It was as though all that realm of citizenry and public life had shrunk back and no one dared hope for a better society or desired membership in some continental sense of possibility; they just tended lawns or refinished the kitchen cabinets, as though the nation-state in this otherwise globalized age had shrunk to the size of a single-family house, as though everyone was living in a country of one or two or maybe six, including four minors, plus a dog and a cat, a microscopic empire ruled by fiat. Thus the people sleeping under cardboard in doorways and the people having a more expansive master suite built shared a common fate not in material goods but in this atomization, of one against the world. For the non-homeless, this retreat was into a house that was once again a fortress as it had been in various perilous pasts, but this time the world had been made unstable for the sake of tax cuts and more cuts. The old modernist dream of a better world had become the dream of a better home and garden, and a massive industry of television programs, magazines, books, tax deductions, Home Depot warehouses, and more specialized stores fed this appetite or this distraction.
The twenty-first-century American housing boom was globalized anyway, critics argued, because it was fed by artificially low interest rates held down by the Republican administration and backed by massive investment from China, situated as purchases of extremely low-yield or even negative-yield treasury bonds. China did this to keep its own economy from booming into a rising yuan and living standard that would undermine its status as the world’s great discount manufactory; the United States did this to keep its own economy from sliding into recession or even depression. A cheap yuan kept their economy going, as a booming housing market kept the U.S. market going, though going as a house of cards ready to tumble. Which is to say that a withdrawal from public life and national ideals can have consequences in those spheres anyway. “A nation,” says Leopold Bloom, “is people living in the same place,” a lackluster answer that annoys his nationalist interrogators even before he adds, “or also in different places.” But not necessarily at home in the world. Just in the home.
CLOSING COSTS
Making and controlling a world is much of what child’s play once consisted of, when it consisted of toy soldiers, dolls, blocks, train sets, Noah’s arks, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, dollhouses, and other devices that before Gameboys let children be engineers, builders, and designers. The tiny scale lets children be giants, Iron Guards, kings or queens of Ithaca, prime ministers, in charge of their world as they are not in the world. Maybe we all dream of being God, the god who breaches dams, moves houses suddenly, erects bridges, decides where forests will be and who will die; and we graduate from the dollhouse to our own house if we are lucky, where we assume a role somewhere between God the Creator and the chambermaid, choosing but carrying out more painfully the clean floor, the dinner for six, the potted plants, the framed prints. The execution is difficult. The dreaming is easy and unending.
2006
NOTES FROM NOWHERE
Iceland’s Polite Dystopia
In late 2007, an Icelandic teenager named Vífill Atlason created a minor international incident when he phoned the White House, told the operator he was the president of Iceland, and managed to set up an appointment to speak with George W. Bush. When the White House figured out what was going on, Atlason was taken away by Icelandic police and questioned for several hours, then told that he would be placed on an American no-fly list. No conversation took place. I, on the other hand, managed to make a lunch date with President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson not long after I arrived in Iceland, simply by bumping into him at an art exhibit and asking. Iceland is a nation of just over 300,000 citizens, a scale at which everything should be and can be accessible to the ordinary citizen as well as the crashing writer. In fact, I was picked up for my date by Dorrit Moussaieff, the president’s Israeli-born second wife, who happened to be heading off with another American to another lunch. This other American, an extremely wealthy New Yorker in well-ironed jeans, liked Iceland so much that he was thinking about settling here, and as we crossed downtown Reykjavík in the chauffeured presidential Land Cruiser, he listed his reasons: clean air, clean water, no crime, and no immigrants. He liked Iceland, apparently, for being a gated community with the whole North Atlantic as its gates, but he still had his concerns. The graffiti lightly spattered over the city bothered him enough to mention it twice.
And then they went to their lunch, and the chauffeur and I rolled onward to Bessastaðir, the suburban presidential residence. Built as a school in the eighteenth century, Bessastaðir is one of the few old buildings left on this long-deforested island, where for a millennium most structures were made from driftwood and sod. Bessastaðir’s cluster of immaculate red-roofed white buildings looks like a small country estate, and though it is set apart from the other houses in the neighborhood by a wide grassy lawn, it has no apparent defense against interlopers, not even a serious fence. The president travels without visible security everywhere in Iceland, showing up at art openings and ribbon cuttings to mingle and shake hands when he’s not overseas—as he often is—pitching Iceland to investors, talking up the democratic virtues of small states, and organizing climate-change initiatives. Grímsson had lived at Bessastaðir for three four-year terms, and the question of his fourth was up in the air when I arrived. The president is by no means as powerful as Iceland’s parliament or its prime minister, Geir Haarde. But he does have real authority in some areas, notably the ability to veto legislation, and—more to the point—he is recognized by most as the nation’s symbolic leader, which is why I wanted to talk to him.
Iceland’s population is one thousandth that of the United States, and I wanted to know if the problems we faced at home were a function of size. An encouraging domestic development during the long years of the Bush administration had been the tendency of U.S. cities and states to set their own policies, particularly on the environment and climate change—to withdraw from the unaccountable federation to a more responsive, more localized scale. And so I looked toward Iceland with optimism. I was in a country with no army and little crime, where children are free to run outdoors unsupervised. Most of the people in Iceland are related to one another, and few of them seem to feel that American anxiety of being adrift without an anchor of stable identity or community. Iceland is one of the most literate countries on earth, with the world’s highest per-capita book sales. Not only does it have a long tradition of writer-politicians but, as a returning émigrée explained it to me (though her sense of things might have been a little out of date), “Here the garbageman has read Cicero.” Certain democratic measures are built into the culture: for instance, the way everyone’s surname is just his or her father’s first name with the suffix -son or -dóttir appended; a wife doesn’t take her husband’s name, and even the most distinguished names are rarely passed from one generation to the next. Iceland is the only part of Europe that never begat monarchs or a hereditary aristocracy, and I hoped to find here a kind of perfection of the democratic ideal, or at least a hopeful indication of what could be.
Grímsson himself is an imposing man, exceedingly proper and courteous. He speaks formal English in full paragraphs. When I said to a friend of his that he seemed a bit wooden, she laughed at my caution and said, “He’s wooden all the way through!”
At sixty-five, Grímsson is a year older than his republic (until World War II, Iceland was a possession of Denmark), and his hair is brushed over in an orderly white-blond wave. He grew up in a fishing village on the wild and remote Westfjords peninsula, received a Ph.D. in political science in England, from the University of Manchester, and taught for several years at the University of Iceland before venturing into politics. When we met, he was wearing huge cuff links and a tie patterned with tiny feathers, and he showed me to a small study. The president sat in a high-backed armchair, upholstered in worn tapestry. I sat in an armless version, and for the next ninety minutes we spoke at cross purposes.
“I think the twenty-first centu
ry will be a fascinating period,” he said, a period in which we will “see the relevance as well as the renaissance of small states.” But the vision he described as we ate our catfish and salmon seemed decidedly mainstream, even American. He celebrates small states mostly for how they function economically and in the international society of states. Small states move in a more flexible way, he said, which makes it easier for them to solve problems. He gave me an example. He had just come from the tiny, oil-rich nation of Qatar, whose government had hosted a conference, involving diplomats from such similarly tiny neighbors as the United Arab Emirates, that had put a temporary stop to the escalating violence in Lebanon. “They said to me very openly, ‘The reason why we could do it is that we were small Arab countries, we were friends with everybody—we didn’t have any vested interest, we didn’t have any ulterior motives, we did not have any long-term military strategy—so we could talk to everybody on a faithful basis.’” Of course, Qatar is ruled by a hereditary emir. Small may give leaders the flexibility they need to make deals, but it is not necessarily democratic.
Such contradictions left Grímsson unfazed. He began his first presidential campaign, he said, by traveling to every town and village in Iceland, “except two or three very small and remote ones,” to meet with the electorate, and this journey had more profoundly informed his thinking on participatory democracy than even his years as a professor of political science. “Constitutions and formal democratic rules—of course they are necessary and they are essential,” he continued, “but the great force of democracy, especially in modern times, is what we have called the will of the people.” This will, he said, was not always expressed through such traditional means as voting. “There are strong democratic pressures almost in the air without them necessarily having to be organized in a systematic way.”
Indeed, Grímsson may well be a principal beneficiary of the unsystematic way. He stood unopposed in the upcoming election—Icelanders, as one small-town librarian told me disapprovingly, have come to believe that it is “impolite” to run against a sitting president, and it has become customary to let them stay in office as long as they like. And so while Americans were absorbed in another electoral horse race, Iceland had no race at all.
The exquisite rhubarb crisp that ended my meal at Bessastaðir reminded the president of boyhood days helping his grandmother put up jars of rhubarb preserves. Nearly every autumn saw a flurry of activity to dry enough fish and salt enough lamb to avoid starvation during the dark and isolated winter, he said, and people who come here now, “who see this ultramodern society,” fail to understand that it has been only a very short time since Iceland was a poor country, “almost a developing country.”
Iceland is marked, maybe even scarred, by several hundred years of such poverty. It began to lessen only after 1902, when Iceland got its first motorized boats, bringing a wave of modest prosperity to the country’s fishermen, who still produce more than half of its exports. World War II brought the next and larger wave: as the Nazis occupied Denmark, Iceland fell under the protection of Allied troops, thereby allowing the nation to liberate itself from centuries of colonial rule and become an independent republic, although the American military continued to maintain a base there from which to monitor the Soviet Union. In 2006, the United States discovered that it had other priorities, recalled its fighter jets and military personnel, and closed the base.
Long before the U.S. military presence ended, the ruling Independence Party began to cast around for something new to pump up Iceland’s economy. The nation had for decades harnessed the turbulent landscape to produce “clean” energy, though geothermal power and hydropower are not quite as green as we would like to think. They take a toll in the form of toxic emissions and the destruction of wild places, though most of Iceland’s postwar energy developments were small in scale and impact. In the mid-1990s, however, the government decided to offer up Iceland’s vast natural resources to energy-intensive industries such as aluminum production, which also generates significant pollution, in a scheme that involved damming virtually every major river in the country. This willingness to sacrifice Iceland’s wilderness to foreign corporations reflected Iceland’s image of itself as a new player on the world stage, as “modern” (even if giant dams are rather old-fashioned icons of progress) and “high-tech” (even though it still exports more fish than aluminum). One popular claim was that Iceland would become “the Kuwait of the north.”
Many Icelanders have been troubled by the decision to sell off the landscape. The signature such debate took place over the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project, which involved building several dams along two major glacial rivers, a series of deep tunnels to carry water to hydropower stations, and a new electrical infrastructure to connect those stations to a coastal smelter. The measure became increasingly unpopular as Icelanders got to know something about the massive amount of remote wilderness that would be—and now has been—drowned; about the reindeer that calved there and the pink-footed geese that nested there; about the serious pollution the hydropower smelters would emit, even if the electricity itself was emissions-free; and about the scandalous economics of the deal, whereby the citizens would pay billions for the infrastructure and the U.S.-based aluminum manufacturer Alcoa, which would most benefit from Iceland’s increased smelting capacity, would provide only a few hundred jobs to locals in return. In a country the size of Iceland, a few hundred jobs outside the capital count, and there has been a ripple effect on the declining eastern economy and population—but at a cost many think is too high.
To hear ordinary citizens speak about the dams, you’d think they lived under a vast tyranny; they speak of powerlessness, secrecy, intimidation, and loss. And yet little in the way of actual political protest has emerged. Icelandic presidents are barred from party membership, but before he took office, Grímsson was a member of the Peoples’ Alliance Party, which in 2000 joined Iceland’s three other center-left parties to become the Social Democratic Alliance. The hope was that the coalition could gather enough seats in parliament to defeat the ruling Independence Party, whose website announces its principles as “the freedom to work and freedom of the individual, abolition of any kind of restraints,” and “a dynamic and open economy.” Despite offering a fairly tepid version of Clintonian moderation, the Peoples’ Alliance effort thus far has not succeeded. Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, a member of parliament who co-directs the Left Green Party—founded in 1999, in part to oppose the dam projects—suggested that this conservative streak was just a part of the national character. “It is difficult to get people to join political parties. It is difficult to get people to join the associations and ad hoc groups that are working on these issues,” she said. “We would be much stronger if we had more people. But they are not willing to come.”
There have been few petition drives and no national referendums on the dams. Indeed, the only concerted campaign has come from a small organization named Saving Iceland, which is run, according to its website, not by Icelanders but by “a network of people of different nationalities.” The most dogged and potent local opposition has come from artists, who began protesting outside the parliament building almost as soon as the proposals were aired. For a 2003 TV documentary about a site soon to be submerged by a dam, the photographer-naturalist Guðmundur Páll Ólafsson tore out the pages of his book on the region to demonstrate what was being done to the landscape itself. At an exhibition in downtown Reykjavík this summer, the artist Rúrí mounted a video installation, called Flooding/Nature Lost, that featured footage of geese and other birds sitting on their eggs until the rising waters of Kárahnjúkar’s reservoir dissolved the nests and washed away the eggs. The birds walked away, puzzled and pathetic. Rúrí, a kind, spiky-haired woman in her fifties, has devoted much of the past decade to creating a mournful video catalogue of Icelandic waterfalls, particularly those already or potentially lost. Of the dam projects, she said, “This is sad and ridiculous in a democratic society, especially one
that claims to be the oldest in the world.”
Iceland’s national parliament, or Althing—the word for “assembly” being, in Icelandic, thing—was formed in 930 AD, about sixty years after the first settlers came over from Norway. They met at a site whose name, Thingvellir, “the plain of the thing,” still commemorates this ancient annual gathering, which was a combined parliamentary session, court review, and country fair. I visited it on a pleasant May day when a down jacket and lined gloves were the right attire, and wild ducks and geese called overhead. I was driving in my rented car across a high plain strewn with volcanic debris—big, twisting, dark boulders upholstered in pale, thick moss that disguised jagged edges and crevices—when suddenly half the landscape dropped away and I began a descent into the wide valley created by the meeting of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. A long ledge of dark gray stone eighty or a hundred feet high ran along the far end, and the Axe River dropped off this ledge (in a foaming waterfall that in another country might itself be a big tourist attraction) and into the grassy valley below, where other streams braided together to create a web of estuaries and tiny islands. On the far side of this riparian oasis was a series of long stony fissures, from a few feet to perhaps twenty feet wide, filled with astonishingly clear deep-blue water, a canyonland in miniature with its own flora of mosses, grasses, and stunted trees. The Thingvellir region, like much of Iceland, is as lush as Ireland and as harshly grand as Utah.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Page 19