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January 29, 2006
The Trouble with Elections
“Give Hamas a Chance” Gazeta wyborcza (28-29th Jan) magnanimously states on page six in the headline of a piece by Mariusz Zawadzki, datelined Gaza and marked “analysis”. The subhead (actually it appears above the grand headline) reads:
Democracy in the Middle East is bearing unexpected fruit. Elections are being won by the ultra radical Mahmud Ahmadinejad in Iran; by Shiite religious parties in Iraq, meant to be a model of modern democracy; and Hamas terrorists in the Palestine Autonomy.
“Unexpected”? Is this the standard of analysis we can expect in Poland’s paper of record? Zawadzki continues: “The problem is not Hamas but the spiritual state of Palestinians, who support radicals en masse”. The condescension continues: “They [Palestinians] have chosen a change but doubtless they do not know what it might mean.” Zawadzki, you understand, does know, what with being such an acute foreteller of the future that he failed to predict the radicalisation of Middle Eastern politics and the hardening of attitudes in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. While pontificating about the state of democracy in Palestine, Zawadzki mentions that some people fear that the new government might change school curricula to inculcate radical Islam ideals. Mr Zawadzki may not know this on account of being in Gaza (or on another planet) but something remarkably similar is happening in Poland – bringer of democracy to Iraq, that model for other democracies – right now. The new government plans to introduce patriotism lessons in school.
Posted by hgrodsk at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)
January 25, 2006
Bukes
The Poles seemed to lose interest in novels very quickly. Hardly had they managed to produce a handful of decent ones than Witold Gombrowicz set to work writing “anti-novels.” His contemporary, Witkacy, refused even to accord novels the status of “art.” Polish writers are still experimenting with a form barely mastered. Take S?awomir Shuty’s Zwa?:
Today Barbara, let’s just call her Basia, sticking her big bull head out from behind the monitor, loudly told us the price she had paid for success. A series of analogue sacrifices. Old tiles. A broken flusher in a Ko?o brand toilet gleaming with cleanliness, the unforgettable stop light during the delightful excursion to Zakopane. Gruelling hunger strikes ending in culinary orgies. Unsatisfied urge to carry files. Unsuccessful jogging in knock-offs of baggy designer tracksuits. Casual sex with a false arm and an equally casual sketch. A lot of pressure to succeed.
Casual sex with a false arm? Analogue sacrifices? An urge to carry files? Truths universally acknowledged they ain't. Shuty’s novel-length book is really a series of linguistic experiments. The subject matter (when discernible) is quite banal to western readers but appears to be something of a novelty in newly capitalist Poland: kissing customer ass in order to hit monthly targets and earn a bonus is not such fun after all (Shuty has first hand experience of this – but who doesn’t?).
Parts of it are good, parts are indecipherable, and in other parts he just tries too hard to catch and label a zeitgeist not so elusive that it requires a great novelist to capture. His “kebab generation” may go down well east of the Vistula but to us sophisticates it sounds like a disaffected David McWilliams (frantic phrase coiner: cf. the Spar generation, the Magic Bus generation, the Ryanair generation, the provo riche, Robopaddies, Hicos, the Pope’s children etc. etc. etc.).
Typing “polish poetry” into a certain, well-known search engine gives around 22,600 results. “Polish novels” gives 212…
Posted by hgrodsk at 02:55 PM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2006
News v. Opinion
From Friday's Rzeczpospolita, a national daily paper in Poland: A front page article by Marcin Czeka?ski about the detrimental effects of the government's disarray. It seems that many key posts have not been filled yet. There is no treasury minister, for example. And then this gem:
"Privatisation is limping. PiS [the near-winners of the elections] has not sold a single firm of any size. Even though the privatisation plans of the previous government are still binding, they [the current government] are not carrying them out."
It would appear to go without saying - literally without saying - that privatisation is a good thing (the article is clearly about the bad effects of the current situation). Privatisation is not presented here (a long way from the opinion section) as an economic policy with merits and demerits. It may indeed be a wise policy for Poland to follow but is that not a judgement one must make and defend with - oh, I don't know - "facts", "evidence"? You could argue that the absence of a treasury minister should also be presented more neutrally, not as an unquestionably bad thing. You would be right. A rudderless Poland is not necessarily a bad thing when people like Giertych and Lepper are itching to take control.
And since when were governments bound by the decisions of previous governments? If that is the case why have elections to change governments?
Rzeczpospolita, however, is only trotting after Gazeta wyborcza, whose pompousness seems inversely proportional to its decline in intellectual standards. Here's a typically arrogant headline from Monday the 23rd. The story concerns modern architecture:
Poles still fear contrast. In Poland there is still little modern architecture built into the historic fabric. Even moderately extravagant projects can cause a good deal of confusion - is it fear of the new or a dictatorship of conservationists?
The poor benighted people are "confused" by extravagant intrusions of concrete and glass into medieval streets. And what causes this? Well, the sub editor allows only two possibilities - fear and dictatorship.
Posted by hgrodsk at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2006
RTÉ's Omniscience - and Promptness
Today's RTÉ (Radio Telefís Éireann. RTÉ is the state broadcaster in Ireland) news website contains a report on the Jean Charles De Menezes killing.
The report contains the following sentence:
"Mr de Menezes was shot dead by police at a London underground station six months ago when he was mistaken for a suicide bomber."
How does RTÉ know the police mistook him for a suicide bomber? The Independent Police Complaints Commission report into the matter was only delivered to the Crown Prosecution Service today. The killers have not been tried so there has been no way to test the veracity of their claim to have mistaken de Menezes for a suicide bomber. The policemen who killed de Menezes claimed other things which subsequently proved to be untrue.
So how does RTÉ know the police mistook him for a suicide bomber? Because they said so.
You can contact RTÉ if you are concerned about how readily they take the police at their word at: newsonline@rte.ie
Update:
RTÉ changed the wording almost immediately after I e-mailed them. The relevant part now reads:
"Mr de Menezes was shot dead by police at a London underground station six months ago. Police officers claimed that they thought he was a suicide bomber."
Posted by hgrodsk at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)
Military Intelligence
A tightly-edited, coherent entry today:
An initially unpromising article about ambulance services in the current (print edition) Polityka reveals (apart, of course, from the under-funded mess that Poland has inevitably made of its emergency services) that hospitals in Poland were located not in places determined by the needs of the surrounding civilian population but according to Warsaw pact plans; that is, where the powers-that-were foresaw heavy casualties in the event of NATO invading. (What? NATO invade? Boy were the communists ever wrong about the peace-loving North American Treaty Organisation.)
But this was not just communist paranoia and to-hell-with-the-masses. America’s interstate highway system was built to cope with mass evacuation in the event of a nuclear attack. The botched evacuation of New Orleans suggests that the communist threat may have been no more than a justification for massive state intervention in the automobile industry rather than the spur for developing a meaningful emergency plan. Either that or the plan had not been updated since 1956.
Nor was little “neutral” Ireland untouched by considerations of war and peace, though in the case of Ireland the enemy was within. The hideous University College Dublin campus in Belfield is popularly believed to have been designed to stymie hot-headed sons of strong farmers and future civil servants from rioting. The only flat, open space in the middle of campus is a reservoir for water cannons – sorry, a water feature. The open spaces are broken up by broad, shallow, steps too steep for a wheelchair but shallow enough for an armoured personnel carrier. All this conspires against large gatherings of people, unless the Student Union take it into its head to protest on the football pitches or in the now capacious car parks.
It would be nice to think that more enlightened attitudes prevail today. But, as Pawe? Walewski reports, in Poland’s health services the siting of hospitals with accident and emergency wards has in the recent past been dictated more by local officials’ overweening ambitions than by real needs.
Posted by hgrodsk at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2006
Breeding
One of the great worries facing the new political establishment in Poland is the low birth rate. Hence the decision to pay people to have children. I was reminded of this when reading Tom Tomorrow’s criticism of Niall Ferguson:
“You see this theme popping up a lot on right these days — the fear of an exploding Muslim population outstripping a declining Western birth rate. I wonder if the writers even realize the extent to which they are echoing century-old fears that the ‘advanced’ races would be outbred.”
Is this why the Polish government is paying people to have sex? (In Poland having sex and procreating are increasingly seen as synonymous.) Birth rates tend to be higher in poor countries (here Poland again bucks the trend). If the Polish government really wants to be “pro-family” maybe they should pursue policies that drive the country further and further into depression...
Posted by hgrodsk at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2006
Anything Goes
I complimented Beatroot for predicting a rapprochement between PO (Civic Platform) and PiS (Law and "Justice") the other day. But now the nearly-ruling PiS looks like it's getting into bed with Lepper's Samoobrona (see previous post). Political commentators in Poland seem to be in the enviable position that any prediction they make - any at all - will come true soon enough.
Well, there's no trick in that so I'll turn to books:
Against my better judgement, I bought Andrzej Stasiuk’s Jad?c do Babadag (“Going to Babadag”). I cannot abide travel writing. Travelling I like and I even like travellers’ tales. But books about travel bore me unspeakably. Stasiuk, though, has quite a reputation and I liked his Opowie?ci Galicyjskie (“Tales of Galicia”, translated into English by Margarita Nafpaktitis).
And indeed, it is clear from the first words of Jad?c do Babadag that this man is a writer, not a travel-writer: “Yes, it is only that fear, those searches, traces, stories, which are to obscure the unattainable line of the horizon. It is night again and everything is receding, disappearing, covered by the black sky.” Besides, this is not western literature. We are firmly in central European territory and inevitably, as the back-cover blurb says, the book is “…a journey into the heart of the consciousness of an inhabitant of that part of Europe which has always been regarded as inferior, benighted, primitive and backward.” Indeed. If it is a journey into the heart of Stasiuk’s soul that would explain why he finds the same things everywhere he goes, from Albania to Hungary through Slovakia, Poland and Romania: trash, decay, emptiness, the provinces, rootlessness, bohemia…
Perhaps if he stayed put for more than a few minutes in these Babadags and Székásveresegyházas he would find something that was not already on his mind when he arrived (see interview at www.polishwriting.net). I still have not been brought around to travel writing.
Posted by hgrodsk at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)
January 11, 2006
Lepper vs. O'Rourke
My fellow monkey, Shane Barry, is exercised by Irish politician Mary O’Rourke’s “working like blacks” comment.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear… Come to Poland! Listen to these pearls of wisdom from Andrzej Lepper, leader of the Samoobrona party, and a man not long ago considered a political pariah but now moving closer and closer to the centre of power:
“The most dangerous nation for the Poles is the Jewish nation. They are everywhere. They are plotting intrigues everywhere.” (Nowiny, 18th Dec. 1995)
“Samoobrona is the hammer of God for what is happening in Poland. It’s not enough that Balcerowicz must go; he must spend the rest of his days in a work camp.” (Samoobrona Congress, 7th April 2002)
Balcerowicz is a neoliberal technocrat like – as Beatroot points out – everyone in Europe’s central banks. And, to show that the markets even have the power to reign in a raging anti-semite, here’s a more recent quote from Lepper:
“He [Balcerowicz] doesn’t have to go at all. He does what the law says, and he does it well. Any economist would do the same in his place.” (Puls Biznesu, 18th Nov. 2005)
The above Lepper quotes were gathered together in Nie magazine, Jan 12th 2006.
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:15 PM | Comments (0)
Service
Here’s a lazy one, lifted from Nie (“No”) magazine. In Warsaw central railway station they have opened a special “Service Point” for intercity train travellers (or “the rich”) where you can, as Nie says, have a coffee and send flowers to your wife or fancy woman but not buy an intercity train ticket – for that you have to queue with the other schmucks.
Actually, this is not such a lazy entry, as I can dilate on the trains in Poland, although since I know that as a subject it is nearly as boring as car-commuting I’ll keep it short and put something new up tomorrow. They’re going backwards. Total regress. You buy a ticket now and it might be valid but then again it might not. Depends on which company is running the train at the time you board. Following in the glorious footsteps of the English, Poland has split up and part-privatised its railways. The timetables in Warsaw central have biro-ed in corrections on them – if you’re lucky, that is. If you’re less lucky a thug in a shiny-elbowed suit will tell you your ticket’s no good and you’ll have to buy a new one from the conductor
It didn’t used to be like this.
Posted by hgrodsk at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)
January 07, 2006
Who rules Poland? Who do you think?
No one in their right mind would be interested in the squalid personnel-changes that pass for politics in Poland but the elevation of Zyta Gilowska to minister of finance and deputy prime minister illustrates a few realities about where power lies in Poland that might go some way to reassure those who are worried about the autocratic tendencies of the ruling Kaczy?ski twins.
Gilowska was a member of the PO (Civic Platform – the names, as usual in modern politics, are largely meaningless) before being kicked out back in May for a mild case of nepotism. She has now joined the near-winners in the recent elections here: the Kaczy?skis’ PiS (Law and “Justice”). The interesting bit is the minister for finance that she is replacing: the hapless Teresa Lubi?ska. Lubi?ska’s sin was – no, not nepotism and not party political apostasy and opportunism either – but the far more heinous crime of offending the markets. Some time ago she expressed a negative opinion about the gigantic foreign supermarkets moving in to pick over the carcass of the Polish economy. The worst thing was she did so in the Financial Times, where foreign investors might read it. It’s alright for newspapers to report how supermarket employees work wearing nappies because they are denied toilet breaks but a government minister must on no account pass such remarks, lest investors be scared off.
So there you have it: the make-up of the Polish cabinet is not determined by the prime minister, Marcinkiewicz, nor his puppet-master, Kaczy?ski, but by foreign investors who read the Financial Times and need nappy-wearing wage-slaves to keep the profits rolling in.
Posted by hgrodsk at 02:33 PM | Comments (5)
January 04, 2006
The Royal "I"
“They queue at the check-in desks in near silence, the weather-beaten, mountainy men in their cleanest dirty clothes with the tell-tale spatters of plaster; the sprinkling of women of a certain age, with the sprayed-rigid hair-dos in unlikely colours…” So begins a model of sloppy reporting and editing entitled “A Polish homecoming” in the Irish Times’s weekend supplement on Dec. 24th and bearing the sub-head “Kathy Sheridan joins Poles on a flight out of Dublin for a long-awaited Christmas trip home, to emotional family welcomes.” (Why Kathy Sheridan had long awaited this flight to her home, Poland, is left unexplained.)
First, the boring complaints: it’s “Zakopane”, not “Zacopane”; “?ukasz”, not “Lukas”; “szcz??liwy”, not “szosowy”; “Katarzyna”, not “Katarzaena”; “Krzysztof”, not “Krysztof”; “Janina”, not “Janena”; and “Joanna”, not “Johanna”. That’s a total of six proper names misspelled. Furthermore, there is no letter “v” in the Polish alphabet so it is unlikely that the Konrad mentioned in column two comes from “Vistola”. While the surname “Adamizyk” might be right, it’s more likely “Adamczyk” and Kielce is definitely north of Kraków, not south – I checked this in a big book called an “atlas”. Oh, and the whole tone of the piece is condescending in its pity for the poor Poles with their “near-empty, shabby little holdalls” and their “sad, beloved” country.
But it’s with the editing that things gets interesting – though I realise that not everyone will share my fascination with the art of editing. It’s a front page article, continued on page five. Apart from the photographer, Witold Krassowski, only Kathy Sheridan is credited on page one. The result is that half way through the article she appears to pull off the feat of bi-location, for not only is she on the plane from Dublin with the returning migrants, she is also on the ground in Katowice with their families waiting for their loved ones. Only at the very end of the article, at the foot of page five, is the miracle explained: “Additional reporting by Marcella Gajek”. My spies in the DfA tell me Marcella Gajek is Polish, so you might expect that the spellings would be more reliable in her part of the article. But no, it is at the Katowice end that the most outrageous mistake occurs: “‘Da! (Yes!) they’re real!’” The Polish for “yes” is “tak”, not “da” – that’s Russian, and you can probably imagine how the average Pole views the surprisingly widespread western belief that Poles speak Russian.
But was it Marcella Gajek who was in Katowice, waiting for the returning Poles? After all, the “young blonde woman” speaks to her in “perfect English”. Maybe my spies have been extracting confessions under duress and Ms. Gajek is not in fact Polish. Or maybe there were two people in Katowice – one who wrote “They [Kate’s family] chat easily” and one who wrote a couple of paragraphs later “She [Kate’s mother] can hardly speak without her eyes welling up”. Or maybe there were three reporters there – including the American who wrote about the toy “airplanes”.
These articles are sent out to the printers as .pdf files so the printers can no longer be blamed. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to treble-check the grammar and spelling of this entry…
Posted by hgrodsk at 03:31 PM | Comments (4)
January 02, 2006
Tragifarce
The Christmas edition of Polish current affairs magazine Polityka contains a fairly typical look back on the year in photographs. Internationally, the year is sombre to say the least: New Orleans, the London bomb attacks, race riots in Sydney, the earthquake in Kashmir, violence in Iraq... There is no room for levity in the captions.
And then there are the events of the year in Poland. A picture of the Kaczy?ski twins (one the president of Poland, the other the chief of the ruling party) carries the ironic remark "Poland is again blazing new trails for democracy." The caption under the picture of a rearing horse bearing a riot policeman breaking up a pro-gay equality demonstration ends with the weary words: "It appears that thinking in this matter has been banned too." (Poland's minister for the Interior and Administration, Ludwik Dorn, described the police actions as a "exemplary".) A photograph of the prime minister, who is widely dismissed as the puppet of his party boss (Kaczy?ski), bears the legend "...he promises little and keeps his word."
And so it goes: tragedy in the world at large; mere farce in Poland.
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:53 PM | Comments (0)