The Blue Hand

Last Monday (before we bought the car) my husband and young son were on their way to a meeting at Neskirkja, and had just missed the bus by a few minutes.  They started walking, and as they did, Jim waved to a passing car.  The driver stopped and offered a ride which Jim accepted.  They had a pleasant conversation about the neighborhood and living and working in Reykjavik, such as strangers might have. When the driver dropped them off at the university, Jim thanked the driver, again gave his and our son's names, and asked the driver his name.  The driver replied with surprise, "You mean you don't know me?"  He then proceeded to tell Jim that he was Davið, that he was the former mayor of Reykjavík and former prime minister, and that he was internationally known.  Jim replied, "Oh, you're that Davið," (which seemed to amuse the driver) and thanked him for the ride.


If you are an Icelandic citizen, or someone who has been paying attention to Icelandic politics, you know that this was Davið Oddsson, former prime minister from the Independence Party, who was PM at the time the banks were privatized in the 1990s and was in charge of the central bank of Iceland at the time of the financial collapse.  One Icelander said to us that he is easily the most hated politician in all of Iceland (which is saying a lot as the approval rating for politicians is hovering around 10 percent).  Many see him as primarily responsible for the financial crisis (here's a London Times article from right after the crisis that makes this claim), a charge which he denies. But other Icelanders have said that at the time he was in office, he was both hated and loved and was a charismatic conservative leader.  He does indeed live in our neighborhood.  And he was on his way to his job as editor of Morgunblaðið, the conservative newspaper.  He was (controversially) appointed to that position less than a year after the financial collapse.  (At the same press conference that his editorship was announced the paper announced that it was laying off about 40 staff members).  The paper regularly criticizes the current left democratic government. 


So, Davið had offered a ride to one of the very few residents of Reykjavík who did not instantly recognize his face:

It's taken me a week to write about this very funny incident because I have been thinking about what the "takeaway" is from this story.  It is clear there are several.


First, as another Icelander pointed out to us, it's a small country.  A resident of the U.S. is unlikely to, by chance, catch a ride with Bill Clinton (and there would be all those Secret Service people around giving away his identity).
 

Second, it was very nice of him to give Jim and the little guy a ride.  Icelanders are really nice people, in our experience.


Third, as we started telling people this story, we started hearing about "the blue hand". Blue is the color of the Independence Party.  The "hand" is a double reference to the neoliberal views of the Independence Party (Adam Smith's invisible hand) and the actions that might be taken against you if you act in a way contrary to Davið's interests. The writer Hallgrímur Helgason claims to have popularized the term; in this article from 2004 from the English language paper The Grapevine Helgason talks about writing a piece about Davið referring to him as The Blue Hand because of his "weakness for personal revenge".  Helgason was then called on the carpet in a meeting with Davið. The story is that if you publicly criticized Davið, or acted in a way that he perceived to be against his political interests, he took his revenge on you or your family. People (ordinary Icelanders that we have talked with) have had stories of being removed from committees and of people losing jobs because of the blue hand.  So Helgason made the term more public, but  lots of people knew about the blue hand.


Fourth, I am sure that I have very little idea about what is actually going on in Icelandic politics, as an outsider who does not read Icelandic!  But it is not clear at this moment what direction Icelandic politics is going to take.  The left government just lost two of its MPs, leaving its majority margin quite thin, and the opposition (Independence Party) has been calling for the government to resign. The Icesave vote on April 9th will determine whether Iceland will accept the latest agreement to repay the Dutch and the British for their taxpayer funded bailout of privately held and in retrospect foolish investments.  The polls indicate a majority will vote yes, which might be good for the current government if only so that they can move on to other issues.  Among the other ongoing issues are Iceland's application to join the EU, the constitutional assembly, the election of which was declared invalid by Iceland's Supreme Court, the re-negotiation of the fishery quotas, and the continuing investigation of the financial collapse.


Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that two of the most respected figures in Iceland at the moment are women.  Both have defended Iceland in the face of international criticism (again, perhaps no coincidence).  One, Eva Joly, the French former prosecutor and current member of the European Parliament who was hired by the Icelandic government to oversee the investigation into the financial crisis, was highly critical of the original Icesave deal as deeply unfair to Iceland.  The other, Vigdís Finnbgadóttir, was the first woman president of Iceland, an office in which she served from 1980 to 1996.  She has gone on to promote gender equality, human rights and children's rights, and to serve as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, among many other things.  


For a time after the crisis, there seemed to be discussion of the role of gender in creating the problems that led to the collapse; parliament even ordered a "gender critical analysis" of the financial crisis.  The report was written by þorgerður Einarsdóttir (Director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at the University of Iceland) and Gyða Margrét Pétursdóttir, and concluded that "nation-centric masculinity ideals" had played an important role in the creation of the financial crisis.  (The report is only in Icelandic, but you can find a story about the report here.)  


Whether the blue hand has something to do with gender or not, it seems to be a kind of symbol for some of the problems in Icelandic politics and public life that became apparent after the crisis: the lack of transparency, the concentration of power in the hands of too few people. Only time will tell whether the blue hand will become an artifact of a certain period in Icelandic history.


But you just never know, when you get a ride from a stranger, who that stranger might be.