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April 28, 2006
Pointless Party Politics
A coalition government has been formed in Poland. Well, not really. At the last moment someone pulled out so the coalition is still in a minority. It's just that now it has lost every last shred and tatter of repsectability. Here's the BBC on the subject. How the writer refrained from adding the words "by reality" after "deterred" is a mystery to deep for me to fathom:
At the last moment a small farmers' party pulled out, leaving the government still 13 seats short of a majority. But Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the governing Law and Justice party, was undeterred.
The article continues: "He [Kaczynski] said the coalition was the basis for a stable government for the next four years." Of course, what Kaczynski meant to say was it was a way of splitting a rival political party (the LPR) in two. I can't say I'm sorry to see the LPR divided and conquered but shouldn't there be more to national politics than annihilating the opposition?
Posted by hgrodsk at 10:23 AM | Comments (1)
A Parable
A tale is told which is meant to illustrate the difference between the US mindset and the Russian and explain why the US won the cold war. When an American peasant sees his neighbour build a large and pleasant house he thinks "some day I'll build myself a better house." The Russian peasant, the conventional wisdom goes, thinks "someday I'll burn that house down." Preposterous, of course. The idea that one group of people -- e.g. private sector workers -- would, in order to bring them down to their own level, snipe and bitch and denigrate another group that they think is doing better -- e.g. public sector workers -- instead of working and organising to bring themselves up to the level of the "rival" group...? Quite preposterous.
Posted by hgrodsk at 10:20 AM | Comments (1)
April 25, 2006
Chavez Again
Chavez is an object lesson in the way the mainstream media works. Consider this article in the Sunday Times by Sarah Baxter. Firstly, there's the title, with its reference to Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief: "Mischief stirs for Bush in the 'axis of good'." Perhaps if Baxter knew more about Waugh than the titles of his books she would have remembered he saved his greatest scorn for foreign correspondents.
Secondly, there is the dateline: Washington, not Venezuela. This is very much a US-centric article. Baxter has perfectly internalised Washington's viewpoint, writing: "Latin America is breaking out of its northern neighbour’s back yard." The keen literary critic might find some ironic free indirect discourse there. I think it is more likely that Baxter really does think that South America is the US's property. And while we're getting up close to the written style of the US State Depar--- sorry, of Sarah Baxter, how about this one:
Although it remains a distant threat, the Pentagon and the CIA did not see off the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 only to allow a fresh alliance of potentially nuclear-armed America-haters to form as close as 90 miles from the coast of Florida.
Now, pay attention please. To what does "it" at the start of the sentence refer to? The Pentagon? Well, grammatically yes (though it should be "they" since it's the Pentagon and the CIA), but presumably the US State De-- sorry Sarah Baxter -- had in mind the Soviet Union -- an extremely distant threat indeed, since it does not exist any more. Anyone who can tell me to what the word "it" refers to please use the comments button.
I could go on -- the childish taunts about president Evo Morales's jumpers, name-calling (Chavez is an "oil-rich joker") and guilt by association (Iran, Hamas, Castro) -- but the ambassador of Venezuela, Alfredo Toro Hardy, wrote the following letter to the Sunday Times. Please note, though, Baxter's article appears under the heading of "politics"; Hardy's under that of "opinion".
In her article "Mischief stirs for Bush in the ‘axis of good’" (World News, last week), Sarah Baxter presents a one-sided perspective. Nothing is said about Washington’s active support and connivance with Venezuela’s opposition, the coup d’etat against President Chavez, the oil strike that cost the country more than $10 billion or his seven visits to the US while Bill Clinton was president, during a period when constructive bilateral relations prevailed.
It was with President Bush’s neocons and Cuban exiles in Washington that harassment of the Venezuelan government and bilateral tensions began, and it was Donald Rumsfeld who initially compared Chavez to Hitler. The article does mention, though, an alleged anti-semitism from Chavez, based on a phrase that was put out of context. This anti-semitism was emphatically denied by the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela.
Somewhere there must be a web site dedicated to western reporting of Chavez.
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:34 PM | Comments (1)
April 23, 2006
Disco Castro
Saturday's Gazeta Wyborcza carries a report by Maciej Stasinski about Teodoro Petkoff, the 74-year-old challenger to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. This newspaper, please note, is regarded with deep suspicion for its left-wing and liberal sympathies by the right wing political establishment in Poland. On a couple of things, though, this newspaper, the American media and the most ardent right wingers can comfortably agree. One is Chavez, who can win elections from now until kingdom come but never, ever, be regarded with the same sympathy as George W Bush, who as we all know, won one presidential election and will never win another. There is some entertainment value in watching journalists struggle to fit Chavez's achievements, his huge popular appeal, his charity to America's poor and his democratic credentials into the pigeonhole marked "renegade dictator" along with Castro, Hussein and Milosevic...
Stasinski describes Chavez in the first sentence of the article as an "extreme populist." Now perhaps the Polish language works differently, but can you be an "extreme" populist? Does it mean Chavez strongly (extremely?) cherishes the beliefs that have made him popular? That he has principles, in other words? Here's another free press gem: "The president of Venezuela, like his master, Fidel Castro, is capable of harassing the public for hours with relentless attacks on alleged enemies of the country: neoliberalism, capitalism, the oligarchy, or 'the dangerous Mr. Bush'." I did not live under the horrors of a communist dictatorship but I doubt that "lengthy speeches" would top most Poles' lists of the ills of totalitarianism.
It is wonderful to see how scrupulously Stasinski uses the word "allegedly" (not e.g. Poland's "allegedly" humanitarian occupation of Iraq). The oligarchy is an "alleged" enemy. In fact there is abundant proof that they are real, not alleged, enemies of the country: the oligarchy led a coup to overthrow a popular and democratically elected leader, aided and abetted by another non-alleged enemy of Venezuela, George W Bush.
No Polish discussion of left and right wing international politics can be complete without mention of the US sponsored, right wing death squads in Latin Am--- sorry, of Castro, Chavez's "master." Kaczynski, president of Poland, also has a master. His name is George W Bush and Poland is at war with a small and far away country called Iraq because of this master-servant relationship.
Stasinski does not entirely gloss over the 2002 Venezuelan coup. Although he writes not a word about who organised, carried out or backed the coup, he does briefly refer to Chavez being returned to power after it by a "miracle." Not by the will of the people, understand, but by a miracle. Perhaps God is on Chavez's side.
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:29 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2006
Writers
This month's issue of Lampa (Lamp) has a few features on Stanis?aw Lem, who passed away recently. Radek Knapp writes in one of them "One day I told the Master that I had written a story, to which Lem replied: 'don't write. You'll starve to death'." It's a tough old profession alright but not for everyone. Lem, for instance, is one of the most successful science fiction writers of the century. But take young gun Ignacy Karpowicz, an excerpt of whose latest novel, Niehalo, appears in the same magazine. The novel-writing game gives such poor pickings that this young man (born 1976) has to scrape along doing translations as well - from English, Spanish and Amharic. It's not much but combined with the occasional royalty cheque it just about allows him the financial independence to live in both Costa Rica and Ethiopia, when he's not travelling around Central America and Eastern Africa.
I never did take to Lem. Solaris was a struggle and I cannot even remember if I ever managed to finish The Invincible. Gazeta Wyborcza published an extract from one of his masterpieces to mark his passing. They titled it "Sepulka?! Without a wife?!" In it Tichy, the narrator, finds himself in strange place where all the time he hears the word "sepulka." His curiousity is aroused. Even though there are signs advertising this sepulka he cannot figure out what it is. At last he goes into a shop selling sepulkas and tries to buy one. The salescreature is horrified to learn that he does not have a wife and refuses to sell him one. Undeterred, Tichy, asks an acquaintance he bumps into in a bar to sell him one. The acquaintance's wife overhears and faints and the narrator is heaved out of the bar.
Now I know it's the future and they do things differently there and all that, but what kind of a moron tries to find out what something is by buying it? I myself am a stranger in a strange land but it would never cross my mind to find out what a "preserwatywa" was by trying to buy one off an acquaintance in a bar - especially not after such a reception as Tichy received in the shop. ("Preserwatywa" is the Polish for condom.)
Still, it's hard to dislike a writer who would say "I have tried to forget what I wrote in The Magellan Nebula but I don't know if I have succeeded because it is a hopeless book. That Sesame is very poor and Astronauts is terrible." I must be doing something wrong.
Posted by hgrodsk at 08:54 AM | Comments (1)
April 18, 2006
Timing
April 14th - Gazeta Wyborcza drops its cover price to 1.50.
April 15th - Gazeta Wyborcza publishes an article by Adam Krzemi?ski of Polityka about Das Bild (publisher Axel Springer Verlag) entitled "Tabloid with Blood on its Hands".
April 18th - A new newspaper, Dziennik, appears in Polish shops. Price: 1.50. Publisher: Axel Springer Verlag.
Posted by hgrodsk at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2006
Coalition
You have to hand it to Gazeta Wyborcza 's pictures editor. Wojciech Olku?nik's photographs in today's paper of Andrzej Lepper as he slides his way into the job of deputy prime minister do much more to convey the newspaper's disgust than the tedious and tendentious comment articles accompanying the news that Lepper's Samoobrona party has signed an opening coalition agreement with PiS (Law and "Justice").
Here's a link to the front page picture. Unfortunately, the one on page four is not online.
Posted by hgrodsk at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2006
I Really Shouldn’t…
Being stuck in a bus behind a button import company van last weekend proved a by-no-means-rare-enough opportunity to subject myself to the horror that is commercial Polish radio. (“I don’t mind the formatting,” a friend of mine once said, “but must they all have the same format?”)
All Polish women in advertising went to the same voiceover school, where they were taught to smile while speaking. The big fat bloated American PR specialist that indoctrinated the entire Polish advertising industry gave the men slightly different instructions: smirk while speaking. So the women come across as simpering idiots and the men sound like sweating perverts. With one hand firmly gripping their microphones, the other, you feel, to your sickened horror, is despoiling something beautiful.
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying George Orwell described advertising as the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket, thus rendering all of the above superfluous - but it was a long bus journey.
Posted by hgrodsk at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2006
April Fool's Day
I am proud and happy to report that I fell for all five April Fool's jokes in the last Nie bar one.
That Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski paid a state visit to the US instead of his (identical twin) brother and president of Poland, Lech? Sure, why not?
That Minister Wasserman wanted to drain a lake in memory of Pope John Paul II?
That you can buy a paint that, applied to your car, eludes detection by police radars? Yes, I fell for that too, though in my defence, I assumed the paint didn't work - only that people believed it did and were buying it.
That no ducks had died of H5N1 in Poland yet? Well, why wouldn't you believe it? (There's a complicated pun here on the word for duck and the names Kaczy?ski and Donald Tusk of the PO.)
That Andrzej Lepper, populist peasant leader, actually comes from an aristocratic background? Real life loves irony no less than writers.
Nothing is too absurd for Polish politics and life not to be true.
British public life is more staid, or perhaps its journalists less inventive, because all the Guardian could manage was a story that Chris Martin from Coldplay had gone Tory. Naturally I fell for that too. I'd have been a fool not to.
Posted by hgrodsk at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)