Things got weird

Things got weird last week.

Life is always weird in Greenland in one way or another, which is kind of nice generally. But last week they got weird in a bad way.

First Trump said he wanted to buy Greenland. That was pretty funny. But while we were all laughing, Trump was getting cross.

A few days after the initial hilarity, and in a growing undercurrent of glowering, Trump announced he was cancelling his state visit to Denmark because the Prime Minister of Denmark, Mette Fredericksen, wouldn’t discuss the sale of Greenland. And we all responded with a collective “Huh?”

The Danish Prime Minister had said that the idea of Greenland’s sale was “absurd.” Noone can speak to him that way, Trump announced. Noone can speak to the American people that way (apparently the American people were somehow involved in this), so he responded by saying that the Danish Prime Minister was “nasty.” I wasn’t fully aware of this heirarchy previously, where the Danish head of state may not say that the American head of state’s idea is “absurd” but the American head of state may refer to the Danish head of state as “nasty,” and that is ok. Now I know.

Nonetheless, maybe making fun of the school bully wasn’t a good strategy.

Since then, Nuuk has gone crazy with American media. My husband stumbled into a conversation with a Financial Times journalist in a cafe in town. The journalist bemoaned that he even had to cover this story. Was it even a story? He was in Greenland for two days to get the local angle. It probably took him two days to get here and it’ll be two days to get home again, first flying east, and then back west.

And everyone is talking about Conan O’Brien. My son is glued to his ipad watching him. O’Brien was here for a few days to help Trump out with ‘securing the deal’. I am clearly quite old as I didn’t know anything about Conan O’Brien before his Greenland visit. But Greenlanders are much more connected than I am. The local newspaper’s website ran a photo of O’Brien on the main street interviewing the father of a kid my son goes to school with. Well, of course anyone he would interview locally, I would know. So would everyone else in Nuuk, and possibly in Greenland.

People who have lived in Greenland for decades say that Greenland has never seen this level of international attention. What a way to get it. Since last week, everyone in a position of any authority has been contacted by American media, including me. And really, I am not in a position of any authority. I have authority over Greenland’s rocks. Well, I try. But as much as I shout out my back window at the grey hills, they’re pretty stubborn, those rocks. They just sit there and don’t respond. It can be quite frustrating.

Maybe that’s a strategy?