“I have a faith but I’m not a follower of any religion. I don’t believe in religious systems. Actually, I resigned from the Church of Denmark when I was 20 years old, so why should I be forced to carry a symbol of a system that I left?”

And Kristensen is firm in his belief of freedom from religiously infused citizenship apparel. He’s ready to take his complaint all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, should the Ministry of Justice not comply with his demand of erasing Jesus from the passports.

So far, the Ministry isn’t reacting. Neither are the Danes according to a majority in the parliament Folketinget. Jesus stays in the passports.

Let me give you a (very) brief update on the relationship between Danes and Jesus.

Before the Danes met Jesus, they believed in the Norse Gods, a merry fellowship of skull-smashing bearded brutes that told the Danes that if they died on the battlefield they would go directly to Valhalla and spend life in eternity eating meat and drinking mead and engaging in inter-Vikingial skull-smashing until the Last Day of Ragnarock when über Norse God Odin would summon them to fight against the evil skull-smashers of Asgard.

Jesus was born 965 years before the then King of Denmark, Harald Bluetooth, stated that all Danes believed in Jesus and his father, God. His announcement was made through the proper official channels of the time, a rune stone with a brisk statement specifying: “I’m Harald, son of Gorm and Thyra. I won all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian!” on one side and a relief of the Crucified Christ on the other. This stone, named the Jelling Stone after the village where Mr. Bluetooth saw fit to erect it, is also known as the Birth Certificate of Denmark.

The Birth Certificate

Danes were Catholics until 1536 when the then King Christian III decided that all this buying of indulgence and sending tithe to Rome was a load of bollocks, so from now on all Danes were Protestants and the church was a matter of state and Mr. Christian didn’t need the Pope because Chris was fully capable of taking care of his own clergymen, thank you very much.

Then democracy kicked in and in 1849 the Danes made themselves a constitution, the Grundlov. And when they reached the point of deciding their beliefs, their only frame of reference for dealing with these matters was 900 years of some head of state telling them what to believe in. “You are evangelical-Lutheran because I say so!” had been the mantra of the then King Frederik VII.

But the Danes were firm believers in democracy now so they became perky: “No, everybody should have the right to believe in whatever they want – except for you. YOU be evangelical-Lutheran, Mr. F!” and gave that circumstance its own paragraph, §6 to be precise. So it’s a constitutional right of every Dane – except the King or Queen – to make their own kind of peace with whatever kind of deity or lack thereof that they choose.

Today surveys show that only 5-6% of Danes believe in God.

But.

82% of the Danes are members of the Church of Denmark and pay 1% of their combined income in Church Tax. Around 72% of newborn Danes are christened in churches. 42% of all weddings take place in churches. Danish priests are civil servants whose education and wages are paid for by the state.

This peculiarity derives from §4 in the Grundlov. In the concise linguistic tradition of Harald Bluetooth it states that “The evangelical-Lutheran Church is the Danish people’s church and as such supported by the State.” So you see, it’s in the law that a particular church is the Danish one –  and everything Danish is good. That’s why a vast majority of Danes believe in not separating church and state and most Danes will tell you that Denmark, even though thoroughly secularised, has Christian values deep in its core and if you dig for that core they will tell you that it means we are compassionate, forgiving and love our neighbours.

So Denmark is full of grace, according to Danes. Let’s elaborate on that. Let’s go to Germany, the home of Martin Luther.

In his famous Theses Luther stipulates that salvation doesn’t come at the price of following rigid rules and regulations but is a gift from God to everyone and the only price you have to pay for eternal happiness is to meet the world with grace.

Unfortunately Danes have entered this bargain like cheap used car dealers and have done everything they can to pay as little grace as possible for the eternal happiness that they put in the marketplace of State-building Solutions. They have fully embraced the concept that the similarly German but much later theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”.

Bonhoeffer was killed by the Nazis a few days before WW2 ended in 1945 for his role in the German Anti-Nazi Resistance. Bonhoeffer was serious about his grace, you see. He thought that grace without repentance, the willingness to change ones behaviour, was cheap. If you discover harmful doings that inflict unhappiness on your neighbour, you should make an effort to stop those harmful doings - practice “costly grace”, not just feel sorry for him and turn the other cheek.

We’ve already covered the Danes’ attitude towards change, so let’s not go deeper into that now. Let me just give you an example of the fact that when believing gets tough, Danes choose not to believe.

During the last year, Denmark has seen two different but equally high-profile cases of whether or not people should be forced to leave the country.

Case 1:

Back in the late 1990s a Danish woman called Camilla Broe played an active role in arranging the transportation of some 100,000 Ecstasy pills from the Netherlands to Miami, USA. She has confirmed this herself. When the American police confront her with their investigation in 2001 she goes back to Denmark where she was protected under the rules of extradition between Denmark and USA.

But those rules were changed as a part of the new Anti-Terrorism Act of 2007. This means that Camilla Broe can be extradited to USA for trial and, if found guilty, returned to Denmark to serve her sentence. In September 2009 she arrives in Florida, but the trial ends in February 2010 with the charges being statute-barred. By 1st of March she’s back in Denmark pending the ruling of the Miami Prosecutor’s complaint about the first ruling.

Case 2:

During the last 12 years around 17,000 Iraqi citizens have applied for asylum in Denmark. Approx 12,500 have been granted asylum and 4,500 have had their application denied. Of the latter, 4,200 have left the country as of May 2009, but 282 have refused to leave due to the violent situation in the regions of Iraq that they fled from originally. On the 15th of May last year the Danish Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs declares that it has signed an agreement with the Iraqi government about forced extradition, and on 16th May, 70 Iraqis seek refuge in the Church of Brorson in Copenhagen.

The night between the 12th and 13th August the police enter the church and start putting the Iraqi families on flights to Iraq.

So far so good.

Camilla Broe hasn’t denied taking part in drug trafficking. But she claims that it was a result of Battered Woman Syndrome; that her actions should be seen as the consequence of the violent domestic environment she endured at the time. She also states that since the criminal acts that she is charged for happened 12 years ago and that she is now the sole provider for a daughter, the charges against her should be dropped.

The Iraqis had all received and taken note of the refusal of their asylum application, but claimed that the situation in Iraq was too violent to make it possible for them to comply with the Ministry’s decisions and that several of them had been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by Danish doctors. They also claimed that their children were born and raised in Denmark, had never visited Iraq and only spoke Danish since that was the language spoken at school.

Two cases pleading for the compassion, forgiveness and neighbour-loving of Danes. But with one difference: To meet Camilla Broe with grace would also constitute criticism of the American Justice System. No problem there. Never waste a good opportunity to badmouth foreign countries. But to meet the Iraqis with grace would constitute criticism of the Danish Justice System – and we can’t have that now, can we?

This difference showed up immediately in opinion polls.

60% of Danes think that Camilla Broe should be acquitted of all charges, 18% even think she should be paid some sort of compensation for her troubles. 27% think the trial against her should be allowed to proceed.

53% of Danes think that the extradition of Iraqi families was the right thing to do. 54% find it all right for the police to enter the church at night and transport men, women and children away in buses to prisons and airports. 32% think they should have been allowed to stay due to extraordinary circumstances.

So if you ask the Danes about Jesus, they will tell you that he is welcome to stick around and do his grace-thing as long as he also does something Danish while he’s here. They will even comply with most of his demands for the human race as long as it doesn’t in any way, shape or form impair the Danes’ right to love themselves unconditionally.

That’s why Mr. Kristensen will have to come to peace with the fact that the Crucified Christ will be represented in the colour of dusty beetroot in his passport for eternity.

The Bornholmians have been told all their living years that even though they are geographically detached and pretty far away from the rest of the country out there in the Baltic Sea, equal treatment means equal treatment, so if anything is wrong with them and the expertise to cure it is somewhere to be found in the Kingdom, help is at hand.

But there’s something on Bornholm called ovre. I guess the best translation will be to ask you to think of the term ‘over there’ and then get lazy and just think of ‘over’. Ovre means ‘everything in Denmark that is not Bornholm’.

Bornholmians have a love/hate relationship with ovre. On one hand the island is in no way big enough to support itself. The amount of sunshine, smoked herring and granite just isn’t sufficient to keep 42,000 people self-sustained. Especially not the granite, since that would mean literally carving up the island piece by piece and exporting it to vain house-owners all over the world. On the other hand the island has been under Swedish, German, Soviet and Danish supremacy through the centuries, so even though peace has reigned in the last 64 years there’s still a great animosity towards everything and everyone from any ovre lurking around in the back of the Bornholmian brain.

The woman’s cancer was cured. But she lost one breast. She lost the breast because the freeze microscopy facilities needed to perform a breast preserving treatment was only available ovre and the doctors at Bornholm Central Hospital and the mayor of Bornholm County had agreed to not let ovre boast about their fancy equipment and steal their patients and therefore did not inform women with breast cancer about the possibilities modern treatment provide and their rights to choose freely from any facility in the country. Five women lost breasts unnecessarily before someone intervened.

And what happened then? How did Denmark cope with the fact that five women were mutilated in the name of Bornholmian hygge? The two doctors are still working at the same hospital. Their boss has commented on the incidents with only one word: “unfortunate”. The Bornholm County Mayor first stated that the decisions were made because the removal of the breasts improved the patients chances of survival, but that was immediately denied by the doctors from ovre. Then he changed his explanation to: “There was a waiting list for breast preserving treatment” but that was firmly refuted by several hospitals around Denmark. Then the mayor went silent, perhaps because the then Minister of Health stepped onto the scene and called the events “unacceptable and irresponsible” but apart from looking and sounding a bit upset – did nothing.

The five women each received compensation averaging 34,000 kroner. That’s about 4,000 euro or 6,400 dollars or a tad more than the average Dane earns per month. Or what a cancer specialist earns in a week at Bornholm Central Hospital. Quite a bargain – one breast for one month’s pay. That’s the amount that says: “something was wrong” but not nearly enough to say “something was very, very wrong”.

Apart from that – nothing happened. There were no angry letters from citizens to politicians. There was no public outcry demanding those responsible should be held accountable. The mayor still enjoys a blossoming political career. The then Minister of Health is now our Prime Minister. And the Danish Cancer Society – whose expressed purpose is to “ensure optimal conditions for those living with cancer and its consequences” called the amount of compensation “adequate”.

But what about Danish society as a whole? I suppose it could be considered a civilized reaction to this wretched state of affairs to refrain from anger and just make sure that nothing like this could ever happen again by giving the whole health care system a thorough going over. But going over systems means changing systems and we know how Danes respond to change, don’t we? Change compromises hygge. NEVER, EVER compromise the hygge.

So Danes did the opposite of reducing the problem with local patriotism. They scaled it up and took it nationwide. Last year the European Commission had to threat the Danish government with sanctions for not allowing all Danes to use their right to seek the best possible treatment anywhere in the EU. Several cancer patients died after being declared incurable by the Danish health system even though both German and Swedish hospitals were able to treat them.

The Danes’ reaction to this? Nothing.

Because nothing must disturb the hallowed ground of hygge. Not even death.

I’m afraid you’ve been lied to.

There’s nothing likeable about hygge at all. Except if you like keeping your air intake at the absolute minimum level required to keep your vital organs working or otherwise celebrate conditions where externally imposed stimuli are completely absent. Nevertheless hygge is not only a state of mind that Danes escape to now and then to catch their breaths in the humdrum of modern life. It’s the mother of all downsides of Denmark, so to fully understand our unfortunate national character, we need to scrutinise the phenomenon intensely. Hence the two-piece split-up of this post.

Let’s start with pronunciation, which implicates the ability to master the Danish way of dealing with both the Y-vowel and the sound of the double consonant GG.

If English is your native tongue, you’re in trouble with the Danish Y. There simply are no words in your language that encompass this sound. The best thing you can do is to purse your lips as if you were going to say “OH” but make the sound of “EE” instead. The GG’s are easier – you can find help in “bragging” or “gagging”.

If you’re German, it’s ein Klacks für dich. Think of “Ü” and you’re there. GG shouldn’t cause trouble either.

Now French. Think of your word for “naked” - “nu” - and you’ve got it. The GGs could be a challenge for you, but try doubling the first G-sound in “demagog”. (I’m aware of your… special needs… regarding the H in the beginning. Try letting air pass from your throat and out of your mouth without adding any sound. Like a sigh of despair.)

For the Spanish readers it’s easier to explain what not to do: Don’t use the sound of Y in your ‘word’ for “and” - “y” - and don’t just double the G-sound from “gringo” because it would just mess you up.

If you speak Mandarin you could practise your Ys by calling out for your friend Yu. Regarding the GGs – I’m afraid I have no idea… Perhaps my friend Liyuan can be of assistance.

Now let’s move on to the actual meaning of the word hygge. The problem is that it’s possible to find words in almost every other language that’s approximately the same as some of the original aspects of the hygge concept. The cosiness that applies to locations in English speaking countries. The Gemütlichkeit that can develop among Germans. Or the douillet in French cafés. All of them describing a certain feeling of happiness, individually or in groups, deriving from feeling safe and shielded from circumstances or people that could inflict harm. But none of them come anywhere near what hygge has disintegrated into in Denmark.

We adopted the word from Norway, probably because Norway was Denmark once. But as with so many other aspects of life, all the different and interesting nuances of the concept that thrive in Norwegian culture have been eroded by the general Danish brutishness. So all that’s left now is one single characteristic: recognisability. And that brings us to the heart of the matter.

Hygge in Denmark is the condition of complete absence of anything we haven’t seen before. Because new things have the mere possibility of imposing danger. You can find proof of that in how we use its antonym, uhygge. That means ’scary’ in Danish. We use it to characterise scary movies or the perspectives of war. Perhaps this circumstance makes the meaning of hygge clearest to all you lucky non-Danes out there. I’ll bet another 100 kroner on the fact that you wouldn’t find ‘not cosy’ a fulfilling description of what’s going on in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ or life in the jungle in Vietnam in the early 1970s.

The perverted philosophy of life that hygge has become offers a variety of paradoxes in Danish culture. I’ll give you a few examples, but  my advice is not to try to understand them, because that would mean that hygge has infected you and hygge is known to be incurable.

1: Equality

On the surface Danish society looks like it has a stream of fairness running through its veins. No one is homeless. No one is filthy rich. Distribution of wealth through high taxation is welcomed with a smile by everyone. The workplace culture is dominated by a sense of consensus, not by tyrannical bosses.

But if you scratch the surface the uhyggelige truth emerges immediately: 5,000 people are homeless. The ten richest families collectively account for a fortune of 320 billion kroner which equates to around 20% of our gross domestic product. 70% of  Danes find moonlighting okay (the number for immigrants is 18% by the way…).

The number of psychopaths in managerial positions is four times higher than in the society as a whole. The number of compensations paid out by insurance companies for personal damages induced by bad managers has risen 50% during the last 3 years.

And if you present these figures to Danes, they’ll either question the validity of the statistics or say that it’s their firm belief that it’s worse in other countries. Why? Because acknowledging the truth would mean that changes should be made. And change compromises hygge.

2: Tolerance

At first glance, Danes seem quite tolerant. They will tell you that they believe that everyone has the right to practise their religion as they please. That gay people can kiss and hold hands in the street, even marry each other if they want to. That everyone is entitled to their quirks and a variety of foibles in the local community only adds charm to the neighbourhood.

Here’s the reality check: In the late 1960s and early 1970s a substantial number of Muslim citizens came to Denmark. It took more than 30 years before they were permitted to be buried outside Christian graveyards. Not a single minaret has been allowed to be built yet and the vast majority of mosques are refurbished cellars or apartments. This week the government decided to give 100,000 kroner to any Danish citizen of ‘non-western origin’ that leaves the country for good.

Gay people can marry – but not in churches. Last week a famous football player published a book (probably written while he was serving a sentence for beating up his ex-wife) in which he states that he “really hates gay people, they are fucking disgusting” and “admires Hell’s Angels for not doubting their masculinity”.

That led a famous actor to yell angrily at him in a TV show they both attended the other day. Not because of the obvious bigotry or sick fascination with violence. But because the book had stirred up a commotion that “completely ruined the hygge!” in Denmark. The head of communications at the Danish Football Association stated that gay men should “pay respect to the majority that could feel unsafe when confronted with viewpoints of minority groups”.

The number of lawsuits between neighbours has risen 300% during the last 5 years.

So you see, there are no limits to what Danes will do to defend the sanctity of hygge by oppressing anything and anyone who dares to be different and deny any truth that challenges them to change things. I think this also explains the extremely high suicide rate in our country compared to the rest of the western world. And I’m not alone in this theory. The brilliant British novelist V. S. Naipaul wrote about it in a letter to his friend Paul Theroux in 1995:

“If you are interested in horrible places, I can recommend Denmark. No one starves. Everyone lives in small, pretty houses. But no one is rich, no one has a chance to a life in luxury, and everyone is depressed. Everyone lives in their small well-organized cells with their Danish furniture and their lovely lamps, without which they would go mad.”

In Holy Hygge (Part 2) I’ll take you through a couple of examples of the fact that Danes are willing to put up with self-mutilation – even death – to defend this relic of the hygge cult.

Last week a famous football player published a book (probably written while he was serving a sentence for beating up his ex-wife) in which he, among other things, stated that he “really hates gay people, they are fucking disgusting” and “admires Hell’s Angels for not doubting their masculinity”.

That led a famous actor to yell angrily at him in a TV-show they both attended the other day. Not because of the obvious bigotry or perverse fascination of violence. But because the book had stirred up a commotion that “completely ruined the cosy atmosphere” in our country.

There’s a handful of kudos to you if you can guess the subject of the next post. And no - it’s not football. Or homosexuality.

But sometimes the wrongness of the claim or argument is of such vast proportions that it makes your urge to correct it so vehement you can almost taste it. The things you want to say are so plentiful that it’s too much for your articulacy to handle  and all that comes out of your mouth is: “But…”.

And then you get your act together and you formulate your rebuttal to perfection and you’re just about to take it into practical application when your brain says: “Wait a minute! If the person in front of you has not been able to determine the level of absurdity of his or her conception by his or her own capability, what are the chances that what can be said in the amount of time you are willing to spend on this thing, will do the job?” And your brain realizes that it’s a futile endeavour and all that comes out of your mouth is: “But…”. Again.

Do you know that feeling?

I do, because I study Danes all day long.

Let me give you an example: In Denmark we have something called Efterløn, an early retirement plan that makes it possible for practically everyone who has been working for 30 years to retire at the age of 60 instead of the 67 years of age that otherwise qualifies every single Danish citizen for State Pension. When this was first introduced in 1979 it was a brilliant idea, if you ask me. The difference in physical degradation caused by different jobs was much bigger than it is today. The health of a 60-year-old lawyer was simply much better than that of a worn down 60-year-old  farmer or factory worker. And on top of that the unemployment rate of young Danes was out of control at the time.

All in all, it simply made good sense to let the more fragile part of the workforce out of the pen and frolic on the green pastures of the society that they had built themselves.

Things have changed now. A report from the Labour Market Commission recently showed that the health of citizens on Efterløn is the same as those still in labour. And the number of 60-67-year-olds with jobs is only half the average of the other member countries of the OECD. The cost of this is 37 billion kroner per year in pensions and lost taxes. You could run 9 fully staffed and equipped Central Hospitals for that amount of money. Every economics expert you can think of has been begging the Danes to reform Efterløn for years.

Surveys on this subject are frequently made and published. They more or less all show that the amount of Danes who find Efterløn a life-threatening danger to Danish economy is around 80%. And the percentage of Danes who think that Efterløn should NOT be the subject of even the subtlest of adjustments is – you guessed it: 80%!

This is where the but-buts kick in.

Here’s another one for you: Danes use the word ‘integration’ a lot these days. And they always use it in sentences that somehow point out that ’successful integration of different cultures’ means that all other cultures have conformed to the Danish one.

Small clusters of descendants of Danish immigrants are scattered all over the world, from Dannebrog, Nebraska to Tandil, Argentina. It has been obligatory for every Danish Prime Minister for the last 50 years to visit at least one of these during his reign (’her reign’ has yet to find use in the Danish language) and just as obligatory to laud the community for its efforts to “uphold its Danish roots and values through generations”.

But… but…

The Danish version of ‘but’ is men, but don’t throw the English word into oblivion if you’re in the process of becoming Danish. Saying it out loud can help you practise one of far to many different but undistinguishable pronunciations of the letter ‘å’ as in ‘båt!’ which is Danish for the sound from the small bulb horns that circus clowns carry around.

Båt-båt…

I should warn you that the post is a little wordier than usual, but hey – I’m a complicated man.

I was born in the fall of 1967 in Copenhagen. My mum’s dad owned a small provisions business at the harbour supplying the ships with victuals and the seamen with liquor. My grandmother was a seamstress. My dad was made an orphan at the age of five, raised by nuns for a few years and then adopted by a Member of Parliament in desperate need of good publicity.

My parents met each other at the university so it was paramount to them that my name reflected their astronomical levels of knowledge and insight. And since this was the late sixties, “it was very important for us that you were named after a provo”, as they have often told me. Peter Andreas Heiberg was the right man for the job, apparently.

Heiberg lived from 1758 to 1841, was a writer and translator in a time of absolute monarchy - not a period of Danish history where mocking the nobility and criticising the King’s decisions would pass unnoticed. He was banished on Christmas Eve, 1799 and lived the rest of his life working as a clerk at the Foreign Ministry in Paris, France. His wife divorced him and many years after when his adult son visited him for the first time, he had gone blind. He died forgotten, poor and alone. Thank you ever so much for the christening gift, mum and dad.

In 1972 my parents had the audacity of sharing their attention to me with a brother. My response to that was beating him up on a daily basis until I received a well-deserved knock-out in 1981. Today he’s my best friend.

My dad spent the most of my childhood by almost finishing courses of study. He’s almost an architect and almost a civil engineer. In 1981 he summoned the strength and passed an exam as a mural paintings restorer and spent the rest of his working life rubbing and scratching tiny chalk whitening flakes off church walls around the country.

My mum was more determined in her ventures. She graduated as a social worker when I was 5 and has spent her career helping the homeless, saving children from violent homes and nursing mentally handicapped citizens.

They are both retired now. At this moment my mum is in Beijing on vacation and my dad is probably sharing a few pints with the locals at one of his favourite watering holes.

My brother and I were born and raised in socialist surroundings. Both our parents are proud members of the Socialist People’s Party, Socialistisk Folkeparti or SF, which occupies political territory a little to the left of the Social Democrats but far away from thoughts and ideas that include violent revolts or politbureaus. It was formed by people who were excluded from the Communist Party in 1958 because they had criticised the Soviet Union’s reaction to the uprisings in Hungary in 1956. Its chairman was lucky enough to break his leg at the party’s first election in 1960, so he campaigned from a hospital bed and SF entered our parliament Folketinget with 11 seats out of the 179 available and sent the Communists into oblivion. They have (almost) always supported the Social Democratic prime ministers since then, but have never held ministerial offices themselves.

My parents’ version of socialism is… pragmatic. They have owned property. They have christened both their children in churches. They have raised my brother and me to follow our ambitions, even if they include helping the evil multinational companies’ never ending efforts to enrich themselves on behalf of the working class. Once, when they were called to a meeting at the school where I was a 3rd grader and told that they should stop me from reading ahead on my homework because I was ‘getting out of level’, my parents just laughed and gave me more books.

But they have always demanded from us that we should show gratitude for living in a country where education and healthcare is free for all and unemployment doesn’t mean you have to spend the nights curled up in cardboard in dark alleys.

Except for the two summers I spent at Feminist Camp (more about that in a later post), every summer holiday of my childhood was spent on a bike, traversing the country from top to bottom, which sounds more energetic than it is, since you can never be farther away than 600 kilometres from anything in Denmark (except if you count in Greenland or The Faroe Islands, but they don’t seem to want to be counted in any more).

Every once in a while our parents would call the pedal-horse convoy to a halt and ‘give us the land’ as they called it. Spectacular scenery, a dolmen on top of a hill, a sunlit clearing on a hot July afternoon – they would tell us that this was ours no matter who claimed ownership of the actual property. This was ours because it was Danish and we were Danes. At the time we had no idea what they were talking about, of course, and pretty much had all attention directed towards laying out a strategy for relieving them of the private ownership of a couple of ice creams.

In 1982 our family moved from Copenhagen to a small town called Svendborg on the island called Fyn. Smack dab in the middle of Denmark, yes, but in the middle of nowhere if you asked me at that time. I was stunned. Copenhagen is not a big city by most standards, but Copenhageners are of the firm belief that it’s enormous. Arriving in Svendborg presented me with a change of culture that seemed impossible to endure at first. But I settled in, got friends, got my own apartment and completed upper secondary school with usable grades in 1986, still thinking that my future lay in astrophysics. Boy, was I wrong.

My plan was to spend a year or two having fun and then go to university and learn how to discover and inhabit other planets. And what could be more fun than getting paid for spending time in a bar? Little did I know that it was in the dense fumes of tipsiness and tobacco that I should find my vocation.

When you’re a bartender you have the responsibility of your guests well-being. And the first prerequisite for that is a cheerful and non-hostile atmosphere. Getting people to behave properly is a challenge – getting drunk people to behave properly is known to be almost impossible. But for some reason I was pretty good at it. A few months in, I was hooked.

Since then, I’ve made my living by adjusting people’s behaviour in different directions. From buying more coffee or chewing gum or cement factories to wearing a condom more frequently. I’ve spent some 20 years riding on the back of a society that’s gotten richer, healthier, more secure,  and better educated every year. According to most theories of human behaviour that should create the foundation for a people who would develop into being more generous, more tolerant, more optimistic and more likely to base it’s decisions on rational thinking. But for the Danes, something went horribly, horribly wrong along the way.

My suspicion of this was first awakened in 1999. I was hired by The Danish Refugee Council to do a  fund-raising campaign for the benefit of the refugees from the barbaric civil war in former Yugoslavia. The Danes’ history of providing means of survival for other nationalities in dire straits offers plenty of proof that this should not be an insurmountable task. Showing the actual living conditions of those in need usually did the trick. But our research showed, that the Danes either refused to acknowledge the authenticity of the hardship that these people had endured or simply ignored it. They couldn’t care less. But none of the participants of our surveys failed to mention how well-renowned Denmark was all over the world for always ‘being there’ when help was needed.

Instead we made the campaign all about helping the heroic Danish men and women struggling to make things right in Kosovo. Not a single picture of refugees. Lots of pictures of Danes. The amount of kroner collected sky-rocketed.

Something broke inside me during the weeks I spent on this project. Really? This was it? That’s what 50 years of perfect living conditions does to a people? Frosty indifference to those not as privileged?

But there were more shoes to sell, more cars to be wanted by more Danes so I just kept on truckin’ and made ads showing Danes wanting shoes and cars, hoping that it was just a phase. That reason would pull us through. Boy, was I wrong again.

A few years ago a writer was working on a school book about Islam. This guy had previously written books on the subject, one of them suggesting that we should spray menstrual blood on the Koran to teach the Muslims a lesson about equal rights of the sexes. This time he had cast his attention on the fact that drawing pictures of The Prophet Mohammed is considered extremely poor taste in some circles of Muslim society. I know a couple of the cartoonists that he asked to make drawings of exactly that for his book, both of them politely saying no to the job because you never get very far by spitting in people’s faces before trying to change their convictions.

A newspaper ran into the story and concluded that the only right reaction to this was to buy and print a number of cartoon drawings making as much of an insult to The Prophet as possible with the expressed intent of ‘mucking and ridiculing’ Muslim beliefs. Just to celebrate freedom of speech, you know.

I lost all hope for Danishness that day. All the spectacular views and the dolmen-dressed hills and the sunlit clearings were instantly reduced to sickness-invoking symbols of pure and unleashed stupidity. The whole thing with the cartoons showed that Danes lack even the simplest ability to engage in meaningful relations with cultures other than their own. And by that we lose the chance to play a part in shaping the world.

Despite my upbringing, I’m not a socialist. I believe in the idea of the welfare state; I’m indisputably a product of it myself, but there’s too much envy in socialism for my taste buds. I’m not a Neo-Conservative either. Or a Social Democrat. Or a nihilist. I believe that all the privileges and possibilities that we can agree to help each other achieve should be made instrumental for a higher level of human development. We should contribute our experiences and techniques to the collective pool of ideas and efforts of the world so that other countries can use the best of them to build better societies and develop new tools for society-building that we can use and so on.

I know this must sound incredibly banal to most of you, but for Danes it’s not even an option to consider.

So to sum things up and in response to the questions in the comments about why I’m doing this: I did love you once, Denmark. But I have serious doubts about ever being able to love you again. Because by meeting the world as a miserly, paranoid fool you produce the very proof that your way of doing things leads to failure.

And that really pisses me off.

P.

Why are they all here? Well, the fact that the 115 members of The International Olympic Committee are occupying an equal number of somewhat overpriced hotel rooms right now as well would probably give you a clue. This Friday they will gather in all their magnificence and decide which city is to have the honour of spending billions on hosting The 2016 Olympic Games.

So all these people aren’t here to experience the crass and hostile atmosphere of everyday Danishness or to enjoy the questionable cuisine of the pølsevogn. They’re not here in admiration of everything Danish or to celebrate our newly acquired record in inter-collegial bullying at the workplace. They are here to pull strings, kiss cheeks, cross fingers and garner a high-risk business opportunity for their respective cities. And pay their tribute to the Olympic Principle as formulated by its second father Pierre de Coubertin: “for people who dare to try to break records”, of course.

Right now, in these exact hours, thousands of people are fighting for their lives in the aftermath of a tsunami in the Samoan Islands. 113 are already dead and the number is rising. An earthquake on the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent 1.000 people to their graves this morning and tens of thousands are still buried under the rubble.

Why am I mentioning this? Because the prioritisation of these events in the Danish news tells you everything about how the Danes view the world.

A brief summary of any randomly chosen news programme from Danish television today would look like this: “Breaking news!! Michelle Obama is attending a party tonight at the Admiral Hotel! Extra, extra! Oprah Winfrey asked for an umbrella today because it was raining a bit! We interrupt this programme to announce that Brazilian president Lula da Silva is picking up his suitcases at this very moment at the airport. Oh, and by the way… some people died on some islands in The Pacific today. This just in! Famous Friends actor David Schwimmer is in Copenhagen too!! And now the weather: Looks like all them Denmark-loving celebrities will experience occasional showers and temperatures between 10 and 15 degrees Celsius.”

I try to make a habit of ending posts here on Downsides of Denmark with a quirky little remark. A funny twist of sorts. But I’m all out of those today.

Yes, I’m in advertising. No, I had nothing to do with the Karen-campaign.

P.

…

Danes are thieves. Not in the sense that Danes nick more apples in supermarkets or swindle more billions than any other society with a concept of private property. No, Danes are more devious than that.

Danes steal achievements. No Nobel Prize too small, no Oscar too big – if the Danes like it and they think that it could constitute some sort of victory for Danishness, they just take it right out of your hands and dance around the town square cheering and celebrating, complimenting each other for a job well done and this being the final proof of the Danish Model’s supremacy on the battlefield of Utopias.

Take Viggo Mortensen. Or Scarlett Johansson. Or Connie Nielsen. Or Lars Ulrich. All of them great stars and highly and deservedly respected artists – and in some way or another born with Danish blood in their veins, the poor sods. And each and every one of them has been dragged through the whirlwind of greedy arms, stripping them of every available chunk of achievement every time they set foot on these desolate shores.

“How has being a Dane/having Danish ancestors/the fact that you’ve once seen a picture of Hans Christian Andersen helped you in your career?!” is the first and last question that every internationally applauded individual has to answer whenever the press is present. As if the years and years of refining their respective skills, the numerous disappointments and the astronomical levels of bravery that leads to the respect of your peers and the cheers of the punters had anything at all to do with the fact that a certain amount of the artists genomic variations derives from their pale and somewhat bloated ancestors of the Baltic Sea Region.

But the decayed sense of what’s yours and mine doesn’t stop at looting innocent artists, scientists and industrialists of the fruits of their labour in broad daylight. The Danes take any available opportunity to pluck any produce that hangs in the gardens of whole populations.

This spring served an example so grotesque that it made me doubt if I would ever be able to call myself a Dane again without the flames of shame burning in my cheeks.

As you may have noticed, there’s a bit of debate going on in Denmark at the moment. For some reason Danish people seem to be uninterested in discussing anything other than people who are not Danish. What do they wear? What do they eat? Where do they live? What TV shows do they watch? But most important of all: how do we make them stop all that and do what we do?

One of the more persistent perceptions has been that people who can’t show a pedigree containing at least three generations of pure Viking are unreliable and lazy. And the high number of people with mysterious origins in the unemployment statistics was seen as both the proof of the fact and the very reason that these exotic and morally degenerate tribes lived in total isolation from everyday life. ‘Parallel societies’ the phenomenon was christened. ‘Lack of integration’ was how it was understood.

The fact was, that it was practically impossible to get a job interview if the name on the application had just the slightest outlandish twist. It was a common known fact among immigrants and their children that if you sent two identical job applications for the same job, ‘Gudrun’ would get the interview. Gürcin wouldn’t.

But the Danes kept insisting that it was ‘the foreigners’ who refused to ‘integrate’. Until this spring.

Along came a survey from The Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs (yes, we actually do have a Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs…). It showed that the struggle to get a chance to contribute to society slowly but surely was beginning to pay off. After 15-20 years of humiliation, immigrants no longer have to send out 300-400 applications to get a job.

And what happened? The report from the ministry was celebrated in newspapers, TV and at the local værtshus to the resounding cheer of “Look at that! Foreigners work as much as Danes do! That must mean Danes are the best in the world at integrating people. Actually it just proves what we’ve always known: the Danish society is the best in the world and we should never change anything about how we do things because we are simply divine!!”

So to sum things up: If you’re visiting Denmark for the first time any time soon and you think that walking around in the streets is safe – think again. Your watch and wallet may be out of danger, but if you’ve done any sort of good in your life; if you’ve made any impact for the better of the world, however feeble and insignificant it might be – check your pockets regularly during your stay.