Reality Is Always Catching Realism by Surprise

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In the summer of 1990, Iceland and Albania played a soccer game.¹ It was a momentous event. This was a qualifying game for the European Cup and one of the first portents that Albania intended to join the community of nations in its work and play. The country had been isolated for decades and hardly visited except by a handful of admirers of its dictator, Enver Hoxa. The players can be expected to have found it quite a novelty to venture beyond their country’s borders.

Nothing was known about the Albanian national team until they arrived at Heathrow Airport in London where they made a stopover on their way to Iceland. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in June when news reports reached Iceland that the Albanian team had been taken into custody at Scotland Yard. The players were suspected of shoplifting duty-free goods by the armful. During questioning, the Albanians referred to the “duty-free” signs that where hung up everywhere in the terminal. In their country various goods, for example beer, were free in their country on Sundays. For all they knew, this was the custom in other countries as well.

Though the Albanians escaped the clutches of Scotland Yard, their dealings with the eagle-eyed authorities were far from over. Upon the Albanian team’s arrival in Iceland, an extensive customs search was made through their luggage, and the team was kept almost under house arrest until the time for the soccer game came around. So the Albanians’ weak attempt to break their isolation with the rest of the world took on a very peculiar form.

Nonetheless, the soccer game began. The teams entered the field and lined up to hear their national anthems being played. But no sooner had the stadium brass band played a few notes than a naked Icelander, male, came running out from the spectators’ stand and started hopping around in front of the Albanian team.

At once, six brawny policemen appeared on the scene. They rushed the naked man, rugby-tackled him, and piled on top of him in a heap. But the naked man was slippery as an eel and slipped out of their clutches. He ran past the Albanian team, waving his genitals at them. At that point the police managed to overpower him. They were last seen carrying him away.

Then everything went wild. The brass band stopped playing, and one of the stadium groundsmen switched on the microphone and began reciting an impromptu verse in celebration of the incident.

I have often wondered what it would have been like if an Albanian writer had been sitting in the capital city Tirana, a year or two before the game, imagining it taking place and describing everything that actually happened. He would have smashed every rule known to socialist realism and imposed by the Albanian Writers’ Union on its members, because reality often outdoes fiction, and nothing is so poetic that reality has no place in it.

This Albanian writer has suddenly become very real.

As I visualize him, his predicament demonstrates two things. Firstly, how ridiculous it is to subject mental activity to rules, or rather, to social goals; and, secondly, how unrealistic it is to intend to be realistic, in particular when a predetermined definition of reality is used as a yardstick for truth.

Reality is always catching realism by surprise.

The Ghettos inside Us

This is the poetry of the Swedish Nobel Prize–winning poet Tomas Tranströmer, and you could say that in these lines the truth of the poem manifests itself, the living core of that which is covered by no other layer.² No one knows what makes the poem the recipient of that which cannot be put into words by other means. Not philosophy, not theology, not rhetoric, much less politics, can tell the truth that the poem seems to catch on the rebound. There the magic and the magic of the language manifest themselves. Its magic is drawn from the thought, but a poem comes into being when a thought and emotion are enjoined.

“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,” wrote another poet, William Carlos Williams, who was also a medical doctor and knew exactly what he was talking about. That so few seek out poetry says more about modern times than about poetry. Poetry does not enjoy a huge following in the polls and has long been unemployed in the society of superficiality. But that’s only part of it, because poetry springs forth under the most amazing circumstances and finds its voice, not in a dissimilar fashion to public protest. Poetry is a struggle against the void and a search to find substance in life. The economic boom which has just passed, the period of an empty chase after the void. Thus its epitaph.

So, I can go on knitting, but what about the ghettoes? Do they live within us? How do we measure such a trade balance? Is there much inflation in pain? What is the stock index of joy? But should we rather ask: What happened to caring amongst all these riches? Did the economic system of liberalism, which is now coming to pass, lead us away from compassion and solidarity? How tasty was the big cake, which was much discussed and digested by the high priest of neoliberalism, Professor Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson, and who is meant to clean up after all the dyspepsia it has caused? Other people of other nationalities came in and did the work. How did we regard these people? How did we receive them? Did anyone say, “These are just foreigners. We’ll get rid of them once the job is done.” Did we never hear those sentiments expressed? How have the asylum seekers been received, our brothers in need? Has the Reverend Pálmi Matthíasson told the police and the judiciary to be kind to them? How about the bishop telling the Icelandic directorate of immigration to hug a few fugitives? Does the president have a mind to invite them to dinner at his residence at Bessastaðir, like Martha Stewart and the financial grandees?

There is a cannibal joke that goes something like this.³ A cannibal is flying first class. The stewardess comes along with a menu, a spiffy one with a vast selection. The cannibal is as polite as can be, as is a cannibal’s wont, supposedly, at first encounter. The cannibal peruses the menu and then says to the stewardess, “I don’t see anything I fancy on the menu. Would you please bring me the passenger list?”

I’m not going to compare Iceland’s billionaires, who, in cahoots with the government, have left us in the lurch, to cannibals. Not literally. But after having been handed over virtually everything on a silver platter, banks and state-owned companies seem to have said to the government and inspection agencies, “There is nothing we fancy on the menu. Would you be so kind as to hand us the national registry.”⁴

World Light

In Halldór Laxness’s World Light, first published in English in 1969, two characters discuss the state of the financial system⁵:

If caring was scant among the riches, how will it be in times of deprivation, which now loom over us? Now that Juel has emptied the banks?⁶ The boom passed some by. We witnessed pensioners languishing in garrets, vagrants without a roof over their heads. The low wages were preposterous; the average wage hardly covered debts; and families were barely able to scrape by even without plasma TVs, campers, or salmon fishing. There was no mistaking it, people with the lowest salaries were not spending the money that streamed in from the high-interest, foreign-invested IceSave accounts. I do not intend to plead innocent, but I had never heard of these IceSave accounts until the terrorist act was passed against me.⁷

But speaking of solidarity: There were people who said the Bónus discount stores were the best wage supplement possible, and considered Jóhannes, the owner of the Bónus stores, a sort of Robin Hood of the people. Some whispered of dodgy business practices, but others said that the unions should just be dismantled because Bónus would take care of things; and to some this seemed to have been the case. At any rate we are now saddled with feeble unions that instead of fighting for workers’ rights have considered the business world their forum and gambled with peoples’ pensions, often with utter lack of responsibility. But it’s not just that: We are also saddled with the Bónus tycoons and all the other Juels who have pauperized the country but lie in wait to snatch it up again.

The world of commerce seems about to get its way, and people are left asking, what hold does this lot have on the political parties? The tycoons are completely indifferent to the fact that their presence is not requested. They force their way through the door and raid the store. We, our children, and our grandchildren are in turn saddled with their debts. People speak of thousands of billions from the Baugur Empire,⁸ and then there are the IceSave accounts of Landsbanki.

Again, Halldór Laxness comes to the fore, but this time with a description from The Great Weaver from Kashmír:

Should we compare the IceSave accounts to plagiarism? If an Icelandic author plagiarized the work of, let’s say, an English or Dutch writer, the book would become so popular that the Icelander would make money hand over fist, although not by the standards of the Icelandic jet set, just everyday standards. If he were found out, a trial would ensue and the author, but not his nation, would be called to account. This should apply to the IceSave accounts. The responsibility should rest with the Landsbankinn and those who ran it. It is as clear as day that the tycoons are not going to shoulder any responsibility because they don’t see themselves as bearing any. They understand the word responsibility only in a legal sense. They don’t say anything except: “I did nothing illegal.” In their world the word “responsibility” has no social or moral meaning. Such is the world of commerce. The attendant greed seems to breed a disease of the soul, a psychopathic state. It is said such people believe their own lies. Now, I’m not psychoanalyzing tycoons, but this rhymes with their excuses for the bank collapse and their denial of all responsibility. Still, economists must warn of such diagnoses, that the collapse should be viewed as an example of human frailty. The economic principles are the core, but the shadowy sides of the avarice are the manifestation. Did the society of libertarianism care about any rules? If we look at this in light of Hávamál, which can be called the moral manifesto of our cultural heritage, the question resounds: Could the men who were turned into monkeys by money have been tamed? That was the role the politicians should have played, but instead it seems that the monkeys tamed them. How did they do it?

In an article published in the cultural journal Skírnir, Icelandic economist Þorvaldur Gylfason states: “Many warned of the danger inherent in placing the banks in the hands of inexperienced individuals, both within the banks and outside them, but no heed was paid to these warnings” (Gylfason 2008, 491–92). Yes, what hold did the tycoons exercise over the political parties? Gylfason writes in the same article:

We can wind this down with a third Halldór Laxness quotation, this time from Christianity at Glacier. The question is asked, “What’s a quick-freezing plant?” And the answer is:

Banks and Volcanoes

“Icelanders can neither control their banks nor their volcanoes,” said the British comedian John Cleese when he had to take a taxi from Oslo to Brussels.⁹ According to media reports, the cab ride cost 650,000 crowns [US$5,100]. It is likely the comedian’s hosts or those who were expecting him in Brussels paid the entire fare. Someone as indispensible as John Cleese does not pay his own cab fare. But no further story follows, and it remains to be said whether he planned to meet Mr. Brussels, the European Union itself. Then again, paying a single cab fare should not make much of a difference to John Cleese considering all the advertisements he appeared in for Kaupthing Bank.¹⁰ He was the face of Kaupthing for some time and thus plays his part in the deregulation and collapse of the banks.

John Cleese was like a cheerleader on the sidelines, in some ways similar to a court jester and yet not quite ensconced in the traditional role of the jester. His function was to embellish a situation which was actually criminal, and as such he helped preserve faith in the bubble economy of the Icelandic financial princes, and in their casino capitalism. He sold himself for the benefit of their world. I do not know whether the sum John Cleese was paid for his role in the Kaupthing advertisements appears in the Alþingi’s investigative report on the collapse of the banks, but Kaupthing’s Resolution Committee should be able to find the figure among the accounts of the failed bank. His job was to praise Kaupthing and the executive board’s dreams of world domination; and expenses were not spared for Kaupthing’s cronies. As a case in point, the bank’s directors lent a British pub owner the equivalent of the entire state budget. They lent each other and their friends huge capital, and sure enough the company’s bankruptcy ranks as one of the largest in world history. The bank’s directors earned 100,000 crowns [US$750] an hour. The highest monthly salaries were equal to the Nobel Prize award money. Accounting experts have calculated that payment of their wages would have begun long before Christ had they been earning an average salary.

One bank director, Sigurður Einarsson, was wanted by Interpol for some time. Another bank director, Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson, sat in custody for a few days. In pictures they look like Laurel and Hardy. Although it is not possible to call them comedians, bank director Einarsson made light of opening 200,000 crown [US$1,500] bottles of red wine, one after the other, according to Davíð Oddsson, the former director of the Central Bank. This appears in the report of the Alþingi’s Special Investigation Commission. Although Oddsson waged his own war against the directors of Kaupthing and made a public show of closing his savings account with the bank in protest of the bank directors’ salary policy, he nonetheless lent them immense amounts of money in the final stages. It appears Sigurður alleges Davíð had been rude to him at parties, not unlike Lenin complaining in a telegram to Stalin that he had been impolite to his wife on the phone.

Regardless of Sigurður Einarsson, Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson, Lenin, Stalin and Davíð Oddsson, I hope that John Cleese enjoyed his trip from Oslo to Brussels and laughed a lot on the way, both at the volcanoes and the banks as well as the incredible connections linking the two. As to the cab fare, 650,000 crowns is peanuts in comparison with the money our government will squander on trips from Reykjavík to Brussels in order to get us accepted into the European Union so that jackalackeys and their sweethearts in power suits can walk the halls over there and marvel at how much progress has been made since the four freedoms of the Common Market were discovered, not to mention all the menus in Brussels and the beer, the marble, the glass, and the steel. On the other hand, few people mention Grímur Thomsen, a nineteenth-century poet and public servant. He worked in foreign affairs for the Danish king and was one of the first scholars to discover the works of Hans Christian Andersen. He wrote a long essay about the latter and another essay on Lord Byron, but while staying in Brussels, Grímur wrote a letter to a friend saying he found the city so uninspiring that he was unable to get an erection.

Such is life in these years of our Lord: The world slows down and that may be a good thing. Airplanes come to a halt in the air or they cannot take off. Airlines count their losses from volcanoes, but the volcanoes have no concern for airlines. Air transport is paralyzed all across Europe because of ash coming from Eyjafjallajökull. Airports close in the British Isles, in the Nordic countries, and in Belgium. John Cleese has to take a taxi from Oslo to Brussels. Television reporters around the world compete to pronounce the name of the volcano. It fares rather badly, but this is precisely what the advertisements with John Cleese were about, the pronunciation of the word “Kaupþing.” But we Icelanders do not think it strange to pronounce the names of such mountains as Kilimanjaro or Himmelbjerget. No, the English comedian cannot fly on the wings of his wit or send himself with the devil as magicians did in the Middle Ages.

It is not more complicated than that, but British blogs announce: “First they steal our money with collapsing banks and then they spew ash over us. These Vikings—next they will steal our women!” Cash rhymes with ash and ash with cash. “We asked for cash, not ash!” exclaim the British. Thus can dramatic events bring out people’s sense of humor, but humor is sometimes the flip side of despair. I suppose it will end with the British government making Icelanders responsible for all the airline tickets sold in Europe, and our government will grant a state guarantee on them. Our politicians will say that it is only polite to pay for the airline tickets as it will serve us well in the international community, even if we bear no legal obligation to pay, for surely we have the means. And this is to say nothing of negotiating a payment postponement and the fact that the payment could save the global air transport industry. But the Briton who is afraid for the women can take comfort because that deed is done. There exists a theory which attributes the lack of pretty women in England to the fact that they were kidnapped by the Vikings and brought here to the northerly seas so they could keep us warm and multiply.

A good example of this is recounted in Laxdæla saga. Melkorka, daughter of the Irish king, was purchased by Höskuldur Dala-Kollsson, a famous figure in both Norway and Iceland, from Gilli the Russian at a gathering on the island of Brännö. Höskuldur believed her to be mute for she refused to speak in protest of her captivity. She raised Höskuldur’s son, and he spoke both her Celtic tongue as well as his father’s Nordic tongue. This is a story of great importance. I do not know whether it is possible to trace Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s anger towards Icelanders back to these ancient disputes over women, but the above-mentioned quotation testifies to a similar fear. However, it is not at all certain whether the British correspondent or Gordon Brown or his successors fully understand this fear, for it resides in the subconscious.

On the other hand, there is solid ground on which to argue that there are Britons who went broke because Icelandic barons took over their savings and lent them to their friends who squandered the money on empty foolishness, on all kinds of toys, jets, yachts, ski hills, and luxury apartments. They held banquets where they allowed politicians to play and bankers to amuse themselves in no small measure, if the bills from escort services are to be trusted along with other rumors that have circulated since everything collapsed. Even so, none of them ever came home with an Irish princess like Höskuldur Dala-Kollsson, but of course there is no longer a king in Ireland. Some of these barons live in London, where they worked with their money, so it ought to be easy for the British authorities to collect from them. But they are more interested in collecting from the Icelandic public, and we are only waiting for the day that they hold us accountable for the volcanic eruption as well and invoke terrorist laws against volcanoes.

War Cry from the North

We must ask: At the end of the day, what brought our society success?¹¹ It is not the smug ignorance that has taken so much from society without giving anything back. It was the struggle of the working class, the class struggle, that brought us success. It was the last century’s class struggle which brought us a robust welfare system, a school system, a health system, telephone lines, swimming pools, pension funds, and the list goes on. The so-called boom consisted of privatizing the yields of the class struggle, the communal assets of the people, and then turning them into a product. What was communal property before—the fish, telephone lines, and banks, for example—was brought to private parties on a silver platter and consequently squandered. Neoliberal spokesman Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson said himself that the boom consisted of invigorating the so-called “dead capital,” i.e., the communal assets of the people. The trafficking with this capital created a turnover in society, a boom, but now this traffic has come to a stop. It could in fact be said that there has been a traffic accident. The assets of the people have been squandered on useless junk, glass palaces, and shindigs, and little remains to be sold. Even if a large part of the boom consisted of an economic bubble grounded on pipe dreams, one must not forget that the basis of all this was the real assets of the people: the fish, the pension funds, and the state companies. The pension funds have been sucked dry in collusion with utterly corrupt governments, while the privatization of the banks enabled the billionaires to acquire firms and companies and pay themselves dividends without creating anything of value. The communal assets of the people, the “dead capital,” was squandered. It is our role to retrieve it.

Therefore we must fight, protest, and stay alert, establish a new economy where the resources belong to the people, and where whatever is theirs is made so by constitutional right: the right to exploit natural resources and the fish in the sea. The special privileges of the wealthy must be abolished, legal ones as well as tax privileges, and all privatization must be approached with caution. At the moment, emergency measures to aid families and companies are called for. We must break free of the curse of corruption and write our own constitution, and we must not use the depression as an excuse to shirk our responsibility to uphold civil projects, education, and culture for those in need, the poor, immigrants, and refugees. Having said that, I leave you here so you can go on and add what you wish to change, but I finish my piece with the poem “War Cry from the North”:

The author would like to thank translators Bernard Scudder, Jónas Knútsson, and Alda Kravec for their work on this chapter.