Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Newspaper editors everywhere are gnashing their teeth to find that two politicians have been put in charge of being called president and minister (or special envoy or whatever) for foreign affairs of the EU. This Herman Van Rompuy and Catherine Ashton – can they even be googled? What’s to cut and paste here? Has either of them started a war? It’s most inconsiderate of whoever makes these decisions to choose two unknowns. Journalists will now have to do some research and write about EU policies – until such time, of course, that they have dug up some dirt on Herman Von Rumpy-pumpy and “Iron” (inevitably) Kate.

In “Żebry Adama,” (Adam’s Begging) the first story in Wojciech Kuczok’s Widmokrąg (widmo – ghost; krąg – circle; widnokrąg – horizon), a naked beggar catches hold of the narrator and forces him to divest himself of first his (Armani) suit jacket, and then his trousers. It’s not meant, of course, to be an entirely realistic account of an everyday occurrence: it goes all metaphorical, phantasmagorical and poetico-rhetorical about a third of the way through with divagations on whether it is possible to understand freedom without having been set free and ruminations about the narrator’s relationship with his father. Also, Kuczok stops using full stops and paragraphing. Nevertheless, I say, let the pettifogging begin:

The naked man never says anything. He just indicates with his eyes that having got the narrator’s (Armani) jacket, he now wants the trousers. So the narrator takes off his trousers – without taking off his shoes! “Had it a trousers on it?” Flann O’Brien once asked. Yes, but no shoes. Or maybe Armani is known for making very broad trousers? Why even mention “Armani?” After the next war, plague, famine, flood or whatever cataclysm will next engulf Poland, people will still be reading books, maybe even this one (it’s not that bad – not my cup of tea but not bad on the whole). But will they still be wearing Armani? Will they understand that the narrator must be well-to-do if he has a suit called an “Armani”? Okay, Kuczok gives other clues that the narrator is well-off but why drag a story down with brand names in this way?

During the narrator’s fierce internal struggle with his father and his suppressed homosexuality and whatever you’re having yourself he recalls the time when he was caught in a tram without a ticket. He recalls the stage whispers of his fellow passengers, who accuse him of arrogance – a rich man like him should fly to work in his own aeroplane, not use trams, and certainly not sponge on the state by not buying a ticket. But the narrator tells us that he had tried to buy a ticket. The tramdriver had none so he went around these same passengers asking if anybody could sell him a ticket. Why, then, would they react with such hostility to his “arrogance”? Kuczok can be defended here: the narrator did not really hear their comments. He is only projecting. One could safely assume that the narrator has some kind of persecution complex (to simplify) or feels guilty about his wealth – were it not for Kuczok’s bare-foot blunder. As it is, the reader is unsure. Perhaps the passengers really did react so vehemently. Maybe Poles really are that petty and vicious… Or maybe Kuczok was careless.

Widmokrąg is a collection of five stories, each punctuated with an “interludium”, named after a work by Chopin (opus 28, nrs. 3, 15, 4 and 18 if you are interested). This immediately brought to my mind a book by Michał Komar called Wtajemniczenia (Initiations), reviewed in this week’s Polityka. The heroine, Ms. E., holds a salon where people gather to talk about this and that – Dürrenmatt, Sophocles, the traffic these days. The reviewer, Katarzyna Janowska, writes (with no apparent irony) “Order is bestowed […] by the rhythm of meals because in the salon not just ideas but also refined dishes are delectable. Omelette with oysters suits conversations about the essence of justice; plum tart goes with discourse on the philosophy of Shestov.” Ms. E. has a servant who describes Hegel’s prose thusly: “It reminds one of carefully prepared osso buco or carelessly grated crème brûlée.” I’ll be reviewing this fascinating book just as soon as I have completed my double first in Philosophy and Classics. In the meantime it’s beer, sandwiches and James Ellroy.

The same issue of Polityka also has an article about France. You don’t need to read it to see that it is identical to the previous ten thousand articles on France that have appeared outside of France. The title is “Cooling Volcano?” and the subhead reads in part “[How will Sarkozy] manage to change French society.” For my entire adult life I have been reading about how France is a failure and needs to reform. And yet it’s still there, still one of the richest countries in the world. I think I’ll spare myself the effort of reading another attack on the principle of the welfare state. That’s all these articles ever amount to.

After the revelations about the government’s plans to privatise higher education there was a storm of debate on the pages of Gazeta Wyborcza – no, not about education, about something called the Hausner plan. Unless I miss my guess this is the second plan to be named after this Hausner person.  This one concerns public funding of the arts, or to be more precise, cutting public funding of the arts. Surprisingly enough, the government wants to hand over arts funding to the private sector. Corporations are to be allowed write off 1% of blah blah blah. GW has had articles on it every day and every day they printed a summary of the plan’s main points, as if you couldn’t guess to within 99.9% accuracy what a plan dreamed up under the auspices of a right wing neoliberal government consisted of.

Now I think puppet theatres and poetry and what-have-you are important but I am amazed at the complete lack of interest in Kazimierz Stępień’s expressed desire to remove the constitutional guarantee of free study. Propose getting rid of the requirement to do a post-doctoral degree and there is an uproar. Propose cutting poor people out of third level education and nothing.

The other thing that has been occupying the mainstream media of late is who gets to be called boss of the European Parliament – Jerzy Buzek or some Italian guy. We’re all supposed to be glued to our seats with our fingers crossed for Buzek even though we’re constantly told that the EU is about partnership and putting the interests of the community above the interests of individual nations. That’s all very well, it seems, but wouldn’t it be nice if Our Lads got some nice (”prestigious”) jobs out of it? At the risk of being drawn into the pointlessness of it all, here is some background information on Jerzy Buzek: he was not a very good prime minister of Poland for a few years, during which time one Marian Krzaklewski, trade union leader, was the power behind the throne. Krzaklewski also ran for the European Parliament but didn’t get in. Well it looks like he may soon get his old back seat back.

Yesterday’s Gazeta Wyborcza had an article about the decline of the Irish economy. It’s headlined “Womens’ Spendthriftery Caused The Crisis” and consists of quotable quotes from people affected by the depression in Ireland. Among them is one Newton Emerson, Irish Times columnist, who is quoted as saying “In the majority of marriages it’s the woman who decides about spending. Unlike men, they cannot stand saving and go shopping much more often than men. Their oestrogen runs wild. Women were the driving force leading to Ireland to its downfall. In my opinion sacking women would blunt the effects of the recession. It will reduce their appetite for spending and men will find work which will enable them to maintain families. And they will finally regain their wallets.”

Awful stuff, isn’t it? Too bad GW didn’t do a little background reading. Emerson is a satirist. He published this article way back in February, exciting quite some controversy at the time.
(I used my own translation from the Polish because the words quoted by the GW do not correspond with what is on-line at the Irish Times.)

Pretending that the crisis is a good thing, that is. Last weekend’s “High Heels” (Gazeta Wyborcza’s ladies’ supplement) has a subhead on page 37 (above an interview with Karolina Korwin-Piotrowska, a teevee journo) that reads “This crisis has its good sides. Perhaps we will start eating bread again and I won’t have to constantly hear ‘hey, let’s go for some sushi’.”

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…

Poland took delivery of its first Hercules transport plane last week. The aeroplane is nearly 40 years old and attracted much derision from the ever-independent Polish media. For instance, TVN, the fearless private sector news broadcaster, detailed the history of the aeroplane in a lengthy news piece. As long ago as 1983, they said, it took part in a “strategiczna misja” in Grenada. The strategic mission they referred to was in fact the United States invasion of Grenada. That’s Polish journalism.

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.

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.

Out of the top corner of my eye, while sitting on a bar stool the other night, I saw the strapline on a Polish rolling news channel on the TV. It said “W Brukseli o kryzysie” or “In Brussels the crisis [is being discussed].” It got me wondering, and this is what I wondered: which crisis? The war on Gaza? The gas shortage in Europe? The general, world-wide depression? Interesting times.

Who’s to blame in each of the three crises? Israel or Hamas? Russia or Ukraine? The trade unions or the trade unions? Yes, you were mistaken if you thought the depression was caused by reckless lending, short term chasing of profit at all costs, poor financial regulation, ideologically blinded (but independent!) central banks, poor planning, bad business practices, the abdication by politicians of their responsibility for providing for the overall good. It says so right here in Gazeta Wyborcza and the usually more measured Polityka. Here’s the latter on the demise of the US car industry: “It was not the financial crisis that brought the Big Three to the edge of the precipice but … the trade unions.” The unions won such good pay and conditions for their members that the manufacturers could not compete with other countries like Japan, sweatshop of the world. (And why shouldn’t the workers of the richest most powerful country in the world not enjoy the best pay and conditions - is that not what being rich and powerful is all about?)

I would have thought that the job of the trade union was to - to simplify greatly - gain as much pay for as little work as possible. Management wants the inverse and so a happy medium should be found. The US unions, then, succeeded (if Polityka is to be believed) but management, sadly, was not up to the job. So who gets the blame? Not the jet-setting management, for failing miserably, but the unions, for succeeding admirably.

Meanwhile Gazeta Wyborcza acknowledged the economic disaster with its Friday (16th) headline: “It has Begun.” It reports on negotiations between employers, unions and the government, quoting one of the most-quoted people in the country, Jeremi Mordasewicz of the employers’ organisation Lewiatan, that if the unions’ demands are met it will destroy the country. Among those demands are pay raises, a raise in the minimum pay (currently 38% of the national average) a cut in VAT, especially on food, and a raise in income tax on the richest. Raising pay for the poorest puts money into the economy as that money is immediately spent on real goods and services. Giving it to the rich (by means of regressive taxes, for instance) means just that: giving it to the rich, unless you still cling to the trickledown theory, in which case hang in there. It can’t be long now before a kindly plutocrat offers you a dime to shine his shoes. You can give him some stock tips in return.

Elsewhere on the business pages in Poland is the amazing discovery that banks - cover your ears and eyes if you are of a nervous disposition - earn money on international currency dealing by selling, e.g., Swiss francs for more than they buy them. Lots of Poles took out mortgages in foreign currencies and are now crying foul because not only are those foreign currencies more expensive these days but the banks are not using the central bank’s exchange rate. No one less than me wants to be seen to seem to be on the banks’ side but have Poles never heard of “let the buyer beware”? But of course the banks set their own, usurious exchange rates.

Among the other hilarious items from the business pages these days in Poland is the discovery of foreign exchange options. Again, people are running around crying foul because of a basic failure to understand (or even read) their contracts. To avoid unpleasant surprises some export businesses bought guarantees from the bank that a certain rate of exchange would be honoured regardless of the actual exchange rate obtaining on the date of the deal. Everything was tickety boo when the zloty was strong and getting stronger but - what’s this? It turns out the zloty can go down as well as up. And down it has gone, like a brick. Who could have expected this? Aren’t markets always supposed to go up? The lure of options was so strong that some businesses went beyond merely protecting their bottom lines from currency fluctuations to the kind of full-on barrow-boy, hopeless gambler-with-a-system-syndrome playing of the system that brought down America’s economy. They are now going bankrupt.

Presumably some way of pinning this on the trade unions will be found. After all, this is a country where people say “liberal” and mean Friedmanite fundamentalist.