Publishing update: Looks like the new book will actually be released sometime around May 22.



On Monday, I replaced my desk flag.

It must have been late in 1968, my first semester at Waldorf College, Forest City, Iowa, when I bought a miniature Norwegian flag on a stand-up base for my dorm room desk. It’s been with me ever since, in several states, and in several states of being. But only recently I noticed that, in addition to being kind of limp and faded, it had actually started to show holes, produced not by any kind of friction, but just by the aging of the fabric (nylon, I think).

So I sent away to Ingebretsen’s Scandinavian Shop for a replacement. And I had to discard the old flag.

This makes me sad.

Anyone who knows the Walker boys will tell you that we cling irrationally to the mementos of our pasts. And the longer we’ve had a thing—even a shabby, moth-eaten thing—the more loathe we are to discard it. It feels like betrayal to us. Like setting our grandparents afloat on an iceberg to starve. Perhaps it stems from an excess of imagination.

Anyway, I don’t like change. And yes, I know this may contribute to my conservatism. I’ll stipulate to that. So what?

A friend told me on the same day, by coincidence, that the Nordkapp Chorus has decided to disband.

Nordkapp is a Twin Cities men’s choir, specializing in Norwegian music. It has existed for several generations, going back to immigrant times, and has been a staple entertainment at all kinds of ethnic events. But they just can’t find enough singers anymore.

I suppose I should have joined, but my voice is gone, and I really don’t like choir singing all that much anyway, and blast it, I don’t have time for another activity.

Nor does anybody else, it would seem.

So it goes.

I can’t really see a long-term future for any Scandinavian organization in America. My membership in Sons of Norway is kind of like standing on the deck of the Titanic, if the Titanic were sinking so slowly that you had a fair chance of dying of natural causes before it actually went under.

America is about assimilation. If you run into a kid in America today with a Norwegian name, like Olson or Moen, chances are he’s half German, and the remaining half is a mélange of French and Japanese, with a little slice left for the Norwegian that provided the name. Why should that kid think of himself as Norwegian more than anything else?

I feel a little like an old Native American around 1900, knowing that the battle is over and my people are going away. The world I grew up knowing will never be again.

Does this apply to Christianity, too?

I don’t think so.

Christianity isn’t an ethnic identity. It’s not a particular culture. It’s been Jewish and Roman and North African and Middle Eastern and European. It is North American and South American and African and Korean and Chinese. Its demise is anticipated with glee by a few analysts. These are convinced that they’ve reduced all human life to its absolute basic elements, safely extracted the supernatural, and reconstituted it just as good as before. These people are somewhat troubled by the fact that their experiment in Europe has resulted, not in a joyful, neurosis-free humanist paradise, but in a dying culture on the verge of being overrun again by more darn religious people, just in another form.

Modernism is also a particular culture. And it’s dying too. I think it’ll do well to outlive Norwegian-Americanism.