News from Denmark
Denmark has withdrawn from the MGP contest. Despite originally having been the creators of the competition as a children’s alternative to the Eurovision Song Contest, the Danes, along with the Swedes and the Norwegians, have withdrawn from the European, citing a lack of control as a problem.
The Scandinavians were unable to convince other countries of the need for rules prohibiting child performers from baring their bellies or wearing short skirts and too much makeup. The three countries also hoped to institute a new point system, so only finalists found out their placement and total score. The idea was this would prevent children from feeling their songs were worthless.
'We don't think it's a pleasant experience for an eight-year-old to find out that their song didn't receive any points,' said Lars Grarup, programme director for Danish state TV station DR.
Denmark has been put forward as a possible candidate for the detention of Liberian warlord and ex president, Charles Taylor. Quite why Denmark should take on this responsibility when nations such as Holland and Sweden have already said no, is beyond me, but according to our foreign minister, Per Stig Møller, We are but awaiting an official request from the UN.
Naturally the nationalist Danish People’s Party is dead against having Taylor sit his time in a Danish prison whilst the Socialist People’s Party is all in favour. Personally I’d let his own people deal with him. I don’t agree with the SF that global responsibilities means we owe the world to act as a home for people like Taylor.
In Denmark, the priests have a union (just everyone has a union or a society in Denmark). The Priests Union has put forward for priests to have Sundays off work, just like other people. Its not that long ago a priest put forward the idea that Denmark’s churches be closed on Saturdays and people could get married on Fridays instead.The whole thing sounds like just another adjustment to The Machine to me. Denmark is rapidly becoming a nation run on purely economic considerations with even the once mighty church now reduced to the role of being just one more cog amongst so many others.
8 comments:
Well, I'm not religious at all and if the churches all closed down of their own accord, that wouldn't bother me.
What does bother me is that so much of Danish society is gradually being stream-lined to fit into a single social model based on economical values.
How many Blogs do you have Boomer?
I don't know how bad this Euro singing contest is, but it's getting creepy this side of the pond.
Mostly it's birthday parties at Club Libby Lu. A girl turns 6 and she wants the Tween Idol makeover for herself and her friends, complete with makeup, punky hair and a pink headset like Britney Spears might wear onstage. All the girls get to borrow party costumes. Many choose low-slung pants and sequined spandex tops cropped just under where their breasts would be, if they had any. Sometimes, the girls are so small their pants legs drag under their sneakers.
After the makeovers, the club counselors, as they're known, lead the girls in a dance, teaching them to "shimmy down" and to "shake it, shake it." Sometimes they arrange a fashion catwalk. The girls walk down the aisle of the store till they reach the front, where mothers hold cameras. Here, the girls fling one arm theatrically toward the ceiling. The song on the store stereo says: "Wet your lips/And smile to the camera."
There's a 4-year-old on the catwalk whose tube top slips so low it would be indecent if she were older. A mom dashes out into the aisle, yanks it up. And the little princess, oblivious, keeps grinning toward the crowd of smiling grown-ups.
- WaPo: Glamour Babes
When I was growing up little girls hadn’t “earned” the right to wear their hair long. It’s not that little girls wearing long hair was considered indecent. It was more like an unofficial rite of passage. And make-up? Only around Halloween.
Sure, some girls will play dress up, try on their mothers’ makeup and clothing. There’s nothing unusual about that. I’m just not sure we should commercialize it for public consumption. It loses some of its sweetness.
I dunno moif this demand from the priest union seems more indicative of the fact there is a definitely lack or need for them to work on Sundays.
A more capitalistic approach or neo-liberal ideals would be that salvation was on market or available to the customer 24/7.
Bucket.
Perhaps in the US, but not in Denmark. Here, the drive for total efficiency is leading to ever narrower service windows with banks, social services, even the health services cutting their opening times to the absolute minimum in order to save as much money as possible.
Here in Århus for example, they've steadily cut away all the chemists so that there are only three left to serve the whole of the central city district. Thats circa one chemist to serve every 50,000 people.
The last time I went to the chemist was to pick up some TREO pain killers and I had to stand and wait for damned near 45 minutes!
When asked why the other chemists were being gotten rid of, the answer was, we don't need them.
Its the same with the churches. The priests say they are so over worked, they don't have any free time. Well thats fine. But if even the churches don't want to be open on Sundays then whats the point of Sundays? In fact, whats the point of churches?
Plenty of people have called for Sunday to be like Saturday and let the shops and banks be open to provide their services when people aren't at work.
I don't know what the solution is, but I'm getting tired of this constant drive to make every so efficient that its becoming increasingly difficult to have any choices in anything!
Lesly.
I know what you mean. Its getting like that here as well. Even DR, which is pulling out of the MGP has children shows that portray little girls look like 'show biz prostitutes'.
I've seen some people say this was always the case, that all through history girls have had to endure this kind of pressure. Well maybe its just me, but I don't see it. I don't recall half naked girls on TV when I was a boy... but maybe I wasn't paying attention?
I've seen some people say this was always the case, that all through history girls have had to endure this kind of pressure. Well maybe its just me, but I don't see it. I don't recall half naked girls on TV when I was a boy... but maybe I wasn't paying attention?
Adults have encouraged girls to pretend at being grown ups for a long time, that's true. When I was 5 or 6 my mother decided to dress me up in various outfits and take pictures outside the apartment. One of the outfits was a two-piece polka dot bathing suit. The top with a chunky “bra” crisscrossing around the back and the bottom had a skirt. She dabbed a little bit of dark red lipstick on me and gave me a purse. I smiled, she snapped the picture.
At the time I thought it was all strange. For one thing, it was hot as hell. This was her way of memorializing me before I grew up but my mind was on pertinent matters like scuffing my knees at the school’s playground and racing my stepbrothers.
The difference is those pictures were cute. She didn’t overdo it. In the article I cite, those little girls are still being little girls. It’s the adults that have stopped behaving like it is a game of pretend and ignore good taste.
Summer was always so hot when I was a kid as well. In my memory, the sun is so bright it seems to almost bleach the memory.
That was back in the 70's. In the 80's all I remember was how wet it always was. It never seemed to stop raining back then. The memory is all rain and the teachers and miners atriking, the Falklands war and every one hating Maggie Thatcher.
Mette has pictures of herself all dressed up as well but these are mostly because she was into dancing as a girl. She used to belong to a dancing club and even went on international tours. In some of those pictures she is quite scantily dressed and I often wonder at the reactions to the audience.
Her group toured Thailand several times for example and I wonder at it.
No doubt if Pip grows up to want to be a dancer I'll have to let her do the same thing as her mother did, but I can't imagine I'll be happy at it. One thing is for sure, as long as I'm responsible for her, no daughter of mine will ever dance semi naked in that haven of pedophilia which is Bangkok.
Of course, once she's 18 she can make her own decisions, but until then I shall have to play the tyrant.
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