Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

That much is pretty well known.

What is only slightly less well known is that soon after the first Danish Embassy was torched, soon after the first death threat, soon after the first attempted murder of the cartoonist, the editor of a newspaper (the Optimist ) in Skagen, Denmark, asked his staff cartoonist (he had only one; it was a weekly newspaper with a small circulation) to draw a cartoon depicting in some way or other the controversy over the by now infamous cartoons of Muhammad.

“Me?” the cartoonist asked. His name was Jens Baedrup. He’d worked at the paper for nine years. Mostly he drew cartoons of local interest: tourists eating hot dogs while walking too slowly on the pedestrian mall; grizzled fishermen acting surprised at seeing fish they’d just caught on display at the market, as though to say, What are you doing here?; Skagenians caught in bad weather and making the best of it. In fact, his most recent cartoon had been of a man and a woman standing under a roof and the man saying, “At least we have a roof over our heads!” and the woman not saying anything, just looking miserable, because she was drenched, and so was he, because the rain was blowing sideways and the roofed structure they were standing under had no walls.

“Yes. You.”

“Why?” the cartoonist asked. Of course, he’d been following the whole thing on television, on the radio, in the newspaper. It made him anxious, angry, annoyed, the way things do when you don’t know whom to blame. But then again, those cartoons had been published in a Copenhagen newspaper, and Skagen was as far away from Copenhagen as you could get and still be in Denmark. In fact, it was common for people in Skagen, after learning of some outrageous news coming out of the nation’s capital five hours to the south, to shrug it off by saying, “But that’s Copenhagen.”

“Because this is important,” the editor said. “I think you’ll do a good job. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have do this than you.”

The cartoonist recognized that this was tainted praise, or at least praise with an ulterior motive, but that did not mean he was immune to it. He thought for a minute. He would have asked his wife her opinion, but she had gone to visit her parents in Aarhus and wasn’t due back in Skagen for another week. He could have called her on the phone, of course. But things had not been going too well with them. Lately, every little disagreement threatened to turn into a large argument, which then threatened to turn into a referendum on the marriage itself. And one of the things they most often argued about was the cartoonist’s unshakable optimism, his belief that everything was going to be just fine. He knew, if he called and asked her whether he should draw the cartoon, she would question his mental health. I don’t know what you’re so worried about, he would then say. I think everything is going to be just fine. And then she would mockingly call him “the Skagen Optimist,” which, in addition to being the name of the newspaper, was also the name of his weekly cartoon. In fact, the cartoon of the man and his wife getting wet from the sideways rain had been based on something that had happened to them. Twice. The cartoonist thought that by having the wife in the cartoon remain silent (in real life she had not remained silent), his wife would not recognize herself in the cartoon. But this turned out to be yet another example of his overoptimism.

So instead of calling his wife, the cartoonist let his mind argue with itself, the way it does when it’s about to let you do something that you’ll later regret.

You really shouldn’t do this (his mind said).

But I’ll do a good job; the editor said so himself.

The editor is a liar.

Yes, but no one is a liar all the time.

But you don’t even have a strong opinion about all this.

Who better to draw a cartoon like this than someone who doesn’t have a strong opinion?

Tell that to the people who have strong opinions.

This is the Skagen Optimist; no one is ever going to see the cartoon anyway.

Then why do it?

Because it’s my job.

And with that sentence, a good many arguments that should go on for much longer are brought to a close.

“Fine,” the cartoonist said to his editor. “I’ll do it.”

“Good,” the editor said. “I’ll need it before you go home tonight.”

After receiving his assignment, the cartoonist took a long walk through Skagen, his heart narrating his journey: Skagen, the town between two seas; the town with the pretty yellow houses with the red tile roofs and the neat yards; the town with the wet wind and the cold sand; the town that painters in the nineteenth century made famous for its light; the town where the eastward-moving waves from the North Sea crash into the westward-moving waves from the Baltic Sea, and the spectacle is so great that even the skeptical end up taking too many pictures; the town so orderly and good that even the hulking tankers from Sweden and Norway and England and Germany patiently wait in lines that stretch from one sea to another before easing into the docks at Skagen Havn. The town where my parents were born and where they died. The town where I was married in the big white church with the little white clipper ships dangling from the ceiling in between the chandeliers. The town I have lived in for forty-two years. The town I love.

It is said that the Danes are the happiest people in the world, and if that’s true, then the people from Skagen are happier even than that. That was what the cartoonist was feeling. And he was also feeling that some of the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten had made him unhappy, and so had the violent reactions to them, and now so had his assignment. That’s when he got his idea. He went back to the newspaper’s office, drew a cartoon featuring a group of unhappy Danes (one knew they were Danes because they were frowning inexpertly, as if unhappiness had come to them only recently and they didn’t quite know how to show it, and one also knew they were Danes because they were white), and hovering over them, like an ominous cloud, was the cartoonist’s rendering of the now infamous cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Once he was finished, Jens handed the cartoon to his editor, saying, “I think this is pretty good.”

The editor looked at the cartoon. He had been the newspaper’s editor for three years, and he hated the job: the constant deadlines, the ink everywhere, the reporters’ bad-tempered arguments about what constituted good grammar, the general sense of everything having been much better yesterday. He could have just quit, but the newspaper’s publisher was his father. The paper had been owned and run by his family for almost two centuries. Quitting the paper would be like quitting his family: something that seemed less possible the more he wanted it. The editor just hadn’t been able to figure a way out of the whole mess, until now.

“I do think it is pretty good,” he said to the cartoonist. Then he published it the next day.

Less than a week later, the Skagen Optimist decided, after someone had thrown Molotov cocktails through its windows, to shut down after nearly two hundred years of continuous publication. Meanwhile the cartoonist, accompanied by agents from the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, had gone to his in-laws’ house in Aarhus. His wife met him at the door. She knew by now about the cartoon: it, and the cartoonist, had made the television news. She also knew about the death threats: they’d made the news, too. “Everything is going to be just fine,” Jens had told her repeatedly on the phone over the previous week.

“Oh, Jens,” she’d replied. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking everything was going to be just fine,” he’d said.