Gnarr (15 page)

And that brings us back to the Best Party—because
here we have the essence of what it represents, what it wants and what it can do. Whether we can set up anything lasting, or really get things moving, remains to be seen. But at least we’re still having just as much fun, and I think we’ve earned it.

I want to have fun, amaze other people, and amuse my audience, but never at the expense of others, more at my own expense. Ultimately, life is a roller coaster ride, it goes up and down, in ever shorter intervals. Sometimes we fall into a deep black abyss only to be flung just as rapidly up again and rewarded with a magnificent view. This roller coaster ride doesn’t always suit everyone equally. Some turn chalk white with fear and huddle back in their seats, others close their eyes, others yell their lungs off. And then there are those who sit back and relax and just enjoy the ride. I’m one of them.

If I had to name something for which I’m prepared to commit myself even more seriously and more intensively, it’s peace work—even though commitment to peace, absurdly enough, seems to be a risky business. Quite a few of those who work for peace end up in jail or simply get killed. But no matter where I’m headed, whether I get to be president or minister, whether I travel the world or simply emigrate to some distant country—I’m firmly determined to have fun. And in the future I intend to carry on with the amazing, amusing, and disturbing.

I made the Best Party on my own terms. At the start, I thought of it as an idea with a beginning, a rise, and an end. I’d like to think the story has all the characteristics of a classic novel, including a happy ending where good wins and evil loses. It’s not always like that in reality, though.

But the beauty of the Best Party is that it doesn’t exist—it’s just an idea.

We won our election because we didn’t play by the rules. The party never developed a real ideology or membership. You can call yourself a member if you like. It’s a bit like AA—just without the steps.

As you may have gathered by what has come before, I have no business making politics my career, and I never had any plans of staying in politics forever.

In late 2013, as the end of my term neared, the polls showed that I had a good chance of winning reelection—with 35 percent support for a second term. But as I thought over the idea of a second term, I realized that we shouldn’t push our success. What we pulled off with the Best Party was a surprise party, a shock to the system. But you can’t have a surprise party follow a surprise party, or repeat this infinitely. If you try, you’ll
just get a regular party where people mingle and have fun, and then it’s nothing special.

I started to explain this to my colleagues. When you talk about the difference between a regular party and a surprise party, people understand.

I soon announced to the public that I wouldn’t seek reelection.

Part of the reason this was an easy decision is that many of the people I involved in the party turned out to be good politicians. Some of the smartest formed a new party called Bright Future. It has rules and a manifesto and membership. It is what you might call a liberal democratic party, and it’s now one of the biggest political parties in Iceland. We decided to merge the Best Party into Bright Future, and we all plan to support Bright Future in the upcoming municipal elections. And Bright Future has been having a lot of success in Iceland! In the April 2013 election, they won six seats in the parliament.

You can say the Best Party will continue to exist as it always has. Anybody can run with it. There is no copyright for it. Anybody can make a Best Party just like anybody can make a surprise party. It is invisible, but if you put your mind to it you can see it. Can you?

A statement by Jón Gnarr posted on February 15, 2010, on the website of the Best Party
.

Wherever I show up, the people show an ardent interest in our domestic policy. They all want to talk about the Best Party with me.

I remember, for example, a well-attended solidarity meeting in a small town in the north, somewhere near Akureyri. There I met a man who was leading a sheep on a leash. The animal behaved like a dog, following him at every step and obeying his commands—“Sit” or “Down!” It had even learned to gnaw on a bone. After I’d talked with the man for a while and answered the various questions he asked, I wanted to know why he took this sheep around with him. “Because I love it,” he replied without hesitation. I understood immediately. The life of the people out there is so different from our life here in the city. We hang out in our chic offices, sipping latte macchiatos and making a few decisions as we do so, while the people out there drink beer and have dinner with their herds of animals. The people in the countryside, especially up round Akureyri, speak an Icelandic that you could hear throughout the
country twenty years ago, and is now almost everywhere extinct. What we take for granted is often completely alien to them.

Once we organized an information evening in Húsavík, on the north coast of Iceland, to which a group of farmers from the Mývatn region, also in the north, had also traveled. But they hadn’t come to learn about the Best Party—they’d apparently heard the news going the rounds in Mývatn that I owned an iPhone. And now they all wanted to see the phone and begged me to allow them to touch it. I handed it to one of them and encouraged him to phone home. It’s a scene I will never forget. The man was so moved that tears were running down his face as he called his children who were standing barefoot, gap-toothed, and filthy in some dunghill. He must have felt he was calling his family from some distant future. He didn’t understand that the thing was simply a mobile phone.

It was then I realized that we are all creatures of feeling. The people in the country are mostly simple folk and can’t do much more than shovel manure and stroke their sheep, or slaughter them in order to get through the winter. But they have feelings, and therefore they belong to us. We all belong together, no matter where we live. The Icelandic sheep connects us. Even if no one knows his sheep as well as does this farmer. He lives with it, eats together with it, takes it into the mountains and goes swimming with it, sleeps with it in the stable, and is probably the only person
who knows when its birthday is. And then we come and take away his sheep and eat it. We can’t pay any attention to the feelings of some yokel, of course.

We start the day with a workout in the gym, rush to and from work, and on the way home just have to pop into the mall. Nevertheless, we mustn’t forget our roots. My grandfather was one of these country rubes, just like the countless others that we could observe in their natural habitat on our Land Cruiser Tour. We honk like crazy and growl curses under our breath if they chug along at a snail’s pace ahead of us on their prehistoric Ferguson tractors. And if we eventually overtake them, they stare at us perplexed and offended, because the stresses of modern life have not yet reached them.

The Icelandic sheep is our secret emblem. It fills our bellies and keeps us warm. For us, it’s like the bread and wine for the apostles at the Last Supper. We divide the world up by the color of its wool, and simply plod along behind the bellwether. And if the sheep could talk, it would ask us to be nicer to each other. No doubt about it.