Allow me a thought or two on the triple selfie that became this week’s leading event of real-fake-news? The photograph, and the photograph of the photograph, and the commentary surrounding it, improbably united two subjects I’m interested in: Michelle Obama and Danish television. As I wrote in January of last year, the progressivism of Denmark—where seventy per cent of women work and ninety-seven per cent of children between the ages of three and five attend day care—makes surprisingly good fodder for TV shows, which are “free to plumb the realities, rather than the desirability, of gender equality and women’s liberation.” Like Birgitte Nyborg, the female Staatsminister in “Borgen,” Denmark’s Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, is a woman. Like Nyborg’s, her personal life has sometimes intruded in distracting ways upon her professional one: Does she wear too much Gucci? Is her husband gay? (Thorning-Schmidt, who is married to Stephen Kinnock, the son of the former British Labour leader Neil, was forced to deny such rumors publicly.) The difference between TV shows and the news is that the former is entitled to create drama out of speculative notions about what happens when men and women hang out together in the inner chambers of the political tent. Say what you will about “the selfie seen around the world,” but the most juvenile thing to emerge from Wednesday’s memorial service for Nelson Mandela is the notion that Barack Obama was flirting with Thorning-Schmidt, and that Michelle Obama was mad about it.
Andrea Peyser, at the New York Post, is a leading exponent of the theory that Obama “went into sugar shock over a Danish pastry.” Obama, she writes, “lost his morality, his dignity and his mind, using the solemn occasion of Nelson Mandela’s memorial service Tuesday to act like a hormone-ravaged frat boy on a road trip to a strip bar.” The pastry is apparently also to blame, having “hiked up her skirt to expose long Scandinavian legs covered by nothing more substantial than sheer black stockings.” There’s more, but let’s debunk, at random, the next paragraph: “With Michelle glowering, the world judging and mental fidelity floating into the abyss, the president leaned into the air space of the cross-legged Danish cupcake, who is known in Copenhagen as a fan of America’s randy TV show ‘Sex and the City.’” She is, and so are Celine Dion, Harry Styles, Julian Fellowes, Marina Abramović, and Antonin Scalia.
So we’ve got the Ditzy Blonde Chick. Cue the Angry Black Woman! Is there anything more tired than the idea that Michelle Obama, sock-Nazi and America-hater, is constantly shooting dirty looks at attractive women? (We’ve seen this before with Carla Bruni. She probably hates toddlers, too.) The meme, in addition to not being very persuasive, carries a whiff of racism. Why the presumption that Obama would be attracted to Thorning-Schmidt? Why the assertion that Michelle Obama would be jealous of her, even when photographs that everyone chose to ignore, and the photographer who took them, suggest otherwise? And what about David Cameron, the third man in the frame?
Amid the hubbub, Thorning-Schmidt might have been making jokes about the impact of the negative benchmark rate on the Danish krone, or gossiping about Xi Jinping. When I e-mailed Ask Rostrup, the political editor of DR, Denmark’s version of the BBC, to ask him how the selfie incident had played in Denmark, he replied, “I think, in the end, it will turn out positive for Thorning-Schmidt—basically because it shows her on good and close footing with two of the most powerful political leaders.” He pointed out that it was important for her to be seen in high spirits—during the memorial she received word from her embattled minister of justice that he was resigning. (Her foreign minister resigned the next day, due to health problems, prompting a cabinet reshuffle.)
If we’re extrapolating emotional states from photographs, how about this: maybe Michelle Obama was a little bit bored, or left out, of what, despite the gravity of the occasion, was essentially her husband’s office Christmas party. Read Mark Leibovich’s “This Town,” a delicious primer on the social mores of the political class. “The big-ticket Washington departure rite can be such a great networking opportunity,” Leibovich writes of Tim Russert’s funeral. “You can almost feel the ardor behind the solemn faces: lucky stampedes of power mourners, about two thousand of them, wearing out the red-carpeted aisles of the Kennedy Center.” With no punch bowl in sight, perhaps Michelle Obama spaced out. As fans of Danish television know, sometimes a woman who doesn’t smile is just thinking about something else.
Photograph by Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty.