-faced sandwiches? The Netherlands. Bicycles with large carts for children? Germany. Even maternity leave? Switzerland. On and on, mercilessly. What is Scandinavian? Absolutely nothing. There’s no such thing as Scandinavian culture. Scandinavians have depended totally on inventions from the rest of the world. Everything is imitated, borrowed, imported, plagiarized.
Not even meatballs?
Why would SAS want to be so blunt and cruel, deflating the pride its customers take in their ethnic heritage? No, wait, they meant it as a compliment. Scandinavians, since the legendary seafaring and plundering Vikings, have brought back the best things from the outside world and put their own unique stamp on them. If you remember that the northern extremity was one of the last regions in Eurasia to be populated, then it doesn’t seem unlikely that some useful artifacts would have been devised earlier in the evolution of our species. The punchline is “We are travelers.” And collectors. That’s how we developed such a wonderful array of customs and concoctions. And the easiest way to continue this cosmopolitan scavenger hunt is to fly SAS.
Not everyone saw it that way, though. Negative comments poured onto the FB page. “With its disgusting advertisement, SAS demeans everything genuinely Norwegian, genuinely Swedish and genuinely Danish,” wrote Søren Espersen (DK) from the Danish People’s Party. “At the same time, SAS spits on every proper and fair Scandinavian.” Even the notorious far-right website 4chan got into the act (DK). Its users set up many threads, each with hundreds of comments, linked to the video, in what appears to be a coordinated attack. The video is part of a Jewish plot to undermine the white race, they wrote. According to journalist Kevin Shakir, the video’s references to all those other countries, shots of people with various skin colors, allusions to customs and cultures blending together across borders – it all looked to 4chan like an attack on white nationhood. They went so far as to dox employees of the advertising agency.
What’s wrong with learning from others?
We didn’t mean to offend anyone, said an SAS spokesperson. We wanted to say only that travel “lies deep in our Scandinavian DNA” and is enriching for us as both individuals and a society. Although the company maintained that it stood behind the campaign one hundred percent, it removed the video, which had already been seen by over half a million users. Later it posted a shorter version, omitting the “absolutely nothing” riposte. Not because it regretted the first, though, simply as part of its normal practice of making several versions of an advertisement. The original had of course been reposted on YouTube and shared all around the world it depicted.
The bomb threat came by email. Police evacuated the building (DK) in central Copenhagen and searched it. A hostel above the fitness center where the ad agency employees were relocated was also evacuated, sending some of its guests to stand on the sidewalk in their pajamas and freeze. No bomb was found.
“Away is nice, but home is best”
That’s a Danish saying. SAS’s critics would certainly endorse at least the second part. I’m still a little mystified about their real rationale or argument, though. Do they think the claims in the video are false and these phenomena really did originate in Scandinavia? Do they want to be able to pretend in peace that they did? Do they feel that Scandinavia improved these things so much that it deserves the title to them? Are they worried that contextualizing features of the region’s image will hurt tourism? Or are they just ethnic purists who fear that enthusiastic tourism will melt humanity into a single intermingling beige race?
I wonder whether there weren’t any woke trolls chiming in about all this cultural appropriation or at least the carbon emissions from this contemporary treasure hunt. From the video, it looks so easy to hop on a plane and feast on the world’s bazaar that you forget that the price of all our imports, souvenirs and cross-cultural experiences includes calamitous weather, mainly in the poorer lower latitudes from which SAS can safely return us.
