New release: Meet the Danes: a novel

Here's my excuse for slacking off on Coronravirus DK earlier this year, when things were going much better in Denmark. I have spent my lockdown time dusting off an old manuscript from the vault and shining it up.

Now I'm publishing my first novel:

 From the back cover:

Meet the Danes is a rollicking satire of 1980s American pop culture disastrously transplanted into the unsuspecting nation of Denmark … and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale land will never be the same.

When newlywed but jobless academic Norman McKay follows his wife, Kirsten, back to her homeland, he struggles to fit in—until by chance he gets recruited to help launch Denmark’s first commercial television network, DK2. With programming fueled by Norman’s twisted take on American viewing habits, DK2 sparks a culture war that quickly spirals out of control, sowing confusion, political controversy, violent resistance, and murder. Norman’s increasingly desperate attempts to salvage DK2 and prove his goodwill only end up sabotaging his marriage, incurring a centerfold’s wrath, and provoking U.S. military aggression against its puny NATO ally.

Can Norman pull the plug before it’s too late? Television overtakes reality and reality imitates television as the world’s oldest kingdom careens into surrealistic turmoil.

Readers of the blog will find the tone of the book rather different, but I hope you will enjoy it. Please share this announcement with anyone you think might be interested.

Paperback and Kindle editions are available on the Amazon sites—in the US, the UK, and Germany—and the paperback will soon be available on other online bookstores. 

Not another Danish political cartoon, not China

Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that published the infamous Mohammed cartoons that caused violent demonstrations and boycotts in the Arab world in 2005, has done it again. It has picked on another bloc of more than 1.3 billion people to offend. On Monday it published a drawing of the Chinese flag with the five stars replaced by images of the Wuhan coronavirus. The Chinese ambassador to Denmark called it insulting and demanded an admission of misjudgment and an apology. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Denmark concurred. 

JP’s editor, Jacob Nybroe, responded that the drawing was not intended to be offensive, that the paper has a right to freedom of expression, and that China’s response reflected a “different type of cultural understanding.” He maintained that there was nothing to apologize for. The illustrator himself, Niels Bo Bojesen, made no comment. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was also asked whether she would apologize and responded in the same vein (DK): “[W]e have a very, very strong tradition in Denmark not only for freedom of expression but also for satirical drawings in Denmark, and we will also have it in the future.” Other party leaders concurred.

Satire in the eye of the target
In Denmark political cartoons are referred to as “satirical drawings,” but it is not clear that this one is satire. Readers may differ in their perception of satire. The paper says the drawing is simply a representation of a major world event at the moment. The flag image is used as a way of identifying the origin of the coronavirus, but it does not explicitly mock or demean China. It has no text except the word “Coronavirus” and no other elements besides the flag image that suggest a particular interpretation. The paper had previously used other national flags to identify issues. It seems to have deniability. 

Does Frederiksen think it’s satire, or was she just using the usual name of the genre? If it is satire, then it is satirizing something in particular, presumably the Chinese nation or government. What would the implied criticism be – that China should have done something to prevent the outbreak? That the Chinese might have risked something like this happening because they eat wild animals, as in the SARS outbreak? 

It wasn’t critical, but if it was, it had a right to be 
In any case, this has become a confused game of imputation and double-guessing. It’s not just any country that the drawing refers to; it’s one with the most powerful censorship apparatus in the world and the only one that can bully the most powerful corporations in the world such as Google and Apple into complying with its censorship policies. 

Whether or not China is being hypersensitive, once it takes offense and demands action, it elevates the drawing to an international incident. If the drawing itself is a test of China’s international diplomacy, its response poses a test for the Danish players and then the Danish players’ response in turn poses another test for China. Frederiksen’s statement was less “offensive” toward a superpower than her seemingly spontaneous comment that Donald Trump’s interest in buying Greenland was “absurd.” 

Finessing deniability
Did JP knowingly or deliberately provoke China, even with its deniability? Was the paper being callous and unsympathetic toward the Chinese people suffering from the outbreak and the Chinese authorities scrambling to contain it? Should it have refrained from publishing the drawing because of the Chinese government’s sensitivity to possible criticism and the possible repurcussions on Denmark’s exports to the country?

Perhaps the “satire” was aimed indirectly at China’s censorship policies. That is, even though the drawing itself didn’t contain any particular criticism, it was a stealth attack that provoked a reaction by China that could be criticized for trying to curtail freedom of the press in another country. In this reading, the illustration thus gained a measure of ridicule or absurdity that true satire requires – even the wordplay found in much classic satire – insofar as China itself has publicized the “insult” far beyond JP’s weekly domestic circulation of 120,00 – the population of a mere village in China – and caused it to go viral, like the bug depicted.