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.