Cover of the July 1926 Vanity Fair issue in which Anderson’s “Inquiry” appeared
“Nations are like people,” the US American novelist, short fiction writer and poet Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) remarked in 1926. “It takes a long, long time for one of them to grow up.” That year—that month—the United States was commemorating its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, which prompted Anderson to add:
As a nation we are still young. It has only been a hundred and fifty years. What’s that? Well, we may still be wearing short pants, but we are walking down past the clothing stores on Main Street and looking at the spring styles in long pants almost every day now. Such a job we tackled—whew!
Never mind “whew!” How about “whoa”? A “still young” nation? I have heard that one before—back in 2018, at the wedding here in Wales of an international trans student from the United States whose sister told me, probably in response to a reference of mine to the still fresh wound inflicted on democracy by the MAGA king’s first term, that her homeland was bound to make mistakes, and presumably be excused for making them, because the Republic was still so very new.
When, at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, the forty-seventh and perhaps last elected President of the United States, in one of his characteristic falsehood-and-insult-littered tirades, referred to Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark he had long coveted, as “a piece of ice,” his imperialism, imperiousness and imperviousness to historical facts were once again on blindingly stark display.
Greenland, Iceland, or whatever the misleader of the fabled free world may call the largest island of them all—if indeed it is land, or a land, rather than a frozen asset on the verge of liquidation—it needed to be his, outright. Until, that is, Number 47 (previously 45 but never adding up to more than number two) was duped into settling for cubes portioned out in a deal existing since 1951. Put that in your Diet Coke and drink it, sucker!
“A piece of ice.” Is not Melania enough? Well, not according to the Epstein files, if ever we get to see them entire and unredacted. The likely scenario of hell freezing over comes to mind, boggled though it is.
“A piece of ice.” That, clearly, is what cultures and communities—history and humanity—are to a rapacious tyke-oon, a petulant plutocrat whose crude, rudimentary vocabulary and short attention span remind us daily how limited his definition of “great” is and how precisely that limitation sums up the narrow mind of a bottom feeder—a Moron-roe Doctrinaire?—raised, none too loftily, on the notion that anyone aspiring to be a big fish needs to swallow whatever comes or gets into his way.
Greatness, thus conceived, means little more than to amass much to amount to more in the eyes of the world he, in a less-than-popular deviation from his America First agenda, has set his greedy peepers on.
“A piece of ice,” indeed! The word is chilling enough as an acronym, when it refers to a deadly experiment in cryotherapy involving the deep-freezing of democracy until it falls off the body politic as if it were an unwelcome and unsightly growth.
While I could not gauge the degree of ire among the largely undemonstrative audience at Davos, the phrase certainly made my blood boil, as does pretty much every exhausting waste of air emanating from a hothead whose actions are raising the global temperature as perilously as the actual warming his administration has chosen to deny for the opportunity of raking in a final few billions. When Number 47 talks Greenland, you can bet he means greenbacks.
It is undeniably global warming that makes the island of Kalaallit Nunaat more strategic a region than it ever was, now that melting ice caps open routes and facilitate access to the Arctic.
Climate change was not yet an issue during the so-called “Battle for Greenland”—the subtitle and subject of War Below Zero, a book published in 1944. And yet, atmospheric conditions and the ability to forecast them on location were apparently key to the US interest in the region in a pre-satellite age.
According to War Below Zero, the conflict in question was not a war for “territory” but “a war for weather.”
