Politics and Press

Iceland blows its top

The Montreal Gazette’s great cartoonist Aislin summed it all up by publishing a cartoon with an Icelandic text, including the ∂s. It showed a volcano spewing out ash towards the centres of western civilization with the translation of the text given below: “That’s not an exploding volcano, we’re just burning down the banks”. By encapsulating the only 2 events most of the world knows about the founding civilization of western prose literature, Aislin helped explain such scenes as the following which managed to be filmed by the CBC: A horde of teenage girls left stranded after months of bilingual training in in Paris in April because of the disaster of flight cancellations is greeted by a horde of weeping relieved parents at the Vancouver airport. The parents are apparently overcome with relief that their innocent charges have managed to survive the threat of having to stay on in Paris.. It looks like the girls are winking out secret messages that tell a different story about their awful fate of having been forced to stay an extra week in Paris in the spring. Can the parents really think the way they try to act?

An Icelandic teenager, responding to the question of my brother Doug about whether s/he thought Iceland could survive such a calamity, didn’t hesitate: “Don’t worry about us. We know how to fish and raise potatoes.” Give me that Icelandic teenager any old day.