...but tired of inactivity.
So I'm going to throw in my two krona about the mind-bogglingly stupid "debate" surrounding the "war zone" in down town Rvk on the weekends.
Before 2000, all the clubs and bars in Rvk were required to shut down at exactly 3am, resulting in thousands of drunken party-goers pouring into the streets en-mass to try to catch cabs home (all at the same time) or to continue partying out in the streets. Now, sometimes this was fun. There was a sort of carnival atmosphere to it, on a good night. But there were also a lot of brawls, a lot of pointless vandalism (actually, almost all vandalism in Iceland is pointless. Fucking shit up for political purposes is unknown, but blowing up bus shelters, torching public parks, and kicking in windows is considered "kids having fun") and serious crowd control issues.
Back then, the Rvk city council came up with a rather brilliant solution to this problem. They simply granted the bars permission to remain open longer, which led to downtown emptying out in trickle rather than a flood. Smart.
Fights decreased. Property damage decreased. Gettin' a cab home became much much easier.
7 years later and things are supposedly "totally out of control" downtown. Random gangs wander around beating people up. People are doing drugs right and left, pissing on people's cars and houses, all the while hurling bottles and glasses around like confetti.
And so the brave men and women of the political establishment have mobilized to make downtown safe again.
Bullshit!
Listen up you whiny political sub-urban bitches on the city council: YOU BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELVES. And you know it.
First, you started closing down most of the public restrooms, leaving Joe and Jane Barhopper, not to mention Jack and Jill Homeless (you know, the people you adamantly deny the existence of) with no other place to relieve themselves
but public spaces.
Then you ban smoking in all bars and clubs, meaning that people who smoke (and Iceland has a whole lot of "party smokers" on top of the regular black-lungers like me) have to go outside. But thanks to noise ordinances you passed mostly as a result of feud between the old council and the old Grand Rokk, many places aren't allowed to use their courtyards and balconies as smoking sections, and even when you do allow it, you tell the bar owners that people can't take their drinks with them.
So now you have groups of drunks loitering outside all the bars all the time, and they interact with other drunks walking past, and the whole scene gets noisier and rowdier.
Then your little yes-men at RUV (the state radio and tv station) and Möggan (the oldest newspaper in the country, and an unapologetic supporter of the so-called Independence Party's neo-con agenda) start pumpin' out stories about violence and drug use downtown.
Now, the drug use is there, but that's hardly the fault of the bar owners. Its the fault of the Rvk police, who like to pad their bank accounts and arrest records by putting a couple of plain-clothes officers outside the residence of well-know dealers and arresting anyone who comes out, fining them, and letting them go, instead of cutting off the supply at its source.*
As for the violence, well, aside from the documented fact that its actually decreased, there's two factors at play here. One, up until recently the cops were nigh-invisible downtown. They might cruise around in their vans, and maybe try to
break up impromptu concerts, but they aren't out in any sort of force, certainly not enough to deter some drunken idiot from taking a swing at someone. The other factor is the whole "if you report it, they will come" scenario. After months of stories about fights and violence downtown, the kind of people who
like that sort of scene start to show up for it. You know the type: Barely graduated school, spends hours working on his car/motorbike, wants to move to the States "cause they got guns there". Basically the little shits who have nothing better to do than drink, fight, and listen to crap techno.
Thing is, most of these guys, like most of the people pissing out in the open and throwing glass and shit, they aren't from 101, or even 105, 107, or anywhere near downtown. The hnakkar fuckers and their yuppie parents (ask almost anyone who works at a bar or late night eatery in Rvk who the worst, most annoying, most violence prone asshole customers are, and they will tell you: Yuppies) are from the suburbs. And because they don't live here, they think that anything goes downtown. After all, that's what the media keeps telling them. If there were pubs or clubs in their neighborhoods, they wouldn't put up with that shit.
But of course there aren't pubs and clubs in their neighborhoods. Because yuppie shits don't want anything disturbing their Sunday brunches or frightening the little yuppie-spawn. And thanks to that, there are almost no bars outside of 101.
So what are the brave folks of the Rvk council going to do about it?
Well, they could have had a bit of common sense and foresight and say, re-opened the public restrooms, worked out a "night bus" to keep people from having to hang around all night for a ride home, given the bar-owners the option of choosing to be non-smoking or not**, tried to clamp down on the other reason for all the drunks in the streets (i.e. the infamous and annoying artificial lines that many clubs create at the door to try to look "cool" and "popular", another thing I blame on yuppies, who get such a kick out of being seen outside the "coolest bar in town"), and not have handed the policing of 101 over to underpaid undertrained little wannabe cops who do most of their work sitting in an office watching shit hit the fan on all the Big Brother cameras the shity...city put up.
But they're not going to do any of those things. Instead, they will "fix" the problem they created by the most asinine means possible.. They've already talked about getting rid of the downtown liquor store, especially the beer cooler (cause people buying a couple of cold beers are really the problem) and sent large squads of police out with orders to arrest anyone "disturbing the peace"(not to mention arresting/fining them for drinking in public, what was previously the single least enforced law in Iceland***). For the first time since I last left the Empire...I mean U.S. I've heard that hideous phrase "zero tolerance" thrown about. They've proposed shortening the opening hours again (one step forward two steps back much?), putting up even more useless cameras, and some have even proposed forcing all the clubs to move to some "new" area so that they don't disturb the locals.
Meaning that the locals close to this new Gomorrah will be disturbed instead.
But mostly, they'll just keep bitchin' about it. Because the main reason for all this debate and hyperbole is distraction.
Teachers, child-care workers, nurses, and social workers in Rvk are being paid ridiculously low wages, children are on mile long waiting lists for day-care and after school care, disabled kids can't get the extra helpers they need, a few politically connected developers are busy buying up and tearing down the old downtown (makes you wonder about
that fire doesn't it?) the city power company, buses , and most other things are in the process of being privatized (all under the guise of "making them more efficient") to benefit the already hyper-rich while the public parks are slowly falling into ruin and the aforementioned public restrooms are closed for "lack of funds/to keep
unfortunates**** from doing drugs in them", and to top it all off, the city is throwing billions of krona into building a monstrosity of an opera house that the majority of its citizens will rarely see the use of.
But none of that matters. People are pissing on cars! Breaking bottles! Its the end of the world! Don't think about where all the money for police and public infrastructure has gone! Don´t question why we can´t afford to pay for social programs anymore! Don't think about how the very area we're labeling a war-zone is amongst the most valuable property in the country! Don't think about the plan to turn it all into luxury housing and a mall...
I have a simple solution to at least one of the problems, namely the lack of hygienic places to pee.
From now on, until Rvk reopens public restrooms, stops this bullshit about closing times for bars, and gets their fucking priorities straight, I say that all of us barhoppers and unfortunates take turns pissing in the pond in front of that concrete monstrosity they call a City Hall here.
A piss protest! Mígamótmæli! Its so stupid it might just work.
*If you are going to make drugs illegal (a stupid idea to begin with) then you should at least try to make it impact as few people as possible, by cutting it off at the source i.e. the importers, who being rich and well connected never seem to get busted.
**Bar owners should have been given the right to choose to be smoking or non, and those who choose to have smoking bars should have then been required to put in ventilation (actually all Icelandic bars could do with that) and pay a certain percentage extra for national health insurance.
*** Yet another example of an agency creating a "problem" to fix and hence look necessary to the public. I have never in 15 years of Icelandic life seen this law enforced and all the better for it. People ought to be able to have a cold beer in the park. Fuckers!
****The newest code-word for "poor" "drug-addicted" or "homeless". Not that there's homeless or poor people in Iceland...nooo... just lazy people.
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