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.
Once again we see what I call the Seppo-Usonian-American tripartite division: the "Israeli" "Americans" or other "Americans" in "Israel", these are really Seppos through-and-through, they have sold their chance at dignity for a "guarantee" of protection by The Empire, making their own interests align with those of The Empire; the Palestinian Americans, and the solidary Americans in the West Bank generally, these are the true Americans, because for as much as their lives may or may not have been shaped by Americana or by living in the USA, their interests do not align with those of the USA, so these Americans in fact feel very acutely how little their lives actually matter to a USA that despite all evidence insists the contrary.
I genuinely feel like the word "American", as most people use it, is a sort of Janus word or contronym, it's a word with multiple contradictory meanings. I have already reflected on this in my own country in Northern Europe, that just because I happen to share a first language and a blue passport with the NATO ghouls, that this alone does not make me and them belong to the same nation, our nations are in fact not only distinct but in an antagonistic relationship with one another! And the "Israeli" "Americans" I would say have far more in common with those Seppo soldiers in Norway, and the Palestinian Americans far more in common with myself, than the opposite or either group with the other.
So this is not a dynamic that's unique to the (")Americans(") in "Israel"/Palestine, this is a dynamic that is omnipresent throughout the entirety of what people presently understand as the "American diaspora" — it just happens to be that in Palestine, the contradictions are much more plainly visible and felt and much more openly discussed... Except even here it's phrased as "Israeli Americans" and "Palestinian Americans", as if these groups somehow share a common "American-ness" that the US government is simply hypocritical about, as if it's "brother against brother". But call a Seppo a Seppo, and all the apparent hypocrisy of the US government towards its overseas citizens disappears in an instant.