Friday, July 23, 2010

Ég tala bara ensku

I began subscribing to the Iceland Review Online daily email a couple of months ago. My disgust at finding myself living in a torture state, and a torture state owned and operated by the wealthy, at that, has me thinking that morally I'm obligated either to smash that state or move out of it.
Iceland is famous for its human-scale, liberal government. Or it was until it went broke a couple of years ago due to investment shenanigans. But the Icelanders, instead of making good the gambling losses of the banking classes (i.e., what we did and are doing in the USA), sued the shit out of them and voted their pets out of office. Decency is still regarded as a civic virtue there - I can't imagine a waterboarding scandal left unpunished once exposed.
The colder climate is way attractive to me. I am a cold-weather, brisk-windy-fall kind of creature, and I can't even feature moving as far south as Pennsylvania, much less farther south. And if global warming is going to hit big in my lifetime, I'd rather suffer it in Iceland than in tropical New York City.
I might just be in time. Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir has an article in today's IRO about suffering through the current "unbearable" 20+°C (68°+F) heatwave.
It is also possible that a more temperate Iceland, close to the now navigable waters of a thawed Arctic Ocean, under which lie unknown deposits of oil, is going to find itself a very busy unhappy host to a more imperial nation or two. But at least it would be a state I could defend without disgust.
And if not Iceland, there's Nunavut, altho I don't know if I'd be at all welcome there. "Ég tala bara ensku" is Icelandic for "I only speak English." What's Inuit for "honky"?

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