Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.01.2010, Blaðsíða 6

6
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 01 — 2010
Welcome to Iceland
Here’s how to find
www.ja.is
WHAT?
WHO? WHERE?
People Businesses Maps Direction
Quick guide to the information
you need while enjoying your stay
JANUARY
January will be most
memorable for the
protests in front of
Alþingi that raged on
Austurvöllur through-
out the month, as Ice-
landers furious at the
collapse of the banks
demanded that the
coalition of the conser-
vative Independence
Party and the Social Democrats step down.
Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde resigned
that month, and an emergency coalition
consisting of the Leftist-Greens and the
Social Democrats was formed. Almost liter-
ally on his way out the door, then Minister
of Fisheries Einar K. Guðfinnsson legalised
whale hunting, adding yet another example
of conservatives leaving a mess behind for
others to clean up.
FEBRUARY
Iceland's new govern-
ment garnered inter-
national attention for
a number of reasons.
Within Scandinavia
mostly, the talk fo-
cused on how this was
the first leftist govern-
ment in Iceland's his-
tory. Elsewhere, media
outlets were more
interested in Prime Minister Jóhanna Sig-
urðardóttir as the first openly gay head of
state in modern times. On the home front,
Icelandic corporation Baugur applied to
enter the "moratorium" process in Reykja-
vik, which offers protection from creditors.
Meanwhile, whale hunting drew perhaps
more ire from Icelanders than ever be-
fore, as whale watching groups and labour
unions deplored the practice. The month
closed on a happy note, though, as then
Central Bank chairman Davíð Oddsson was
forced to resign from his post.
MARCH
In this month, the In-
ternational Monetary
Fund (IMF) began to
stretch its roots into
Iceland, as it adver-
tised for applicants
in its then soon-to-
be-opened Icelandic
office. Talks about
joining the European
Union began to gather
steam, as foreign media suggested in nu-
merous op-eds that such a move could
only benefit the country. Most Icelanders
remained opposed to the idea. Fox News,
always quick to push people's fear buttons,
warned Americans not to travel to Iceland
because the people here are “very, very an-
gry”, while adding, “Single guys, there's a
lot of hot women, all broke. So you might
have a shot." Proving that Fox News is as
classy as it is journalistically accurate.
News | Paul Nikolov
The Year In Brief
2009: Politics & Life
As the year drew to a close, Grapevine flipped through
its stuffed contacts list and sent out a bunch of e-mails,
made a bunch of calls, to people we thought could
provide us with an interesting take on 2009—what they
learned, what happened, why, when, where and how?
And how.
We gave those folks free reign, pretty much, inviting
our correspondents to talk about what they wanted. We
imagined all these good folks put together might help
us learn what it meant to be an Icelander in 2009; read-
ing through the results, we can’t help but agree with
ourselves. There are some pretty hefty, eye-opening
thoughts expressed right here.
Some people wrote us long letters (such contributions
can be identified by a cool looking envelope-symbol),
and some of them we called and sorta interrogated on
what they had to say (these are marked with an old-
school telephone image). All of them had interesting
things to say about the year 2009 and the community we
inhabit, whether they amount to complaints, condemna-
tions, revelations or (in at least one case) exonerations.
Not all of the people we contacted responded, and not
all of those who responded were willing to share their
thoughts (we are especially annoyed that so few of our
female friends were up for the task—it feels kinda shitty
to present the year from a mostly male perspective).
Nevertheless, we feel that the following commentary
combines to provide a unique perspective on the messy
year we just left behind, and what may lie ahead. Enjoy!
“What Stood Out, Then?”
2K9
Round Up
Bonanza
Extravaganza
Madness!
PRESENTS
2009 | Andri Snær Magnason, Writer
A lot of people had expectations
that we would see new political
parties or MPs that would be dif-
ferent; there were expectations of
an immediate revolution in our mindset, that all
of the sudden we would see a new humanity,
free from corruption, partisanism and political
cliques. This did not happen.
In many ways, 2009 was still an interest-
ing year. People were very open to ideas and
the National Assembly of November, which
the media tried to talk down as if it intended
to present a plan to right everything, instead
of accepting its findings as a gift or a contribu-
tion to our discourse, which it was.
Through Silfur Egils we heard a lot of peo-
ple that offered solutions, words of warning or
prophecies. "If you do this, you will go bank-
rupt and Iceland will be a pariah nation, if you
do the exact opposite you will go immediately
bankrupt... "
With dramatic outcries like that on both
sides, it became hard for the public to sense
what really mattered. This is among the rea-
sons why big and important issues that one
would have liked to participate in and debate,
like Icesave and so many others, wound up in
firmly in party lines and died there. The dual-
istic form every issue was forced into made it
impossible for the public that will be affected
by them to participate.
On the other hand, this was maybe the
year of the virtual kreppa. Just as the bubble
that preceded the collapse had grown im-
mense, the kreppa sort of grew into its own
bubble. It wasn’t nearly as grave as the inter-
national media and many locals depicted it to
be. Our birth rates went up, while mortality
rates stood still—in the scope of human history
it is unusual that such a period is thought of as
one of hardship.
We are still on the brink of something,
though. If the kreppa reached a low point
in 2009, it wasn’t a kreppa strictly speaking,
rather an important change. But time will tell.
Right now we are experiencing a lot of
impatience regarding political transformation,
and I think a lot of it has unrealistic grounds.
Such transformations happen over decades,
time has told.
There are positive aspects that raise my
hopes. We can observe some tightly knit
grassroots foundation being formed; Data-
market is proposing principles of public trans-
parency and the National Assembly calls for a
more active and direct democracy. Regardless
of how these experiments fare in the long run,
we can still see a large base of grassroots op-
erators forming, one that has been shaping up
over the last decade.
You could say that in certain ways the situ-
ation now is akin to that of1809, when Jörun-
dur Hundadagakonungur [“The dog days
king”] arrived in Iceland and gave Icelanders
the gift of freedom, something that everyone
should have been rather pleased with. He of-
fered freedom and a draft that said every man
was equal. His message was immensely radi-
cal for the times, even more radical than the
French Revolution. It appealed to the 90% of
the country that were devoid of property, liv-
ing in poverty. Yet the people laughed at his
advances. “What does he mean, all men are
equal?”
At that time, our officials said that no true
Icelander desired independence. Jón Sigurðs-
son was but a baby, as was the Icelandic inde-
pendence movement.
It seems we are going through the same
course of events now. We’ve seen the pin-
stripe suited men in their Range Rovers run
everything into the ground, still a lot of us feel
that companies should be run by exactly these
men, as if they are somehow—despite what
experience has taught us—the best at running
companies? It doesn’t matter a thing that they
are responsible for some of the biggest failures
in human history.
It took Icelanders a hundred years to re-
alise they wanted freedom. One hundred
years of poems and resolutions and articles to
understand that a poor man should have the
same power to vote as the rich man. I hope our
current shift in attitude doesn’t take a hundred
years, but the situation now is similar to what it
was in the beginning of the 19th century. Our
whole system came crashing into the arms of
the state, and it was suddenly the nation’s task
to decide what to do with it. But before people
realised what had happened, they grew up-
set with all this new power and decided they
didn’t want it, that it was communistic of them
to have all these powers. Thus it was deemed
the best solution to write off the debt and hand
the power again to the men and their Range
Rovers.
2009 was thus the year that the people re-
ceived all the power but didn’t want it, didn’t
know to use the opportunity to do something
historic—to handle things differently—the po-
litical class couldn’t muster up the energy to
do something idealistic, because they were
just focusing on clearing the rubble.
What really happened last year, then,
was that every large business in the country
fell into the hands of the banks, who in turn
were turned over to the state. We could have
experimented, tried new things; we could
have thrown a national assembly on how to
run these businesses, and where they went
wrong in the first place, we could have de-
cided how to run our society. But no such idea
was entertained. ASÍ [Icelandic Confederation
of Labour] rather wanted a new aluminium
smelter and entered into an agreement with
the people that caused all the chaos, the neo-
libertarian advocates of SA [Confederation of
Icelandic Employers].
From this perspective, 2009 was clearly
a year of disappointment. We have a labour
movement that has no ideological imagination
or vision. They prefer focusing on unemploy-
ment rates—as if Iceland were a chicken farm,
not a community—measuring our productivity
in tonnes while ignoring the ideologies and
methods that caused those unemployment
rates. They are prepared to hand over our re-
sources to reckless people, as long as a thou-
sand workers can get short-term employment.
They may have temporary success in creating
jobs, but if they do not change their modes of
thinking we are destined to go full circle, while
losing our natural resources and along with
them, our future employment opportunities.
Basic statistics tell us this: we bring ashore
1–1.5% of all fish that is caught in the world.
This alone should be enough to comfortably
sustain a nation of 300.000. We play a very
large part in feeding the world, and doing it
well is a big and important task. We welcome
more tourists per person per year than most
nations in the world, and that alone should go
a long way towards sustaining our society. We
produce five times more energy per person
than most of our neighbouring countries—
again, that alone should comfortably sustain
us, yet we still manage to mess it up.
However, if we don’t squander away all of
these posts, we should be able to recover from
our current problems relatively fast.
On The Brink Of Something