Intoxication of the Promise

Confession: I watched Free Willy with my daughter last week, thinking that I was perhaps killing two birds with one orca-shaped stone. I'll call the exercise {quality family time}X{a 112 minute dive down a doubtfully but potentially valuable rabbit hole}. Sad to say, as a means to more thoroughly understand Fortun's ethnographical adventuring, Free Willy was a flop. My daughter enjoyed it, though, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

The excellent excerpts from The Atom Station we've read prompted me to check a few facts on the internet. It turns out that Iceland's 20th century wasn't as tumult-free as I'd imagined. In 1940, the ísland experienced a real British invasion (Operation Fork), followed by an US-led Allied occupation until the end of WWII. Directly after the war, controversy over Iceland's joining NATO let to mass rioting and demonstrating.

I digress, but purposefully. The section on W.H. Auden's visit to Iceland is, like the latter of the two aforementioned events, illustrative of an underlying political shiftiness. At the start of Ch. 9, Fortun likens his motivations for escaping to Iceland to those of Auden's. He also implies that they were both wrong in supposing they would find asylum from the lunacy of their respective lives, as Iceland's 'promise' of isolation, and of freedom from politics, proves illusory: "Any fantasy that I had of fueling enthusiasm while avoiding politics in Iceland... quickly proved unsustainable" (83). Picking up where he left off in Ch. 4, Fortun continues exploring the meaning and worth of other, equally vague promises. I appreciated Fortun's dissection of Gudmundsson's perplexing, mystical statement on the importance of the HSD legislation (87), elucidating the wild contradictions of then-director general of Iceland's public health system. Even more scandalous is the off-the-cuff quasi-racist remarks of then-prime minister Oddsson, extolling what he describes as submission to authority (though he calls it "trust") as one of Iceland's national treasures (92-3).

Personally, I'm most intrigued by the intoxicating aspect of the myriad promises that surrounded the creation of the HSD, and how this inebriation affected many people's ability to think and speak clearly about it. We can find a good example of this kind of romantic vision at the dawn of Fortun's book, in the Roche press release (2), where promises and potentials of the future benefits of the HSD are proof enough for those in power. I'm eager to start chasing the trail of money between the companies and the Alþingi, to find out just how much these tipsy promises cost. Hopefully Fortun decides to shed some light here.