Kapuściński isn’t always so mistily allegorical, though. Here’s a quote from Wojna futbolowa (The Football War):

Because it was an oligarchic government dependent on the United States the decree [concerning agricultural reform] did not provide for the division of the latifundia or for the division of lands belonging to the American United Fruit concern, which had large banana plantations on the territory of Honduras.

For a time Cywińska was even minister for culture. She caused a furore by saying that theatres under construction (for many years) in Lublin and Kielce should be turned into toilet paper factories. Needless to say, she’d do it all again, only this time “…I’d be harder.” What? Even harder then she already is? By my calculations, that would fall under the category of “well” hard, possibly even “well hard with a sarf London accent.” One of her protégés, Hanna Śleszyńska, supplies the obligatory compliment: “She is demanding but actors treated seriously give their all so as not to let her down.” The only question is who is being complimented? Even when Cywińska is wrong she’s tough: For a time she headed some cultural foundation some of whose funds were dodgily invested, mainly by members of the foundation. As a result she was forced to resign because that’s what being the boss means: taking responsibility for things that aren’t even (directly) your fault. That’s how goddam tough it is in the hot seat.

Bad and all as it is for unionized workers in Western Europe, things will be much worse for Polish academics – or will be if professor Żylicz, chairman of the Polish Science Foundation, gets his way. He is quoted in Polityka (April 5th), saying that in order to attract heavy weight grants to universities, academic jobs will have to be filled by competition. Fair enough so far but the jobs will have to be “contractual in nature, and limited in time.” So no more permanent jobs for lecturers. One objection seems obvious: what price academic freedom if in three years time your GlaxoSmithklineWelcomePriceWaterhouseCoopersMicroBasf grant runs out and you have to go begging for another “grant.” But what amazes is the casual consignment of a whole group of workers to permanent stress and insecurity. You can bet Żylicz would not so calmly, barefacedly suggest that miners or nurses have their careers destroyed and family lives ruined.

Quoted in the same article is professor Andrzej Jaszczyk of the Mining Academy, who repeats the very modish idea that academics should take part in exchanges with other universities. Again, fair enough but he also says academics should be forbidden from working in the same university they did their PhDs in: “Academics should be on the move.” Goodbye job security, goodbye sweet old hometown…

The Catholic University of Lublin of John Paul the Second [sic] is in hot water for handing out doctoral degrees when not entitled to do so. It’s a vexed and complex question of staffing and seniority but it can, fortunately, be summed up in one sentence: the boffins can’t count. The university did not have the required number of suitably qualified staff to award doctoral degrees in pedagogy and economics in the years 2005 – 2007. This could be bad news for deputy Joanna Mucha: she was awarded her PhD in economics in October 2007.

Andrzej Matejuk, the new police chief, announced plans to create a special unit to deal with football hooligans. His predecessor set one up six months ago.

Ad on the side of car the regularly parked blocking the fire access road to my block of flats: “Are you looking for Compensation and Damages? Call ….”

Jacek Kurski.

The television stations that still keep inviting Jacek Kurski on to their shows. Here’s what Kurski had to say for himself in April 4th’s Gazeta Wyborcza:

“I, Jacek Kurski, apologise to Donald Tusk … for making false allegations … that PZU, using taxpayers’ money, financed billboards of Donald Tusk with the caption ‘a man with principles’ …”

Speaking of liars, today’s paper has an ad for a car which is rotten with lies. The ad announces a seven year guarantee. Check the small print and it turns out to be a five year guarantee (only the power transmission is guaranteed for seven years). The advertised price is 23,450 zloties. Again: out with the magnifying glass and you discover that this is only half the price of the car. There’s a financing deal on offer and, as required by law, the real annual percentage rate is dutifully given in the small print: 0% to 11.46%. Some help. Better still, the calculations used in arriving at the figures are based on a car which is not featured in the ad! It’s nearly as bad as the toothpaste that promises “3D” whiteness.

I say: here’s fun! In the Catholic University of Lublin of John Paul the Second on April 9th there’s a trade fair: “targi zakonne.” That’s right: fair’s fair and the trade is holy orders. Among the attractions of the day are a discussion entitled “Holy orders: Avant Garde or Antiquariat.” But it’s not all serious discussions about monks and nuns. Also on the cards is a “Pokaz ‘mody’ zakonnej” (Holy orders ‘fashion’ show).

Prompted by this, I decided to devote this one to absurdities of Polish life. Like for instance, the requirement that in order to sit a driving test you must have done a course in a driving school. If you fail you have to do a supplemental course in a driving school. Guess where the examiners are recruited from? Well from the driving schools, of course. What matters is not that you can drive but that your driving school papers are in order.

Here’s a direct quote from Jarosław Kaczyński of PiS: “I am against a referendum because it would certainly produce unambiguous [jednoznaczne] results… I think that referendums should be held in those countries where public opinion is against [the Lisbon Constitution]. The people should not be cheated. The decent thing would be to have referendums in England [sic], France and Holland.” (Nasz Dziennik, March 12th, reprinted in Nie). On second thoughts, I’m not sure that is so absurd. He’s only saying what all the Eurocrats think: no referendums because people might vote for the “wrong” thing. When Ireland rejected the Nice referendum, the exercise was simply repeated until the people voted yes.

Nie also tells of the following happy situation in the administration of public health service in Poland: the NFZ (roughly equivalent to the UK’s NHS) draws up reports on abuses in the health services (overcharging the state in various ways) but the organ that is empowered to do anything about the abuses doesn’t get the reports because the NFZ is not obliged to hand them over, which it doesn’t want to do because if it did it (i.e. the NFZ) would get less money from the state to provide health services. Clear? Of course not.

I commented before on Konrad Niklewicz’s bizarre ideas about who should sponsor the debate on GMOs – i.e. the companies that stand to earn most from their introduction, not scientists, the state or, God help us all, opponents. And here a week or two later is the same Niklewicz writing about how lobbyists rule in Brussels. One example is the “Competitivness [sic] in Biotechnology Advisory Group,” of which the dismayed Niklewicz writes: “It does not have a single non-governmental organization representative; it has six scientists and twenty business representatives” (Gazeta Wyborcza March 28th). This article is shoved back to page 30, the business section, unlike the same author’s clarion call for business to lead the debate on GMO, which was on page 2.

Another curiosity of Polish law: it is possible to libel the dead. Roman Giertych has to publish an apology to the family of Jacek Kuroń for remarks he made in 2006. (Kuroń died in 2004.) I’d take Kuroń’s side against Giertych any time, living or dead, but in my innocence I really did think that dead people had no say in the matter.

When Minister for Justice Ziobro left office he had to return some of the gimcracks our rulers are given to help them oppress us. Specifically, something like three mobile phones and a laptop computer. Ziobro, a man of impeccable morals, obviously had nothing to hide and the damage evident in the returned laptop was purely from wear and tear. He was a hard man, Ziobro. The laptop is on the road to recovery of data now, though. The unencrypted data shows that he was writing the scripts for the State TV news service. On second thoughts, I'll put that in the passive voice: scripts for the State TV news service were written on his laptop. The encrypted stuff will be denuded and demasked in the next week or two.

It’s no wonder the present government is doing nothing.

But somehow it has come about that in a country which – it is ever clearer – is involved in a civilisational leap, everything public has for years been consistently pushed into deeper chaos. The point of this is obvious. When TVP [public television] broadcasts only dancing on ice and the speeches of chairman Kaczyński, when the quality of public education has fallen well below private education, and when a visit to a specialist in a public health clinic means a three year wait everyone will finally agree with the ideological thesis that all public services should be privatized

So it would seem that the white summit mountaineers have come up with the wonderful idea of formalising and legalising the existing jock.

While we’re at it, why not have a chemicals and cosmetics company lead the public information campaign on the beauty myth? Or let the cigarette industry inform us about the dangers of smoking…

Niklewicz writes that BASF earned 57.9 billion euros last year. Just 1% of that would buy a lot of "study and education,” he writes, though he doesn’t put the words in inverted commas. By an extraordinary coincidence, BASF has an ad on page seven of the paper. Perhaps the company has already started informing us about GMO.

Some head teachers held the exams early. The questions therefore found their way onto the internet allowing half the pupils to cheat their mocks, just like the real thing.

Recently I had the opportunity to cast an eye over the mock finals in English and I can confirm that they have screwed up their education system with the zeal of the recently converted. A typical assignment might be to write a letter containing four pieces of information. For transmitting the four pieces of information there are four marks. For writing correct English there is one mark. It’s the communicative method, you see: less of that stuffy old grammar. The trouble is that English is a terribly easy language to communicate in (I know – trust an educationalist to turn a strength into a weakness). Duke out a few stuttering syllables and you’re away. “Arrive tomorrow night” is perfectly clear English – even acceptable if you’re still into writing telegrams.

Okay, you could argue over how marks should be divided between communication and correctness but surely even the most dogmatic educationalist would clap a hand to her head at the failsafe mechanism: the teachers marking the exams are expected to mark every incorrect word. If the proportion of incorrect words exceeds 25% the pupil fails, regardless of the amount of information transmitted. This of course means that teachers are supposed to count every single word written by their dozens of pupils…

“I will see you before you meeting him.” How many words are wrong there? One word – “meeting”? or did the pupil mean to write “I will see you before your meeting with him”? If the latter, then “you” is wrong” and “with” is wrong (since it is missing). That’s two words out of eight – enough to fail outright – or is it out of nine? God forbid the pupil write: “I will see you before you’re meet him.”

Among the complaints is that Polish academia is inward-looking. Professor do not publish enough in internationally peer-reviewed journals. There’s a lot of back scratching going on. Fair enough. But “international” means “English language” and some of the letters and articles and appeals betray an alarming linguistic slave mentality. Andzrej Koźmiński, rector of a private business school called – wait for it – the Leon Koźmiński Academy manages to use the word “English” 6 times in a 400 word letter to the paper. He suggests that entire programmes be taught through English – including post-graduate and doctoral programmes. Professors must have English language publications and posts should only be given to people who speak English. When Bismarck tried that it was called “Kulturkampf.”

To prove that there’s no old fogey like a young old fogey, there is an article by Łukasz Abramowicz and Michał Miąskiewicz, two young hotshots who have made it where people speak English. They present their ideal university and round off the article with a ringing false dichotomy – it’s either our way or Rydzyk’s way. Among the ideals of their university is that students would ring their profs at home – that’s how down with it the faculty and the students would be. You might take a course in linguistics because a part of it is devoted to the study of rhythm in the language of hip hop. After finishing this ideal college, they suggest, you might get job in hip hop management! How this article got published would be a mystery if it were not for the fact that it says – without offering any evidence – that the development of good universities without the help of big business is impossible. You press the buttons you get the banana.

A personal favourite, though, would have to be the story of one Joanna Bronowicka, just a regular average schmo, who studied in Harvard, where she got talking to a professor, who hired her as his assistant on ten bucks an hour. Things weren’t so good in Paris, though: there her prof was as distant and uncontactable as in Poland. Obviously, he was cuter than his American counterpart: seeing the ambitious young Bronowicka coming a mile off, he decided he had better things to do than pay the class pain ten dollars an hour to pester him after every lecture.

And therein is the rub. It’s always the lecturers’ fault. No one ever suggests reforming students.

In short, by 1975 there were three times as many low babies, high babies and junior infants as there had been when the free milk scheme was set up and yet the amount of milk being doled out was unchanged. The low babies, high babies and junior infants had not been sitting on their hands while this situation was developing, of course. Over the years they had dug deeper into their pocket money, using it to buy milk in school tuck shops. Others, less fortunate, took on newspaper rounds to earn the necessary money to pay for milk supplied by private dairies exploiting the neglect in public spending. Unfortunately, the quality of the “private milk,” as it became known, was not always what it should have been. Instead of the full-fat, creamy, rich, tasty state-supplied milk, it was frequently watered down and sometimes even sugared, which, along with the toil of working after school meant that the little children on private milk were often poor students: distracted, quarrelsome and sometimes sleepy. Many seemed to think that because they were paying five new pence a week for their milk that they did not have to do any sums or spellings in class. There were other abuses of the system. It was complained that the big children (aged 6 and even 7) were hogging all the creamiest milk for themselves while the small and/or less well off children had to make do with the leftovers.

Primary school demagogues appeared, condemning the “fiction” and “hypocrisy” of free milk. “Since it’s not really free for most kids,” they said, “it shouldn’t be free for any.” Other more sober six year olds argued that if low babies, high babies and junior infants had to pay for their own milk they would not waste it by spillage, dribbling and milk-fights. Still others - mostly ignored - pointed out that by halting the purchase of a consignment of 16-inch pandy bats from the US, the government could easily free up enough money to buy milk for all the little children.

In the end the controversy was ended when Coca Cola generously offered to take over the free milk scheme, renaming it the “carbs for life scheme.”

Also, the government – or is it the sejm? – is a hundred days old. Nothing much to report there, though.