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November 17, 2006
Free Speech
Taking Poland by storm right now and for the next eight -- no, make that seven -- days is one Krzysztof Kononowicz, who ran for president of Bia?ystok. You can watch his appearance on a teevee show if you search around but it's a slightly unpleasant experience. The question of manipulation comes up and -- well, to comment further would be, well unpleasant. You'll know what I mean if you watch the dreaded Warsaw meeja interviewing him.
A far more interesting nine day wonder is Hubert H., the homeless man who was busted for insulting Kaczy?ski while some -- ahem -- patriotic police were checking his ID one day in Warsaw Central. H. disappeared from view, apparently unaware that he was up on such serious charges. He was taken in by the police in Katowice, who, not realising what a big fish they had caught, let him go again. He has been on the -- not run, exactly, maybe on the walk -- for months but finally he has had his day in court in another coup for the forces of law and order and censorship. There's a news report here. Even if you don't speak Polish you can probably get the gist of what Mr. H. said about Kaczy?ski that has so exercised the authorities. Have a look: he's probably not what you're expecting.
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:12 PM | Comments (1)
November 13, 2006
Elections
After extensive research (one and a half minutes on Google) I have been unable to find the source for "no matter who you vote for the government always wins." It's certainly true here in Poland, with local elections just over and a government still firmly in power.
An interesting difference of opinion has come out in the media, though. Today's super Fakt tabloid says the turn-out was "marna" (miserable, lousy), while Gazeta Wyborcza says excitedly that it was "?wietna" (splendid, excellent). Fakt announced a turn-out of 34%, GW of 45-49%. Piotr Pacewicz, in GW, actually writes
Serce ros?o wraz z rosn?cymi w ci?gu dnia szacunkami frekwencji wyborczej. Na pewno b?dzie o kilka dobrych punktów wy?sza ni? w wyborach parlamentarnych 2005, kiedy przestraszyli?my si?, ?e z udzia?em w g?osowaniu b?dzie coraz gorzej.Yes, he really wrote that, and he's a grown man.
The heart has swollen along with the increasing turn-out estimates during the day. It [the turn-out, not the heart, presumably] will certainly be a good few points higher than in 2005's parliamentary elections, when we feared voter participation would be ever worse
Posted by hgrodsk at 08:20 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2006
How Capitalist is Poland? (III)
Sponsorship is an idea that should never have been divulged to the Poles. At the moment there is an ad campaign for hospice care. Posters on bus stops invite you to send a text message to the hospice charity. They tell you how much the text costs with VAT but they don't tell you what the rate of VAT is or what proportion of the cost goes to the hospice charity and what (if any) to the mobile phone operators.
Such trifling information is of far less importance than the list of sponsors of the advertisements: underneath the posters appear the logos of no less than 25 companies and "foundations." How mean is that? "Oh yeah, we'll sponsor your sick dogs' home or whatever it is, but we won't sponsor all of it. What, you think Glaxo Smith Kline is made of money? Tell you what: we'll sponsor one twenty fifth of the costs. Can't say fairer than that, can you?"
If you inspect the poster carefully you see the list of logos is actually divided into three groups: "media patrons," "operators" (i.e. mobile phone operators) and "sponsors." The distinction is probably vitally important to their taxation experts and corporate lawyers but to you and me it looks like an undignified scramble to be associated with a good cause at the minimum of expense.
Posted by hgrodsk at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2006
Local, national and international news
All news is local, they say, so here's what Poland looks like going by the pages of a classified ads newspaper that comes out twice a week here:
Poles love cars. One third of the paper is given over to them. The section marked "hobby" is less than one page long, hopefully because hobbyists have their own, specialised publications and not because having a car is so much more important than having something to do with your spare time.
It's surprising how many ads there are for bugging devices.
Or maybe not. (English transcript here.)
Gynaecologists sometimes advertise a "full range of services." This is a widely-understood code for "we do abortions."
When it comes to houses and flats Poles really, really like something called "mozaika," which the dictionary helpfully defines as "mosaic (architectural term)." Having tiles ("glazura" (glazed tiles), "terakota") in the house is more important than just about anything else, including insulation, but not as important as plastic windows. Something called "komandor" is also vitally important. Komandor is a brand of sliding door wardrobes. If you have the old-fashioned (read: communist) type of wardrobe door, which opens out on contraptions known as "hinges" you are a clod, a bumpkin. Remember: it's not "location, location, location" here. It's: "mozaika, glazura, terakota."
Either the law turns a blind eye to it or it's perfectly legal for employers to discriminate against people on the grounds of age and sex in Poland: "shopgirl wanted," "waitress wanted," "male receptionist wanted," "woman aged 30 to 40," "men aged 18 to 40"... and so on. Some clown in Warsaw is looking for native speaker English teachers with a "good accent." Speaking of educational services, a fourth year English student will write your essays and assignments for you at the bargain basement price of 20 zloties a pop. In fact you can buy essays and theses on practically any subject you want. There's really no need to attend all those tiresome lectures or sit in that library all day long. And since your underpaid (or just greedy?) teacher has about five jobs and is supervising 60 MA theses there's a good chance you won't get caught. (This progressive approach to knowledge (something to be bought and sold) has also resulted in Poland having wonderfully courteous and highly skilled drivers.)
And where would we be without a few cheap laughs at Eastern European fashion. From the clothing section:
"Gent's Adidas tracksuit, navy blue, size XL, hardly worn, unusual design. 89 zloties"
"Leather jacket, Rambo-style, dark, good condition, 120 zloties o.n.o."
What about the real news from Poland? A pharmaceutical company was caught selling faulty medicine. Instead of just ordering (on whose authority, by the way?) a recall of the product the primesident of Poland has shut down the whole company and blamed the "third republic" (i.e. the "uk?ad") for the error. (The third republic means post-1989 Poland: Kaczy?ski desparately wants post-2005-elections Poland, ruled by PiS and assorted whacko opportunists, to be known as the "fourth republic.")
In a news story entirely unrelated to this sleazy exploitation of a tragic mistake to make some cheap political capital, local elections are being held on Sunday. The good people of Gazeta Wyborcza apparently think voting will make a difference.
Meanwhile, further afield, the establishment has won yet another landslide victory in the US mid term elections, with members of the democrepublican party controlling over 95% of both the house and the senate.
Posted by hgrodsk at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2006
Why does Gazeta Wyborcza hate America?
South America, of course. Here is the first sentence of a news (not comment) article reporting Daniel Ortega's victory in Nicaragua's presidential elections: "The former revolutionary and friend of communist dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuelan populist Hugo Chavez won Sunday's presidential elections." As I mentioned before, no such discussion of politics in this newspaper can be complete without the demonising of Castro. The article is so hilariously prejudiced it is worth quoting at some length:
Yesterday in Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, the worst nightmare of those who dream of the defeat of populists came true... The elections were won by a man who is the personification of demagoguery, opportunism and pandering to anything that might yield votes and popularity.Yes, the parallells with Poland are striking, though unmentioned.
The article (signed by "MAS") describes the Sandanistas' contributions to Nicaragua after their overthrow of Somoza in 1979: universal education and social care and the nationalisation and dividing up of private fortunes. Pretty awful, eh? Damned populists. The Sandinistas in some mysterious, unexplained way "?ci?gn?li" (brought upon themselves) the hostility of the USA who armed terrorists to fight in a "civil war." Ortega, we are told, was president from 1984 to 1990, after which the country turned to the right and became plunged in corruption. Sandanistas (who were out of power, remember) were, it says here, enthusiastic participants in the sleaze.
See here for some explanation of just why Nicaragua is so poor.
Also in today's GW is an article about the US vice-ambassador's outrageous interference in national Polish politics. Giertych (minister of education) had the temerity to propose a debate on the civilian casualties in Iraq. This caused unease in Washington and, the American said, if it had happened in France or Germany the minister would have been sacked.
Conspicuous by its absence from the newspaper's report on Ortega's victory is mention of the following:
In Managua, U.S. Embassy spokesperson Kristin Stewart threatened economic sanctions in the event of an Ortega victory. She was joined by four Republican congressmen threatening Nicaraguan voters with a cut off of remittances from the United States. Rep. Tancredo, (R-CO) issued his threat in a letter to Nicaragua's Ambassador to the U.S. while Rep. Rohrabacher, (R-CA) wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking him "to prepare in accordance with U.S. law, contingency plans to block any further money remittances from being sent to Nicaragua in the event that the FSLN enters government." Rep. Royce, (R-CA) and Rep. Hoekstra (R-MI) wrote a similar letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The BBC also mentions the US threats to the people of Nicaragua.
Posted by hgrodsk at 03:39 PM | Comments (2)
November 04, 2006
Astroturf (II)
Unilever's public-spirited campaign to make women feel the need to purchase their beauty products continues. The latest manoeuvre is an interview on the subject of beauty and self-esteem with a sociologist in Wysokie Obcasy, the teeth-grindingly awful ladies' weekend supplement to the crusading Gazeta Wyborcza. This colour magazine specialises in finding women who are (or were) successful in some field or other but have not received the recognition they deserve due to the patriarchal nature of society. They then present their stories in such a way as to turn you forever against their subjects.
The interview is entitled "Kraj brzydkich kobiet?" (Land of Ugly Women?). Note that question mark well. If it were missing the newspaper could be accused of lowering women's self-esteem in an effort to get them to compensate by buying Unilever products. And that wouldn't be very feminist, would it? But there is a question mark so the sisters can read on, confident of finding a thoughtful, patriarchy-challenging insight into the beauty myth, the manipulation of women's self-image by advertisers and the--- oh, this is just shooting fish in a barrel. One sentence from the accompanying graphic is enough to show the bankruptcy and complete lack of understanding of the working of language in the publication:
"Prawdziwe Pi?kno. Pod takim has?em ruszy?a w Polsce kampania marki D., która ma na celu wsparcie kobiet w budowaniu poczucia akceptacji w?asnej urody i osobowo?ci.
True Beauty. This is the motto of the Polish D. campaign, whose aim is to support women in building a sense of acceptation of their own beauty and personality.
The by-line is "BOSA"* but it could have been written in Unilever GHQ: the claim that the campaign is to support women (and not to sell soap, for example) is presented as fact. How does BOSA know this? Where is the scepticism proper to journalism? Where the evidence that this is in fact the purpose of Unilever's ad campaign?
Accompanying the interview are pictures of two models from the Unilever ad campaign. Immediately after the interview is a full page advertisement for one of Unilever's products. In the succeeding pages are two half-page ads in the "True Beauty" campaign. Unilever is playing WO like a cheap banjo. Or so I hope.
*The interviewer in the main article (which wild horses will not induce me to read) is Katarzyna Bosacka.
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:08 PM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2006
How Capitalist is Poland? (II)
This week's Nie tells of the predicament of an Armenian small trader in Poland. In brief, he has been refused permission to continue residing in the country because, well yes, he is paying his own way, and yes, he is employing a few Polish people and no he's no burden on society and he's not in trouble with the law but you see the thing is he isn't contributing enough to the Polish state. Sure he pays taxes and his employees' social insurance and so on but it's not enough. Again you can see the scorn Polish authorities have for the small deal.
Sometimes Poles grimly talk of the "American free for all" that it unfettered capitalism but I'm not sure the Americans would turn their noses up at someone who is making his own way -- however unspectacularly. In this, as in many other cases, the Poles are far more cut throat (though counterproductively so) than their ideological masters and another phrase they use seems more appropriate: "the wild East." Of course, libellous-minded people might be able to suggest another reason why the officials in question are making life so difficult for this Armenian business man.
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:56 PM | Comments (0)