Politics and I

Once again I find myself overtaken by time. But I’ve already discussed that in my last entry, seemingly without result. Now is the time for something truly taboo. Now is the time for politics.

While bombs fell from the sky and smoke billowed from the ground in Israel and Lebanon, I found myself on stage at a festival promoting sun, beer, love, and upcoming Danish bands. I told stories about the rise and fall of an Australian punk saxophon player, and read poems written by enthusiatic festival-goers. Everybody was so happy and carefree it would have made me sick hadn’t they somehow succeeded in raising my own spirits too.

I’m often accused of looking like a left-over hippie from the 70s, but the merest superficial study of my values would prove any such attempt at nailing my personality wrong. I’m highly idiosyncratic, and don’t believe that the communal can ever replace the individual, not even enhance it. When people tell me ”Jesus” on the street, I tell them ”Judas”.

Anyway, returning from the festival I have found it increasingly difficult not to think, read, and speak about politics. A sometimes propagator of the view that life cannot be reduced to the ideas from which it derives, I have dedicated this blog to the untold everyday stories of people living in the shadows of opinions, beliefs, and causes. I’m not interested in war, I’m interested in victims. I’m not interested in life, I’m interested in people. But sometimes we can’t deal with the one without dealing with the other.

We live in political times. Even here in Denmark we live in political times. Up through the 90s nobody in our latitudes gave a damn about politics. I was in school back then, and used to leave the classroom every time political topics came up. They were an abstract and somewhat scary lot, and ten wild horses couldn’t drag me into developing an interest in them, or form an opinion about them for that matter. War was bad, and peace was good. End of history.

Today I find myself living in a country desperately trying to continue the trend of disinterested neutrality so popular in the 90s. A country that is actively closing its eyes and ears upon the world, hoping for it to go away, to disappear, to step aside, and leave us be. I won’t revert to political agitation, but I will tell you how it feels when your government refuses to call for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, or even condemn their acts of war.

“Despite a will, there is no way Denmark can significantly contribute to peacekeeping efforts in Lebanon,” our Minister of Defence Søren Gade said today. A safe claim now that most Danish citizens trapped in Lebanon have returned home. And the ones still left are probably too closely affiliated with that country for our government to want them back anyway. This was indirectly stated when a spokesman from the nationalist Danish People’s Party suggested that all social security recipients returning from the bombardments should be checked to see if they were at all allowed to be away from Denmark, or if they should have been available for the job market.

“My knowledge is limited to the few things I know / but all foreign cultures are nothing but jokes,” the Danish singer/songwriter C. V. Jørgensen sarcastically wails as I’m writing this. Though you probably won’t find anybody but him saying it out loud – probably not even a whole lot others thinking it out loud – I fear that such statements are becoming part of the collective subconscious around here.

A colleague at work interrupted me yesterday while I was catching up on the latest news from Lebanese and Israeli blogs. She showed me a local Danish newspaper carrying a front page story about a fire truck that had its undercarriage slightly scorched when extinguishing a fire in a harvest field outside of town. I guess life has to go on, but does it really have to be that blind?

It’s times like these I sit down and play September 12 for a while. Sometimes it even occurs to me that things really are as simple as that game. Substitute Iraqis for Danes, and you’d get the same result. But I’m a Westerner, and an intellectual too, and therefore I cannot allow myself to indulge in such straightforward simplicity. It would ruin my image, and my country’s politics as well.

Speaking of which, I will hold back my horses here, and hand over the reins to the political bloggers. Next time around, hopefully I will see you in less idealistic circumstances.