The show is about Danish Politics, the women are sexy and intelligent, and I just adore the Prime Minister, played by Sidse Babette Knudsen and her publicity chief, played by Brigitte Hjort Sørenson.
I am in good company.
According to the New Yorker, the show, more realistic than "House of Cards," has a great following, not just in its native Denmark, but in subtitled form, in Britain. It's from the BBC that I watch it, beamed to my iPad here in California, using a VPN connection.
And the show is close to my heart. The latest episode centers around how the PM's new party gains recognition through investigating the Danish pig industry -- evidently they, like us, have a problem with antibiotics in meat (see my previous comments in I just can't help it).
It's fascinating that political life makes such compelling viewing...far more so than the farce here in Washington. These Danes project intelligence as well as being attractive.
But what's this got to do with the Act of Union?
It seems Karmic. When the crowns of England and Scotland were conjoined after Elizabeth's demise and James VI of Scotland became the first English Stuart, Shakespere, in an act of elemental bowing and scraping, created two plays, Macbeth (the Scottish play) and Hamlet (the Danish) for James's wife was Anne of Denmark. It took about a hundred years to ratify the Union and things have proceeded, not without some difficulty, since.
After Culloden and the clearances, the Scots have provided the backbone of the British army and a vast settler class that have carried the flag all around the world. Now, full circle, they are considering succession from the Union, an act that will have less consequence than the Dred Scott case, but none the less will be, if enacted, a considerable change for both. England and the rump of the Union, Northern Ireland, will be facing their own issues as there is considerable desire for them to separate from Europe, whereas the Scots are still fully committed.
There are other comparisons with Denmark, even if actual Scottish politicians are rotund and chubby-faced whereas fictional Danish politicians are svelt and sexy. The size of each population is about five and a half million with an gross national product of just over $200bn. Their land areas are comparable as long as you don't take into account the vastness of Greenland whose thawing, mineral-packed wastes may well be the subject of further successions.
So, in three hundred years we have come full circle. The Scots may become more connected with the Danes as there is a considerable empathy of "being in the north" and of the Nordic economic model -- see article "Breaking the Bonds" in the Financial Times at http://www.on.ft.com/1fJJ3Ub
The Act of Union is withering on the vine although there seems to be no great playwright or poet present who, with a sense of weary irony, might care to record this sundering from London in epic terms.
It all depends on the results of a Scottish plebiscite...to be, or not to be...
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