Attention Seeking 101 for Iceland

Iceland,

It seems to me you are trying to get attention from the world, again. You're small, you're far away from everything, you have an unattractive name for tourists, you have long days in summer and almost no day in winter and no one ever talks about you - so I totally understand what you're doing. BUT YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

You get the attention, but just at the beginning - after a while nobody talks about you. So far, you have failed in both your attempts to be talked about. Let me explain.

First of all, Iceland, remember when you decided to default last year (or 2 years ago...I forgot, it was such a banal event) - you thought "yeah that's cool, people will help us so they'll have to talk about us" well it didn't work, did it?

People did talk about you when the story first made the headlines, thinking "Is that a place where houses are made out of Häagen-Dazs?" but then, the attention shifted away from you. Everybody started talking about how the foreign investors would lose all their money and how this will affect the financial funds and products around the world, and how this crisis is so big. Then the media said how small countries didn't make it through the crisis whereas everybody else did, etc. Lame. You appeared as one of those 
small countries, Iceland. You totally overreacted and made a fool of yourself.

Since your "I'm going bankrupt" strategy didn't get you enough attention, you felt excluded again and you came back en force with a volcano that caused floods, glacier melting and panic in a 34-inhabitant village. Well it didn't work either! The volcano formed an enormous ash cloud that left Iceland through the UK and is now all over Europe causing massive problems in the aviation industry.

Is anyone talking about Iceland now? No. It's all about European airspace and planes and how much the industry is losing a day, etc. Iceland is briefly mentioned to say "the ashes of the Icelandic volcano" because NOBODY can pronounce the name of your stupid volcano! Once again, Iceland, you failed at keeping the attention on you. All you seem to do is fuck up the world with your stupid stuff and your mess is what's widely talked about, not you. I mean you're disrupting the aviation industry in Europe...couldn't you have chosen something smaller like "the wool industry on the Faroe Islands" something that wouldn't steal your thunder?

So as a Lebanese, I think I can wisely advise you on how to do that. See, us in Lebanon have a little war once every two years or so in order to keep the medias talking about us. It's a totally local issue or maybe involving our close neighbors, but not the whole world. We initiate our wars, so the medias can analyse why our religions and politics are so messed up - whereas you chose a volcano, how long do you think the medias can analyse and talk about nature?

We also made agreements with many countries so that they have their wars in Lebanon instead of in their own countries, so that gave us good extra media coverage and a lot of political analysis. We are among the best attention seekers of the world.

So you see Iceland, it's not that hard. You just have to chose a subject that involves Iceland, and Iceland only, make sure it's big - tips: war, conflict, religion, child abuse, death - and voilà!

So I'm sorry Iceland, but I'll have to give you a C- at this Attention Seeking exam. Study harder next time and make sure your mess doesn't get bigger than you.

Though now Lebanon is changing its strategy. Almost every important magazine in the world is talking about how cool Beirut is, even people here in South America tell me that they read an article about Beirut or saw a documentary about it on TV. It is indeed a better strategy than using wars, but don't get carried away Iceland, this strategy is taught much later in more advanced classes.

PS: You may have noticed that I put totally random pictures. Well that's because Iceland totally failed and doesn't deserve to have some of its pictures published on such a popular website (by popular I mean famous, not "for the people". It's weird how this word can mean such different things).


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