The Body Electorate

While waiting at a doctor‘s office a couple of weeks ago, I was paging through a recent copy of Séð og Heyrt, a weekly magazine that chronicles the lives and loves of Iceland‘s rich and/or famous/infamous.

The particular issue featured photographs of Icelandic women who‘ve posed for Playboy—in particular a young Icelandic woman, Ásdís Rán, whose chief claim to fame, I‘ve gathered, is undressing for a Bulgarian version of Playboy and also being the wife of an Icelandic soccer player.

In this day and age being eye candy on the pages of a men‘s magazine is considered a major professional accomplishment—up there with being cast in a Hollywood movie or getting on American Idol. Yeah, sorry Ada… (Ada? Ada who? Ada Yonath, 2009 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry).  The magazine‘s editor (an old colleague of mine) suggested in his editorial that since Jón Gnarr—the actor and comedian turned politician—managed to become mayor of Reykjavík, then logically Ms. Rán might just as well become Iceland‘s president.

I would have to agree with him for a few reasons; the chief one being that now that the office of the Icelandic president has been reduced to a PR catering & event service for Icelandic “businessmen,” it would seem that potential candidates now did not necessarily have to be endowed with great political, academic, intellectual, or diplomatic skills—all of which Ms. Rán may very well possess, of course—but rather the ability to entertain lavishly (at taxpayers’ expense) and compose shameless hype about aforementioned financial windbags. This regeneration of the Office of the President thus greatly increases the potential candidate pool.

I must admit that it hadn’t occurred to me that having a certain body type would in and of itself automatically qualify one for national office, but this newfound knowledge has given me a few ideas.

See, I’ve been thinking of running for a seat in the Constitutional Convention (elections for which are nearing—Nov. 30th—although the Ministry of Justice doesn’t seem to be aware of this; when I checked yesterday they hadn’t even put the required signature forms on the election website), and what rather depressed me about that process was a provision in the Constitutional Convention law that states that candidates can spend “no more than two million krónas” on their election campaign.
Since I have not even one or even half a million krónas to spend on convincing my fellow Icelanders that I would be the candidate best qualified to represent their interests in this venture, I worried how in the world I would be able to convince them to vote for me.

But now I know…