Larry Wilson: Danish modernism and the coming invasion of Greenland

The Kingdom of Denmark, so small in (continental, at least) territory, and in population — 6 million, just 60% of Los Angeles County — still looms oddly largely culturally in the world.

Your Danish modern furniture. Your danishes, those breakfast treats that the Danish don’t even call danishes; they call them “Vienna bread,” because Austrian bakers introduced the pastry. Your entire town of Solvang, founded in 1911 by Danish-American teachers from Iowa. Your Great Danes, though the dogs, too, were originally from Germany. The greatest play ever, “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” Copenhagen’s Noma, the most celebrated restaurant on Earth, coming in a popup to L.A. at $1,500 a pop. Tivoli Gardens, the 1843 amusement park that was Walt Disney’s inspiration for Disneyland. “Borgen,” my favorite political TV drama ever, imagining the first woman prime minister of a Denmark whose national politics are so small that everyone in the government and the press know each other already, and, being Scandinavian, everyone is super-cute. The great novel “The Danish Girl” by Pasadena writer David Ebershoff.

So no wonder Donald Trump wants to make Denmark the, well, 52nd, state, right?

Oh, wait. It’s not the cute little part he wants. He wants its semi-autonomous territory, the giant island of Greenland, and he says that he’ll get it “the easy way or the hard way.”

The assertion recalls Rodney Dangerfield’s character in “Caddyshack”  cutting in on the country club’s president at a dance, grabbing his wife and saying,  “You’re a lot of woman, you know that? Hey, you want to make $14 the hard way?”

Because that’s just what Trump wants to do with Greenland, and with its protector, Denmark, both NATO allies. If we did it the hard way — invading with our armed forces, the president’s favorite new hobby — we would literally, by the longstanding treaty, have to start a war with ourselves, because we are obligated to come to the aid of besieged NATO nations, big and small.

The felonious current president says he will get Greenland “whether they like it or not,” and they do not like it. But he doesn’t just want the frozen island, population about the same as Altadena used to have. He says having it is absolutely essential to our “national security.” He told The New York Times that ownership is “psychologically needed for success,” because he’s a real estate dude. It just won’t do to not have it, in what would be the biggest land acquisition by our nation ever — bigger than the Louisiana Purchase, bigger than Alaska.

Owning Greenland is, of course, not central to our national security, though it does get more interesting, Northwest Passage-wise, with the rapid melting of Arctic ice due to the fact of the global warming Trump pretends not to believe in. Because we already have what normal people call Thule Air Base there, which Trump renamed Pituffik Space Base to make it sound weirder and more Mars-oriented, with its two-mile-long runway that hosted B-52 bombers and missile installations during the Cold War, when we also had over a dozen bases and thousands of troops there, thanks to an already existing Danish-American defense pact.

The Greenlanders, and their good-looking, polite Danish overlords, are cool with the base and the pact. Otherwise, they just want to go on hunting their seals and their reindeer and flaunting furry parkas. Greenland, like Altadena, not for sale. As Aqqaluk Lynge, a former member of Greenland’s Parliament, said of Trump’s buyout offer: “We don’t sell our souls.”

So would Trump, after his Caribbean war is over, swing the fleet up through the Atlantic and invade if the ongoing talks with Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers don’t go his way? Such a question, pre-fishing boat bombings, pre-Venezuela invasion, would have seemed opera-bouffe comical. No more. And the Danish minister walked away from the talks last week saying they went nowhere and that there is still “fundamental disagreement” over who should own Greenland.

Actually, many Greenlanders say that being a Danish territory isn’t so hot, either, reeking of European colonialism. But there is the matter of the rich socialism that comes with Nordic control: free health care, free education, Copenhagen cash infusions.

My guess is that if Trump really did take Greenland, he’d have a bunch of whale blubber-strong anti-MAGA protesters on his hands, not unlike fellow cold-weather Minnesotans. At that point, ICE would be his only answer.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.