Published August 31, 2010

Ohmagawd you guys, I’m writing an editorial!

That Haukur has been working too hard for too long not to take a lengthy vacation in some far away, exotic locale and, on route to the airport, he called me in to pick up the slack and, with a little luck and a lot of good ol’fashioned elbow grease, put out a Grapevine or two in his absence.

It didn’t seem like brain surgery, so here I am. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now that we all tried our best to do justice in these packed pages. The ongoing saga of the church is among the more troubling and controversial issues plaguing the country right now and the ever-vigilant Paul Nikolov has shone some light on the issue on page 6, so read up on that. There will be a test later, I’m sure. As is the case with seemingly everything these days, nobody appears to have their shit together where the church is concerned, and by ‘nobody’ I tend to mean the government (poor guys get blamed for everything) – wasn’t it just Tuesday that the Minister of Justice washed her hands of the entire thing, saying the church has got to clean up their own mess and the bishop was still on the defensive?

Then, the very next day the church is issuing public apologies in the news and half the government is calling for the separation of church and state. Everyday there’s a new twist! Can’t these scandals space themselves out a little more so the first one can get solved before the next one cuts in line? Better yet, can’t grown adults in trusted positions of authority act the part and, if they
can’t, then admit their fault and take responsibility for their actions rather than hiding within sacred institutions only to prolong the suffering of their alleged victims by dragging it all out in a very public forum?

Alternately, the Western Icelanders sure do have a pretty sweet set up over in Gimli, Canada. In between reading up on the church/state drama and stats on murder rates and updating yourself on that whole Reykjavík 9 thing (spoiler alert: it’s turning into quite the farce), calm yourself down by taking a gander at the impressive spread of Baldur Kristjánsson’s photos from ‘New Iceland’, where life is sunshine and kleinur and everybody loves everybody. Hmm. This first editorial has turned out to be a glorified table of contents, huh?

I’ll work on that for next time.