The Great Scandinavian Nosedive
Every once in while, a corporation or institution makes a decision so astonishingly bad that average people wonder just how a bunch of high-powered and highly paid executives can be so monumentally stupid. These “teachable moments” used to come along once every decade or so, but now they seem to be happening every other week.
The latest catastrophe has been the instant backlash provoked by Scandinavian Air’s spectacularly ill judged marketing strategy of deriding Scandinavian culture as somehow fraudulent or not real, while at the same time encouraging customers to engage in yet more of the same cultural appropriation they’ve just been belittled for.
Now Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) are shocked to discover that the general public are not altogether happy with being told that almost every part of their cultural identity is somehow invalid, which is pretty much the same thing as denying that a huge part of them even exists in any meaningful sense. Not only is this obvious nonsense, but it’s just one more wearying example of the cultural and anthropological bigotry which has become a disturbingly acceptable part of media discourse in recent years. Boiled down, this pernicious form of psychological self-flagellation holds that pretty much everything in Western societies (and especially the Anglosphere) is somehow stolen from some other society and is therefore not real or worthy of respect.
