Gnarr
Page 12
You can say the Best Party will continue to exist as it always has. Anybody can run with it. There is no copyright for it. Anybody can make a Best Party just like anybody can make a surprise party. It is invisible, but if you put your mind to it you can see it. Can you?
INSIDE ICELAND
A statement by Jón Gnarr posted on February 15, 2010, on the website of the Best Party.
Wherever I show up, the people show an ardent interest in our domestic policy. They all want to talk about the Best Party with me.
I remember, for example, a well-attended solidarity meeting in a small town in the north, somewhere near Akureyri. There I met a man who was leading a sheep on a leash. The animal behaved like a dog, following him at every step and obeying his commands—“Sit” or “Down!” It had even learned to gnaw on a bone. After I’d talked with the man for a while and answered the various questions he asked, I wanted to know why he took this sheep around with him. “Because I love it,” he replied without hesitation. I understood immediately. The life of the people out there is so different from our life here in the city. We hang out in our chic offices, sipping latte macchiatos and making a few decisions as we do so, while the people out there drink beer and have dinner with their herds of animals. The people in the countryside, especially up round Akureyri, speak an Icelandic that you could hear throughout the country twenty years ago, and is now almost everywhere extinct. What we take for granted is often completely alien to them.
Once we organized an information evening in Húsavík, on the north coast of Iceland, to which a group of farmers from the Mývatn region, also in the north, had also traveled. But they hadn’t come to learn about the Best Party—they’d apparently heard the news going the rounds in Mývatn that I owned an iPhone. And now they all wanted to see the phone and begged me to allow them to touch it. I handed it to one of them and encouraged him to phone home. It’s a scene I will never forget. The man was so moved that tears were running down his face as he called his children who were standing barefoot, gap-toothed, and filthy in some dunghill. He must have felt he was calling his family from some distant future. He didn’t understand that the thing was simply a mobile phone.
It was then I realized that we are all creatures of feeling. The people in the country are mostly simple folk and can’t do much more than shovel manure and stroke their sheep, or slaughter them in order to get through the winter. But they have feelings, and therefore they belong to us. We all belong together, no matter where we live. The Icelandic sheep connects us. Even if no one knows his sheep as well as does this farmer. He lives with it, eats together with it, takes it into the mountains and goes swimming with it, sleeps with it in the stable, and is probably the only person who knows when its birthday is. And then we come and take away his sheep and eat it. We can’t pay any attention to the feelings of some yokel, of course.
We start the day with a workout in the gym, rush to and from work, and on the way home just have to pop into the mall. Nevertheless, we mustn’t forget our roots. My grandfather was one of these country rubes, just like the countless others that we could observe in their natural habitat on our Land Cruiser Tour. We honk like crazy and growl curses under our breath if they chug along at a snail’s pace ahead of us on their prehistoric Ferguson tractors. And if we eventually overtake them, they stare at us perplexed and offended, because the stresses of modern life have not yet reached them.
The Icelandic sheep is our secret emblem. It fills our bellies and keeps us warm. For us, it’s like the bread and wine for the apostles at the Last Supper. We divide the world up by the color of its wool, and simply plod along behind the bellwether. And if the sheep could talk, it would ask us to be nicer to each other. No doubt about it.