Following Chairman Mao’s call to go down to the countryside, I spent a day connecting to the dark heart of whiteness and avoided revealing military secrets in the process.

I had never heard of that village until the day that a friend of us called and told us that they had an annual market going on there and asked if we wanted to go. There would be stalls where you could buy all sorts of crap, beer on tap and rides for the kids. So me, my partner, our kids and our friend loaded up our cars and left the multicultural wokery of the big city behind to spend a day among the hardworking salt of the earth people who constitutes the real Denmark.

The market was organised by the village citizens’ association in order to raise funds for local amateur sports and similar activities. Upon arrival, we were greeted by members of said association dressed in yellow vests who directed us to park on the muddy patch of grass that was the parking lot for a seven dollar fee. People there still follow the old ways, so when our female friend drove up to them with our queer short-haired teenage daughter on the front seat, they assumed she was the man in charge of the vehicle and tried to solicit payment from her, until our friend insisted that she, as the adult driving the car, was going to pay.

Then we went to the market, a mix of tents, caravans and rides put up on an empty field outside the village. A road divided the grounds into two and we went to the left where we quickly found a beer tent with wooden benches and a stage in front. We bought pints for the adults and sodapop for the kids. The beverages were cold and refreshing as we sipped them from the disposable plastic cups that are ubiquitous whenever beer is sold in a field. Nearby, a stall sold fried pork sandwiches, and we had the dubious pleasure of having direct view of the stand of a fascist party adorned with a big banner airing their latest grievance: “Save Danish agriculture!” Apparently, farming is about to be ended by an upcoming carbon tax.

The police had sent the two youngest and blondest female cops they could find to the market to mill around and smile at people. In police lingo, this is called “safety-creation.” You have to hand it to the fuss on this one, the marketgoers were exactly the kind of people who would feel reassured by the sight of cops. Apart from a Native American guy selling pan pipes and dreamcatchers, we hadn’t seen a single non-white person among the guests and merchants. We would soon find out why.

A bearded man in his 60’s, wearing glasses and a baseball cap, went on stage singing and playing a Stratocaster. He was covering popular 1980s and 1990s pop songs, the kind anyone coming of age in Denmark during those years would know. Was he any good? Certainly not. Was he good enough for the job? Absolutely. He even had the courtesy to move his head away from the microphone whenever there were notes his voice couldn’t reach. A few older people were dancing in front of the stage, the sun was shining, and the mood was good.

We browsed the stalls to see what was on offer. The shopkeepers’ attitude towards taxation was best described by the “We love cash!” sign prominently displayed at one stall. The goods fell into two categories: old stuff and new stuff.

In the old stuff category, items ranged from garage sale junk to what you’d expect in low-tier antique stores. Several stalls sold old hand tools in varying states of disrepair. One stand’s inventory looked like the going-out-of-business sale of a 1995 hardware store teleported to the present day.

The new stuff category offered goods you can’t find in proper shops: the world’s fakest football jerseys, cigarette lighters with skulls on them, a live poodle, cigarette lighters shaped like guns, supplies for dog and horse ownership, USB-charged cigarette lighters, 20 dollar Gucci watches, and cigarette lighters shaped like muscle cars with watch movements in them. There was also an abundance of food products of inscrutable provenance that were either disgusting health and safety hazards and/or much better than anything you would ever get in supermarkets.

As we browsed the stalls my partner noticed that shopkeepers were treating her weirdly. Being born and raised in Denmark and having a name so stereotypically Danish that JK Rowling could have come up with it, she has also inherited her stunning black hair and slightly darker skin tone from an Italian grandparent. People often mistake her for being Turkish or otherwise non-white. In the immigrant-run stores at home, this usually results in nice discounts, but here, it was a different story.

The shopkeepers clearly didn’t like her. When I or our friend looked at the goods, they were nice or indifferent. But when my partner did the same, they immediately stopped what they were doing to closely watch her, as if she might steal their old silverware or porcelain figurines. They had decided she was one of “them.” One shopkeeper directly asked her to leave, while another angrily told her to “talk Danish” when she spoke Italian to our kid.

We were deep in the heart of whiteness, so it wasn’t surprising to see the Home Guard had set up a stall. The Home Guard is a Cold War relic of civilians LARPing as soldiers a few weekends a year. They offer the easiest way to get a gun and a uniform in Denmark, accepting those too fat and out of shape for the police or military. They hold a special place in the hearts of chuds, some of whom fantasize about being the white vanguard in an upcoming race war.

Their stall featured a jeep and an assortment of rifles, all firmly secured to the table with chains, that the public could hold. We were greeted by a woman in military uniform who looked the exact opposite of how you imagine the ideal elite soldier. “Come in!” she said, immediately trying to recruit me for the defense of the fatherland by enthusiastically mentioning that they had enlistment forms inside. I smiled and nodded.

Unlike me who have not even been a boyscout, my partner over spent a few months as a recruit and she is familiar with military hardware. “Do you have an M/75 in there?” she asked, referring to the long-time standard-issue rifle of the Danish military. “We have all sorts of stuff in there!” The Home Guard woman said, clearly confused. I am not sure if her confusion was caused by the technical nature of the question being above her expertise or if she was thrown off by the question coming from my partner and not from me.

Our kids had great fun holding the guns and my partner reached for her phone to take some pictures. “You can’t do that!” the Home Guard guy overseeing the stall said. If pictures of children holding guns was posted to social media it could "hurt the image"of the Home Guard, we were told. The guy explained to my partner that “we don’t have child soldiers in Denmark”, as if that needed clarification.

We didn’t want to stay after this visit to the people keeping us safe from Putin. The vibes in that area were nasty and my partner felt unsafe. We went across the road to the other hand of the grounds and things were a lot better there. We began to see other skin colours than pig pink and people were noticeably less nasty. Signs of civilization like kebab stalls and Asian grocers emerged.

We went to the area where the kids could try different rides. The rides were mostly operated by seasonal workers from Eastern Europe and each ride was blasting it’s own playlist of either current hits or 1980’s Eurovision songs into the air. As the kids were having fun in a bouncy castle next to the employees’ restrooms I noticed how the restrooms were segregated with one reserved for Danish and Polish workers and the two others for Romanian workers.

After the kids had finished their rides we needed refreshments so we went into a big beer tent and sat down at an empty table scattered with the remnants of several of the giant hot dogs, giant burgers and giant kebabs offered for sale nearby. You don’t buy normal-sized food at events live this. We looked at the beverages offered, a few sodas, beer by the buckets and lots of moronic shots sold in tiny tubes, and decided that we had had enough for today and that we would grab something to drink from McDonalds. On our way home instead. As we exited the grounds I noticed how someone had been so overjoyed by the selection of beverages offered at the market that they had emptied the contents of their stomach beneath the sign at the entrance.

Spending a day like this, connecting to my cultural roots, was an educating experience and I am happy to report that I had so much authentic Danish folkishness that I will not need to go again any time soon.