Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Enough of scandals, I say. Let’s take a “time-out” to have a look at the “beautiful game.” From my seat last night in the pub I could just see – over the tops of the heads of the drunks and wasters at the bar – the TV screen, which was showing the Poland Slovakia match. This was another glorious day for Polish soccer and although the canny Slovaks won 1 “nil” by tricking “our lads” into scoring an “own goal” you can only admire the plucky Poles. They played in the snow in a nearly empty stadium (one Slovak player ran back in to get his camera and take a snap). The fans boycotted the match as a mark of their disgust at the Polish football union. In the few bleary-eyed minutes of the match that I saw, the State Television cameraman skillfully kept the angle low so there was no sign of the empty terraces. The roar of the crowd seemed strangely undiminished, even though there were only about 4,000 people. Some of the lessons learned in a propaganda state or not easily unlearned. The snow, the football union says, kept them away.

The hawky eye of Your Man in Gdansk restlessly probes the murky undergrowth of Polish Politics to bring you the latest in scandals:

A juror in some dancing show, is up on charges of bribe taking in connection with the upcoming privatisation of a publishing house.

The Central Anti-Corruption Bureau tried unsuccessfully to entrap former president Kwaśniewski and his wife.

The head of the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau, Mariusz Kamiński, is in trouble over allegations of politically motivated entrapment (see above - although this has been known for years).

PO (the ruling party) politician Zbigniew Chlebowski is in trouble over his efforts to remove from a bill a paragraph that would damage the interests of the gambling industry. He was recorded saying words to the effect that “Miro” and “Grześ” were on-side. Sadly, memory has failed the sweating Chlebowski and he does not know who he could have meant by “Miro” and “Grześ,” though there are some suspicious souls who think “Miro” might be Mirosław Drzewiecki, minister for sport, who came on-side around June this year, and “Grześ” might be Grzegorz Schetyna, deputy minister for internal affairs and administration. Some even think the minister for sport should resign!

Oops! The last “scandal” slipped in there by accident. The wheeling and dealing between the gambling industry and the politicians was business as usual. There is no hint of corruption. PO, an openly - indeed proudly - pro-business political party, was simply persuaded by a branch of business to adopt a certain policy. That that policy will/would deprive the exchequer of something like 400 million zloties a year is irrelevant. Until a personal payment to one the three politicians is traced, there’s nothing to shout about. (The gambling industry companies in question already, of course, made perfectly legal donations to PO as a whole.)

The following comes in its entirety from Roman Daszczyński’s article in Tuesday’s Gazeta Wyborcza (April 7^th). The penalties for drunk-cycling in Poland are extremely harsh. You lose your driving license for one (yes – your car driving licence). There are currently 1,931 cyclists in Polish prisons for drunk-cycling. The maximum prison sentence is twelve months in jail. The average sentence is 11 and a half months. (The average sentence for theft is two years, out of a maximum of ten.) The other surprise – surely even for the hardiest of euro-cynics – is that the anti-cycling campaign is not just the result of a car-obsessed society but because (it is suspected) in order to be accepted into the EU Poland had to show a higher rate of crime detection. The other surprise is that the person who is questioning this absurd law in the Constitutional Tribunal is a judge! Not a critical mass radical, a single mother, or a Dutch exchange student but a judge. A judge doing something useful?

They say all news is local so here’s a taste of Poland from the pages of a typical urban local paper, a weekly freshet. There are three headlines on the front page and each of them is an order: “Close this alley,” “Talk to the president” and “Fight the Horse Chestnut Leaf Miner.” Poles are very attached to the horse chestnut tree, which is associated with young love, and is under attack from a kind of moth as well as the motorist lobby which wants all trees on the sides of roads chopped down so that people who drive too fast, too drunkenly, too carelessly etc. will have a better chance of survival if and when their cars leave the road. The talking to the president is the media’s idea of participatory democracy. The president in question is the mayor, not the president of Poland. The alley our local hacks want closed attracts boozers and undesirables and it seems cannot be lit.

Elsewhere we learn that John Paul II still lives in our hearts and minds, a bus driver was caught smoking in his bus, it’s time to change your tyres, schools will not in future be allowed to turn away asthmatics and other sickly nuisances, there’s a jazz festival coming up, there’s a lot of property for sale, having to change buses in the centre of town when travelling from one end to the other is a pain and someone found cat.

Three orders…

Sport is a subject I neglect somewhat so in an attempt to redress the balance and bring all readers up to speed on what’s going on in the wonderful world of noble sportsmanship, here’s a quote from yesterday’s Gazeta Wyborcza: “Former Polish Football Association observer and umpire ethics lecturer Wiesław K. has been arrested by Wrocław police.” The charges concern corruption in soccer. The plaintiff – a well-known and influential lecturer in ethics.

As we all know, if it were easier to fire workers, capitalists would hire more of them. But what about tenants? The law regarding rented accommodation in Poland is being changed. In short: it will be easier to evict tenants. “And what’s in it for tenants?” asks today’s Gazeta Wyborcza. “Thanks to the reduced risk connected with renting flats, more flats will appear on the market. Rents will fall as an effect.” In fairness to GW, even they express some reservations.

It is heresy to say shops – of all things, shops – are miserable places in Poland today. “Under the communists all you could buy in shops was vinegar and blah blah blah…” is the usual response. But communism and rationing are gone for getting on a quarter of a century now. There’s no need to be so pathetically grateful for shelves groaning with high-piled tat now, in 2009. There’s a shop near where I live which always struck me with its dismal air. It wasn’t just that in an effort to squeeze as much revenue from the dump the owner had narrowed its aisles to six inches. It was only when I looked up that I realized what the real problem was: the skinflint managers had removed one in every two of its fluorescent lights. The windows were no help either: they had been plastered over with hideously garish blue and yellow posters announcing the name of the chain to which this depressing outpost belonged. Then there was the dairy counter – unstaffed, of course, because actually providing customers with service would cost too much. Like many shops, this one had switched off the fizzy drinks fridges in a further cost and pleasure cutting measure. The producers of fizzy drinks and fridges have met them half way: more and more often here you see things that look like fridges filled with cold drinks but in fact are no more than self-assembly plastic showcases for tepid drinks. Cheap and cheerless.

With a trip to Kraków on the cards, I decided it was time to go up to the attic and dust down a guidebook to the old town. The book I came across, blocking a hole in the thatch, was called simply Kraków and was published in 1951 with a print run of 20,300. I turned immediately to the more interesting passages:

The small town, population 80,000, living in an atmosphere of the patriotic inspirations of Anczyc and Matejko, proud of its university’s growing fame, was also in large part an example of social and political backwardness. The generality of residents, under the influence of a servile bureaucracy and a powerful reactionary party, lead lazy lives marked by conciliation with the ‘mild’ black and yellow servitude. Into this environment, fresh from a successful jailbreak, came Ludwik Warynski, a young fighter for victory of the masses. [...]

The flame of revolution burst above Kraków twice during this period [between the wars]. In November 1923 the working people of Kraków gave battle to the forces of reaction, liberally bedewing the city’s streets with their blood. It was an eloquent protest against a government that had sold out to capitalist exploiters.

I look forward to visiting the house at 49 Lubomirskiego Street, where Lenin lived from 1913 to 1914 (after abandoning “distant and Tsarophile Paris”) and wrote some of the 300 articles he allegedly produced (one every two days!) during his two years in Kraków.

On a totally unrelated note, prime minister Donald Tusk has been voted Person of the Year by god-awful current affairs mag Wprost.

While still in school I and most of the other children realised that cog notes (okay, “crib” notes if you must) were not really much help even if it was common to brag about how much writing you could fit on the back of your tie. You can write “Famine: 1845-1849, million dead” on the ball of your thumb but that’s not going to be much use to you if the question is “To what extent can the famine of 1845 to 1849 and the ensuing deaths of a million Irish people be blamed on the laissez faire economic policy of the English?”

Yet in Poland we have a country that could not function without cogging (and its “legitimate” friend, rote-learning). I never could understand how such schoolboyish japes could last the course into the adulthood of modern Poles. Until I came across the official, state Polish as a foreign language exam, that is. Browsing through the grammar section of the most advanced level I came across the following pearls in a gap-filling exercise:

“Last weekend I and a few (friends) went to the (White Eagle). At one of the tables there sat a few (men), among which I recognised two (priest) (acquaintances) and one (judge)…”

I don’t hobnob much with Polish priests and judges (or dukes) and the reason is simple: they are highly irregular nouns. In fact, a brief perusal of the grammar paper shows that irregularities are virtually the only things examined. Elsewhere the correct conjugations of the following verbs are demanded: potłuc, podrzeć, zmiąć, pognieść and wedrzeć się. Every serious student will know and dread these words. The rather rare perfective form of the past participle (I think that’s what it’s called anyway: the –wszy form) is required and another section keeps asking about 15+ children, 9+ pupils and, strangely for Catholic Poland, 3+ parents. Again, all so difficult that real Poles usually avoid these forms, even going so far as to prefer the easily declined “osoby” (persons) to “ludzie” (people). Tell a Pole about the ways of the –oro number forms and watch the eyes glaze over… Another section examines how well you know the multifarious and various prefixes of the verb “paść” (fall – but knowing that is no help at all.)

In short, you could easily pass this part by rote learning or cheating but by merely knowing Polish? Much harder.

On one of the few remaining broad footpaths that hasn’t been turned into a narrow carpark I have noticed a strange phenomenon more than a few times of late. A pedestrian approaches from behind (I of course am walking along minding my own business). The footsteps draw closer and closer until the walker overtakes me and then pulls in in front of me, sometimes slowing down after the exertion of accelerating to overtake so that I in turn have to overtake him. People definitely spend too much time in their cars.

Sitting on a bus one day I saw three different people reach for their pockets at the same time. This is usually a sign that inspectors have got on and I reached for my ticket. But there were no inspectors. The three people each took out a mobile phone. Mobile phone companies here constantly pester you with unbelievably bad special offers – I suspect that all three passengers were with the same network and received the same invitation to spend more money.

Maths has been made a compulsory subject in secondary school again. This is not the belated repair of some Communist era neglect. Maths was decompulsorised post 1989.

You should be very afraid. A poster campaign is currently advising us all to take AIDS tests. “Women cheat too,” the posters cheerfully remind us. Another set of posters urges us to take our flu vaccinations, helpfully pointing out that “the flu can kill too.”

And now for Saturday night at the movies. It’s well-known by now that non-Polish films are generally ruined by being accompanied by a voiceover (one voice does every character). But it’s worse than that. A quick survey of commercial TV channels last Saturday showed that Polsat devoted 22% of film time to ads and the lottery; TVN devoted 14% to ads; for TV4 the figure was 17% and on TVN7 it was 19%. This is why watching films on TV is such a marathon event. The most modest of films balloons to a two-hour plus epic. It’s especially tiring for the little kiddies: the 100 minute film “102 Dalmations” (Polsat) had 25 minutes of ads. On the other hand, if you’re watching late-night B-movie slashers things are a little better. TV4’s percentage of ads shown during films would be 21% if the horror film “Dorian” (2.10 am) were left out of the calculations. A cynic might even say that the presence of “Dorian” and its mere 6 minutes of ads makes the TV channel look good by bringing down that percentage. A cynic, that is. Just a cynic.