Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.06.2005, Side 5

5
When the guy that used to come by my house and
steal my hard boiled eggs got a 15 million ISK loan to
buy an apartment, I knew things were probably going
to change in Iceland. With no real precedent to look
back on, I pictured thousands of locals ordering pints
of Absinthe from the bar, Monday through Sunday,
on their immense home and small business loans. I
pictured rows and rows of Minis being driven into light
posts by unsigned bands with penchants for Chuck
Taylor All Stars. I pictured galleries springing up for
miles containing nothing but Polaroids of arty people
drinking to excess.
I did not picture a whole generation of young
artists and café workers suddenly taking out loans,
buying places, and being responsible. That seems to be
what has happened.
The fact that a large number of the typical rowdy
crowd now own their living quarters and a part of the
town is the best reason I can come up with for the
celebrations on June 17th, Iceland’s Independence Day.
Describing the unusually mellow festivities, a young
friend put it best, “I was hanging out with my friends
on the 17th, and it was really weird because we were all
sober. And it was a nice time, but I never thought the
holiday would be like that.”
Time and time again, in asking about the recent
holiday, I’ve been told that few remember a more sober
June 17th. True, many have told me that the drinking
on June 16th was out of control, but I was out that
night, I didn’t see too much damage.
The change in behaviour matches changes in major
cities in America that have undergone “gentrification”.
In American cities, there are mixed feelings about
this phenomenon: yes, crime is down and property
values are up, but the character of cities is fading away,
especially as new people move in.
Iceland has a different take on gentrification: with
changes in bank policies, the people who are buying
and changing the neighbourhoods are, for the most
part, the same people who lived there before, only they
now own the place.
I bring all this up because in this issue we’re taking
a look at the new economy of Iceland. If you read
through the interview with Fréttablaðið journalist
Sigríður Dögg Auðunsdóttir, you’ll get an idea as
to how much seems to have gone wrong with the
privatization of the local banks. Other aspects of the
economy also deserve close examination, and we do our
best with this issue.
Still, as when we reviewed difficulties with the
promotion of local culture, and as when we questioned
the marketing of the image of the Icelandic woman,
we realize some things are going right. The positives
of being able to do things like come home and feel
you own the place are remarkable, and do stretch out
into other aspects of daily life. We simply feel that the
profits of the Icelandic Miracle should be handled fairly
and used to invest in the region so that 2005 won’t be
Iceland’s 1928.
EDITORIALS
While my friends and I stretched out on Arnarholl
on Independence Day, enjoying the sun and watching
Gunnar & Felix yuck it up on stage, we noticed a ship
in the harbour proudly flying a huge Danish flag. This,
I thought, should be cause for outrage among the
Icelanders – their independence from Denmark is only
61 years old, after all, and for a Danish ship to hoist a
reminder of Iceland’s colonized past is insulting. On
the other hand, just how independent is Iceland from
Denmark anyway?
Ask a politician about where they got the idea for
this or that law, and I can guarantee you that nearly
every time, their answer will begin with, “Well, as we
see in Denmark . . .” Minister of Justice Björn Bjarnason
summed it up best when he told Grapevine earlier this
year, “Traditionally, Iceland has taken notice of legal
trends in Denmark and, after this rule [referring to a
recently passed immigration law] became law there, we
copied this law as our own.” When I spoke with Alliance
Party MP Ágúst Ólafur Ágústsson about the bill he
introduced that would lift the statute of limitations
on sexually assaulting a child, he told me that when
Independence Party MP Bjarni Benediktsson rejected the
bill, one of the reasons Benediktsson gave for justifying
the rejection was that Iceland should have similar laws to
other Nordic countries.
This sort of logic has always confounded me. Do
other formerly colonized countries check to see how
their former colonizers are voting before they make a
decision on how to manage their own affairs? Probably
not. I doubt MPs in India – which became independent
one year after Iceland - check British law before
passing legislation of their own. If an MP in Canada
(a country that has more in common with Britain than
India does and is in fact still under the British crown)
suggested referring to British legislation before passing
a law in their own country, they would be laughed out
of parliament. And yet Iceland continues to look to
Denmark before making most of its legislative decisions.
Here’s an idea: how about trying to flip that over?
Why can’t Iceland be the trend-setter, the country that
the rest of Scandinavia, Europe, or even the world looks
to as a model? It does happen on occasion: Swedish
government researcher Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson wrote a
report recently suggesting that maternity leave in Sweden
be based on the Icelandic model of dividing up the
maternity leave between both parents. This is something
Iceland should be proud of. More to the point, what
if the Icelandic parliament simply crafted legislation
that meets the needs of the nation, determining its own
destiny on Iceland’s terms? I thought that was the whole
point of wanting independence.
It can certainly be inspiring to raise a flag in your
backyard on June 17th, watch the fjallakona recite poetry
and listen to the Prime Minister read a laundry list of
Iceland’s accomplishments. But Iceland won’t be truly
independent until the legislative body can start thinking
for its own nation.
When You Own It, You Might Not Break It
Bart Cameron, Editor
Paul F Nikolov
Journalist & Online Editor
Nearly Independent
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Roberta Ostroff, the Grapevine restaurant reviewer, passed away this week. As her reviews hinted at,
Roberta was an ambitious, energetic and generous writer. In her emails with the Grapevine as she learned
of her illness, she consistently impressed us with her fearlessness and her ability to find humour and joy in
every situation, even offering a fantastically amusing pitch for a review of Icelandic hospital food.
She was an inspiration and she will be greatly missed.