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Here’s a report from the Irish national broadcaster’s news site which may be beyond parody but by jingo that isn’t going to stop me. For those unfamiliar with the subject, two pieces of background information: (1) the Irish economy has hit a brick wall (2) “Tánaiste” is the Irish name for the post of deputy prime minister.

Govt made very good decisions - Tánaiste

(The government is great, says government)

Saturday, 28 March 2009 15:16

Tánaiste Mary Coughlan has said the Government made very good decisions about how to invest our money in recent years.

(Token Fianna Fail woman Mary Coughlan has said she gambled our money wisely in recent years.)

Minister Coughlan defended how the Government handled the economy during an interview with Marian Finucance on RTÉ radio.

(Coughlan was being grilled by Smoky Finucane on the radio when she complimented herself.)

She admitted that there was an over reliance on the construction industry and said the country took its eye off the ball and was over exuberant.

(She admitted being in the pocket of a handful of building barons and blamed everybody else for her carelessness and champagne-tent insouciance)

However she said we did not blow the boom because we paid off our debt, invested in pensions and provided new services.

(However, not all of our short term winnings were wasted: Bobo Justus got his dues without having to work us over with the oranges, the “legitimate” financial industry also got paid and a few people got meals on wheels or new blackboards or what-have-you.)

The Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment also said competitiveness is hugely important and she is looking at ways we can reduce costs and attract more investment here.

(Coughlan, who is also the minister for outsourcing and laying off people, said that for Irish business to succeed, Irish workers must earn less, and that she is looking at ways of attracting back the mercurial investment capital that has stood us in such good stead in these hard times.)

However she said we are not a low cost economy and that is not necessarily where the Irish people want to be.

(However, she reiterated that workers earn too much and that is not necessarily where capital wants to be.)

What with Sylwia Chutnik, Michał Witkowski and Dorota Masłowska’s Między nami dobrze jest, I’ve had quite a run of luck with books and plays by young writers lately. It’s not all good news on the young writing scene, though. Take novelist Jacek Dehnel (b. 1980), who wrote an article for Polityka a couple of weeks back (March 14th) that gives a flavour of the man, of the times, of the Polish intelligentsia.

He was in Venice. I was in Venice too, once, but I did it all wrong. I arrived on an overnight train, wandered around and saw the sights and stayed in a cheap hotel and ate pizza and got a throat infection and had to go back to the factory after only a few days. Also, I was there in the summer – a fatal mistake, Mr. Dehnel tells us, as summer is “…when the canals stink, and tourists of all countries unite in a great human river…” Bleedin’ tourists. He means me, of course. Mr. Dehnel was there in winter and he found it exactly as Brodski describes it in Znak wodny (“Watermark”). That’s pretty much how I remember it too: exactly like Mr. Wotsisname said. There were, as Jacek recalls and I too recall, lots of “avvocati,” “dottori” and simply heaps of “fondamenti.” Or I presume there were. I don’t speak Italian as well as Jacuś and I don’t know what these things are: advocados, daughters and foundations, presumably. It turns out lots of famous people are buried in Venice – Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde – no wait, that’s somewhere else. Diagilew, Strawiński, Pound… Did you know that Ezra Pound ordered two violin sonatas for his long-time lover Olga Rudge from Georges Antheil, whom Strawiński met in Berlin? It’s true.

The article brought back to me all too forcefully why I was unreluctantly forced to abandon Dehnel’s Lala after a few dozen pages.

Michal Witkowski’s Lubiewo (2005) - though much concerned with the passage of time, especially from communist Poland to the present, glorious, third republic - probably fits the description of “queer literature.” The Lubiewo of the title is a beach he goes to where he meets, among many others, a group of complex-free, open, right-on, emancipated gays - one with peroxide dreads, another with a tatoo - playing ball and speaking in the language of current affairs magazines. Recognising him as a writer, one of them says:

“You’ve got to write about us, about us Gays… It has to be about two middle class gays, university educated, doctoral students in management and finances*, bespectacled, wearing jumpers… So they’ve created a lasting relationship and want to adopt a child but they keep running into problems. Society - get me? - won’t accept them even though they’re cultured and peaceful, as the reader sees. To make the contrast greater let their neighbours have a horribly dysfunctional relationship. They drink and beat their children but they’re the ones the state lets adopt children where it refuses our couple the right, even though a boy (a boy!) would be on the pig’s back with them. [...]”

“Umm. A great idea for a book, an excellent Valentine’s day present: gay couples would buy it in the shopping centres. I’ll run along now and write it. Gotta dash - I might make some money off it.”

Perhaps he would have made some money too but that is most emphatically not the book Witkowski wrote. This is what he wrote (using feminine grammatical forms - the right-on gays use masculine forms): “And I’m an intolerant old unfit, bad over the top faggot as closed to all your discourses as a communist era butcher’s after six. I am Alexis Carrington!” Elsewhere, with reference to the right-on gays’ meaningful relationships he writes “Ja chcę nieznajomego, co mnie wyrżnie jak burą sukę…” This one is not easy to translate, so I’ll just settle for “I want a stranger that’ll ride me like an old bike…” This time the pronoun is no longer masculine or feminine but “co,” which applies to objects…. Lubiewo is rough trading, no-holds barred stuff. An English translation is apparently in the works and I would recommend it.

* They’re a step up from the aspirations of Ala in Masłowska’s Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą bialo-czerwoną (White and Red), who suggests that the narrator must be studying “administration and management” - finances are always better that admin - but it’s good to see that not everyone in Poland has fully bought into chimera economics. Come to think of it, there’s a well-known line from a communist era film in which a character’s profession is described as “director” - of what, of course, it didn’t matter, as he was a made (party) man. Plus ca change!

A great deal between employers and unions is being trumpeted around about now in Poland. In return for an end to “temporary” work contracts with durations of up to twenty years, the unions have agreed to increased elasticity of working hours. Many people will be familiar with the abuse of temporary work contracts; the three month probation period followed by the one year contract followed by the sack followed by – six months later, to get around the law – another one-year contract and so on until you drop down dead without a pension. Presumably, many people will soon become familiar with the abuse of “elastic” working hours.

Permit me to indulge in my radicalism here – but why did the unions agree to give anything in return for an end to this abuse? They are effectively buying their way out of exploitation. When an East European prostitute finally earns enough money to buy her passport back from the gangster who confiscated it after telling her she would be working in a German restaurant this is hardly to be greeted as a great victory for workers’ rights.

One of our glorious leaders, Gunter Verheugen, has had a jolly good idea. He thinks it would be good if business executives were not so obscenely well paid. It’s never too late to start learning in the Third Age University of Life. Welcome aboard, son!

March 17^th’s Gazeta Wyborcza hilariously describes Warsaw as “the most prestigious constituency” in the European elections. You hear that Hillbilly Boy? Your votes are not as good as our votes. They are not as prestigious.

A senator Misiak has been kicked out of Platforma Obywatelska for what I don’t quite know. He has blotted his copybook so often and so completely it’s hard to say. For instance, while in opposition he lobbied the government on work visas for Ukrainians. He was also involved in (if he did not simply own) a company called Work Service, which recruits workers from the Ukraine to Poland. Misiak is expendable, though. The coalition partner’s chief is not so expendable and so his various nepotistic misdemeanours are being indulged by prime minister Tusk.

Here’s how meaningless politics is nowadays: Danuta Hübner, a left-winger (she was European minister in Miller’s allegedly left-wing SLD government), is running for the European Parliament for Platforma Obywatelska, the neo-liberal, right wing, technocratic political party that rules Poland in coalition with the Peasants Party, described by Poles as “melons” because they’re green on the outside and red on the inside.

You know… well, that crisis and all? It isn’t really all that bad. No. Not at all. It’s been hyped up out of all proportions. Yesterday’s Gazeta Wyborcza has the real deal. Page one’s main headline is about the cheerful sounds coming from the United States Federal Reserve (which GW clubbily refers to as “the Fed”) about how Mr. Bernanke thinks it will all be over by Christmas (2009). Bernanke knows what he’s on about, says GW’s man, and wouldn’t risk his good name without reason. (Sure he wouldn’t: he might lose his job if he got it wrong, just like all the other thousands of economists now seeking work after failing to spot this depression coming.) GW’s “My Business” supplement features a front page story about how a scooter manufacturer is doing fine despite this so-called, alleged “crisis.” Such supplements are usually dross even by the standards of the papers which they appear in so some may find it unfair that I even mention this story and the next, on page three of the same supplement: “You lost your job? Set up a Company.” I remember that fairy tale from the 80s in Ireland. We were told the failure of the economy was our fault because we weren’t entrepreneurial enough. Why weren’t we all selling each other stuff we had made? Back to the main paper, and page four’s headline: “Companies are Hiring Again,” accompanied by optimistic-looking graph and quotes from various companies about how they are hiring again. It’s just a thought, but if XYZ Bank claims it’s taking on 450 people this year, might that not be a marketing ploy? A way of persuading customers that XYZ Bank is a safe bet? Of putting the fear of God into competitors? It’s just a thought. Finally, for the day, there’s a story in the business pages headlined “Optimism returns to the Stock Market.”

This is part of a trend here recently. It’s to be seen on TV also, where guests are invited to demonstrate that there really is a crisis. “After all,” the thinking seems to be, “I haven’t lost my job yet. How serious can it be if highly paid TV presenters aren’t feeling the pinch?” It’s all so preposterous that even GW cannot avoid an obvious possibility: that this is all just “talking up the market”(or “lying”). They quote an economist called Petru on their front page about Bernanke’s happy meal prediction: Petru thinks Bernanke is just trying to spread optimism. “Like Gazeta Wyborcza,” no one adds. Messages are mixed, though. For all the patriotic duty of journalists to assure us that The System Works and There Is No Alternative, they cannot always resist the temptation to publish a scary sensationalist headline at least very now and again.

The strapline on the TV over the bar last night had some exciting news. Through the fumes of pure alcohol rising in wavy lines from the gin-soaked counter I made out the words “US stock market rises for second day in a row.” Wow… two whole days.