During the pot-and-pans pandemonium this last winter I for one wasn't protesting for new elections.
I was protesting, at my most stupidly optimistic, for an honest-to-goodness-wipe-the-slate-clean-declare-year-zero revolfuckinglution.
However, I was willing to settle for constitutional reform.
Remember that?
Remember the idea that it had become high-time to rewrite the overly long, overly complex, and totally unworkable Icelandic constitution?
Somewhere along the line, the whole idea just disappeared.
Poof!
No more constitutional reform.
Looking back at it, I remember a plethora of articles pointing out just how expensive it would be.
After all, highly paid experts would have to be fed (on food worthy of such worthies) and housed (in houses worthy of such worthies) for months at a time in Reykjavík (you can't expect anything of this magnitude to happen anywhere else, það er bara svo lómó út í sveit...) each with a cadre of highly paid assistants...and after all, the country was broke and so of course we can't afford it and blah blah blah.
Now, thinking about it, this was a very slick bit of PR. By convincing people that a new constitution was too expensive, the powers that were and the powers that were to be managed to torpedo one of the most popular and radical demands that all us skríl were out pounding our pots for.
But the argument that we couldn't afford a new constitution because its too expensive is based on the same sort of 2007/old school political thinking that got us into this mess to begin with. I mean, come on! The delegates can't keep in touch via teleconference? It's not like it's a good thing that they should all be huddled together in Rvk, far away from the people they are supposed to be representing. And who the fuck says they should be paid??? If you pay the delegates a buttload of money to write a new constitution you'll wind up with the longest, most convoluted constitution of all time because the so-called experts will be sure to keep writing and debating for as long as they keep getting paid.
Why would we even want a constitution written by a bunch of tie-wearing stuffed shirts sitting around their tax-payer provided luxury homes debating issues of rights and justice over snifters of tax funded brandy and tables of tax funded catering?
I say we make good use of the internets, and call for a citizens constitution, a document that anyone residing in Iceland can have a say in one and one that must be ratified by the people by national vote.
It would take a long time, the debates would be many, the arguments heated, but it wouldn't cost a dime and in the end, when we work out a set of simple ground rules that we can all agree on, we implement them.
Regardless of what that bunch of self-serving incompetents and ideologues in Alþingi say.
Think of it as the political version of citizen arrest.
I mean, seriously, what have we got to loose?
