Det var et yndigt land

There´s a well-loved song here in Denmark called "Det er et yndigt land" which means "It is a lovely country" or "It is a pretty land." Much in the same way that as we grow older we fail (thankfully) to notice how old our spouses and friends are really getting, the Danes have failed to notice how appalling they have made a vast expanse of their mostly bland landscape. It may be apocryphal but sometimes one hears of how a frog will not leave a pan of water if the temperature is raised gradually from frog-friendly to boiling. Because the increase is gradual the frog doesn´t notice the change and has no trigger to jump out. In a similar fashion, I think Danes have not noticed that their land is no longer the pretty patchwork of fields and forest dotted with small, red-bricked towns nestling in hollows or along rivers that it may once have been. Nor is it the blue-skied fairy-tale place pictured in the holiday postcards, promotional literature or picture calendars. However, idea of the pretty land dominates the the physical reality that about 80% of their towns are mostly sad, unremarkable places or worse, a foaming, unstructured clutter of boxes strewn amongst infrastructure designed by engineers with an Aspergeresque inability to understand that people have emotional needs beyond the requirements for roadways, power-lines and railways.
The other way of looking at is that as long as Danes have a cosy private home, the appearance of the outside landscape does not matter. Of course, it is worth recalling that the private family home (the suburban home) is intended to cut the individual off from society. Richard Sennett has written about this in The Uses Of Disorder (1971). That the pretty land is pretty no more is not important for a society content with the sofas, lamps and other consumer goods that VS Naipaul described in my last post. Yes, Denmark is getting uglier but nobody notices and if they do they don´t much care. The Danes are poster-children for what happens when a privatised life forgets the value of the public world outside the front door.