https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Eia

Apparently he was even in fucking Body Troopers??? Wow.

So yeah, when I was in secondary school I was made to watch Sånn Er Norge, which is basically like Last Week Tonight except instead of talking about societal issues it’s about how everything in society “works perfectly”. It’s such a profoundly masturbatory work of liberal slop that even being a liberal at the time, I was left wondering what the fuck the point of the show was, and how other people seemed to like it so much — “Are they just jerking off to the unspoken message of Norwegians’ ‘superior intellect’ allowing this country to supposedly ‘tame the beast of capitalism’? Do they just like the escapist fantasy that ours is a perfect country with no need for foreign ideas? How do my countrymen not see the hypocrisy of censuring other countries for propagandizing their youth, when this local TV show being played in this classroom is very plainly that exact thing?”

But I suppose my own circumstances pushed me to be more critical of the show than my teachers…

In any case, the name “Harald Eia” was in one ear and out the other at that time. I didn’t follow along on local media much in those days, and I certainly didn’t care about local celebrities. So it was only much later when I decided to go out of my way to watch more local TV shows, that the name “Harald Eia” actually started to mean something to me — indeed, Harald Eia played the owner of the isenkram store in the “Danish language” bit in Uti Vår Hage, as well as a myriad other roles in that show: Uti Vår Hage is a sketch comedy show from the 2000s, where Harald Eia, Atle Antonsen (who now hosts the Norwegian version of Taskmaster), and Bård Tufte Johansen play various characters satirizing contemporary Norwegian (or broadly Nordic) society.

And yeah, Uti Vår Hage certainly has its moments, but it also has a lot of very problematic ““comedy””. You can’t exactly color me surprised that a guy who worked on a show that repeatedly makes fun of minorities ended up presenting the most masturbatory work of liberal slop that local TV can produce.

And it’s like, just kind of a shame, right? 'Cause it’s like if I watch or read or listen to Seppo content, I’ll feel alienated from the society around me, like I’m seeing the commodification and homogenization of culture; but then I watch or read or listen to local-made Norwegian content, and I just end up thinking, “Holy hell, do I even WANT to feel like I belong with these people‽” — So I still end up feeling kind of alienated no matter what, just in a different way. Media imported from the USA and media created locally are of course under capitalism both going to take bourgeois forms — just representing different segments of the bourgeoisie. And so my predicament is really just which segment of the bourgeoisie pisses me off the least, I guess.

I suppose the true solution to my predicament would be to turn to proletarian culture in Norway. But good frickin’ luck with that! I found Vømmøl Spellmannslag not too long ago, and I liked and still like their music a lot, but naturally one of the musicians in that band would go on to be an openly insufferable islamophobic reactionary dipshit. So you can’t even listen to music that gladly praises Mao and Lenin, without fully escaping the seething racist bullshit in this country.

I mean, is there even a living proletarian culture in Norway‽ It feels like even my leftist friends embrace the Seppo shit far too readily.

And I suppose this is why I like translation so much: rather than needing to choose between Seppoism or home-grown reactionism, or trying to find a nonexistent local proletarian culture, I can rather enjoy localized foreign content.