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January 26, 2008
It's the ecology, stupid
Poles are slowly realising that plastic bags are an unsightly, long-lasting non-biodegradable blot on the landscape - no, sorry. They're realising that a cheap PR buck can be made by pretending to be concerned about the environment.
Spotted on a typical plastic bag from a multi-national supermarket company operating in Poland: "This bag is environment friendly." The geniuses in Head Office have discovered that a bag - even a plastic one - can be used more than once.
Posted by hgrodsk at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2008
Poland has an East
A lorry driver died in the 20-mile queue at the Ukrainian-Polish border crossing at Dorohusk. Warsaw sat up and noticed: Poland has an eastern border. To be sure, Poland’s joining the Schengen pact has meant its virtual closure to Ukrainians, but the emphasis in the national press had been more on the feel-good opening of the western border. “Poles can now wander from Riga to Lisbon without showing their passports” – that was the theme of the delirious reports from December, when the momentous, historical etc event took place. As the supply of cheap and easily exploitable labour from the Ukraine dries up and Warsaw journalists have to start cleaning their houses and raising their children themselves we can expect more notice to be paid to “Poland B” as the east is sometimes called. For now, though, it is still largely ignored, notwithstanding the occasional death in a three day queue. The queues at the border are caused by a go-slow by the Polish customs officers, who complain of understaffing and low pay. The Ministry’s response to what I would presume is a blow to the economy is to wash its hands: “Ministerstwo Finansów twierdzi, że obsadę przejść mają zapewnić dyrektorzy izb celnych” (The Ministry has stated that ensuring the personnel for the border crossings is the responsibility of the directors of the customs divisions). Somebody else's problem.
Posted by hgrodsk at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2008
Poles are too mean to pay for public health
Poland’s public health service is still in a jock. Doctors out, nurses out, patients being evacuated—I’ve lost track to be honest. But here comes Agata Nowakowska of Gazeta Wyborcza to take me by the hand and patiently explain that “Raising Health Insurance Contributions Only Puts Out Fires,” (the title of her opinion piece in today’s paper). Her logic runs as follows: since equal access to health services is already a fiction there is no point in investing in public health (i.e. by raising – during an economic boom, mind you – the health insurance contribution paid by taxpayers, whom she cloyingly reduces to “emerytki” and “nauczycielki,” i.e. female pensioners and female teachers).
Sick people go private not because they are naturally capitalist but because the public service is an underfunded shambles. Nowakowska’s is the same circular argument used by Marek Rocki in his attack on publicly funded education: The state should stop funding BLANK because it underfunds BLANK. You can fill in the blank any way you please: orphanages, fire engines, nursing homes...
Posted by hgrodsk at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)
January 11, 2008
It couldn’t happen here
We have America to thank for what must be or should be or maybe already is a popular new adjective: subprime. Northern Rock crumbled but Poland is safe because as any neophyte knows the market never falls. A brief survey of the advertising of bank loans here:
1. We will not check your credit rating.
2. We will lend you money even if you earn 600 zloties (average pay in Poland: allegedly 3,000 zloties).
3. Your ability to pay is not an issue.
Posted by hgrodsk at 04:02 PM | Comments (1)
January 04, 2008
Wonderful Drinking Den
Cudowna Melina (Wonderful Drinking Den) by Kazimierz Orłoś is an interesting case of a book that requires a certain knowledge of its times to be fully appreciated. Written in Communist Poland (1971), it is, to say the least, schematic. You can almost guess the pattern: an idealistic young party apparatchik comes to town and cleans it up, rooting out the corrupt and the bourgeois, in an object lesson in socialist morality. Except that in Orłoś’s version of the tale it is the party apparatchiks that are cynical, corrupt and greedy. The new broom is not the local party secretary but the chairman of the town council – and he fails miserably in his attempt to reform the town and break up the cliques. Not only that, but he is generally unpopular, earning the nickname “Chrystusek” (Little Jesus) because he will not take bribes or even a drink.
That this outwardly formulaic book is in fact a parody is signalled on the back cover by later, helpful reviewers but there are hints within as well. One of them is the remarkable fact that there are funny bits in it. Take for instance the description of Sergeant Zenon Olszewski: “He was known for the implacable position he took with regard to the hooligan elements that did not observe order and discipline in our town. He was particularly attentive to the matter of correctly crossing the road.” So incorruptible is Olszewski that when people try to go over his head to Major Popielak the major can only wring his hands and say “There’s nothing I can do… The policeman is within his rights,” which must have brought a bitter smile to Poles of the times.
It also illustrates the usefulness of parody: no need to immerse oneself in the real socialist realist literature when books like this serve as both entertainment and literary handbooks. I also cannot help wonder if Orłoś was also taking a swipe at “dirty realism” too, of the type found in Hłasko and Nowakowski. At one point a hippy turns up in town. This harmless stranger is introduced, described and inevitably beaten up and run out of town in just three and a half short pages.
Although the satire is quite broad – the establishment is totally rotten with almost no redeeming features at all – there are some excellent small touches, as when the party secretary books a table in a café but does not deign to say for how many. The owner, in turn, does not dare to ring back and ask.
Cudowna Melina fell foul of the censor and was published in Paris in 1973. Orłoś was banned from publishing for the rest of the existence of the People’s Republic of Poland with the exception of a short period in 1980-1981.
Posted by hgrodsk at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)