I am kind of drunk on Danish spirits.

I think that I am if not a strictly typical Norwegian-American, then at least a fairly common sort of one.

As I am a leftist, a run-of-the-mill cracker has no problem painting me as anti-American, and part of me has to concede his point. An American is not who I am. America is the country I live in and the people who make my passport work. I look around this country, and I even go to live in parts of it outside of the Scandawhovian pale (Wisconsin, Minnesota, and supposedly parts of Washington that I've never been to) and it makes no sense to me. America, even other parts of the Midwest, is/are more culturally alien to me than a country halfway around the world. Some people in Indiana don't even recognize my accent as American. "My people", that is, my family, have only been in this country for 89 years or so as of today, and so we don't share the Revolutionary and Civil War heritage that "real Americans" do. I don't give a fuck about that shit as a matter of personal identity. As far as I'm concerned the entirety of my share in the collective guilt for slavery can be assuaged by buying a Guinness for some strawberry blond asshole in a cableknit sweater. For the record, I wouldn't even have been an American at all had the McCarran-Walter Act been passed thirty-five years earlier. Ironically "Walter" is my maternal grandmother's maiden name. Those people wouldn't have made it in after 1952 either.

I read cute little newspaper tidbits about "quaint", supposedly alien cultural idiosyncracies and I think, "that's unusual?" -- for the record, The Incredibles struck me as un-American before I realized that its Americanness was what's wrong with it. I believe that bragging is the act of only the most extreme assholes.

I know the words to "Vi Elsker" and I know when to sing them. I don't eat lutefisk because I'm vegan but I feel bad about it. One of my professors spent World War II sabotaging German boats at port in Bergen. I had to restrain myself from trying to high five him. I got into Dungeons and Dragons in grade school due to my interest in Norse mythology and not vice versa.

When people badmouth a-ha, even though I know that "The Living Daylights" was a weak-ass Bond theme and Morten Harket is a sweaty-faced jackass, I want to hit them.

I speak Norwegian well enough that cabdrivers think that I'm a Trønder with a drinking problem. I can tell roughly which third of the country a Norwegian is from by listening to them for three minutes.

You might remember the Oslo Accords. This is probably proof that you, too, are Norwegian, because nobody else does. They do however go to show what it is that Norway wants to do in the Middle East. Stop all the fighting. And not to get out the oil, either. Norway has enough of its own damn oil.

So I basically have the same sort of irrational connection to Norway that your average NASCAR dirtbag has to the United States. The difference is, as I have stated before, Norway isn't really exploiting anybody. Torture schools? Not in Norway. Under-the-table dealings with Saudi Arabia? Not in Norway!

This is why I view the continued march of attacks against Norwegian (and Danish, too, I guess) embassies around the Muslim world with nothing less than disgust. Norway has absolutely no history of exploiting the Middle East or Indonesia. Now word has come that Iran has withdrawn their ambassador from Denmark. Look just below to see the traditional Persian Shi`ite stance on depictions of Muhammad (this has nothing to do with my opinion about Iran's right to nuclear self-determination, by the way - just their hopping aboard the asshole wagon). Fifteen thousand marchers each in Beirut and Damascus is not the sort of thing that one can explain away as a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. Thirty thousand people can only be a massive accumulation of people with fucked up priorities. Thirty thousand people in two countries, plus however many more in however many other countries, who have no idea what press freedom entails, is the shame of each one of those places.

As a person who has spent a reasonable amount of time working on Muslim cultural issues in an academic context, I hope that it doesn't get around that I said this: Islam is just as full of shit as Christianity and Judaism, and that's just for starters. There is an irritating sort of pussyfooting you have to do when discussing the various Near Eastern monotheisms in whatever context in academia which is entirely designed to pacify the fundamentalist Christian, or Muslim, or Jew who is sitting there, sweating in his cramped little desk and itching to jump up and scream j'accuse the very second that you imply that their scripture is not literally true. I've seen it from all three, plus a Tibetan Buddhist, and all I have to say at this point is; الف ایر بدیک و الف ایر بنبیيگ. I hope that rendered correctly. The type is too small for me to see. At any rate my point is the game is over. While of course I don't mean to denigrate true belief as a motive for any action, frankly, you true believers can swing on my nuts.

I really wish that at this point I could indulge in the sort of arrogant jingoistic dickwaving that the typical American Cracker Patriot normally does when faced with even more vacuous and artificial threats to his national conciousness. Unfortunately Norway is a small country with a small military and as a non-citizen I can't really speak for them. However I would like to point something out to our arsonist friends in the Middle East:

You know how you benefitted so much culturally from the Dark Ages in Europe, collapse of cultural institutions, flight from barbarians, etcetera? We caused that.