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Yesterday I had a perfectly average day — the details of which I will not bother you with — nicely rounded off with a refreshing ten hours kip. Is this “dignity under pressure”? Am I keeping my head while others all around are losing theirs?

I ask because the signs in Polish are particularly — no, I mean particularly — grim right now. Michnik writes in today’s Gazeta Wyborcza of a “creeping coup” and, reason though he has to dislike the ruling party, he does not sound in the least hysterical. Briefly, Janusz Kaczmarek was arrested. Until August 8th Kaczmarek was the Minister for the Interior and Administration. Before that, he was the “national attorney” (a peculiarity of Poland’s constitution is that the state attorney is also the Minister for Justice - that’s being your own boss).

Kaczmarek has started telling tales about the politicisation and abuse of the secret services, the procurator’s office and the police under the current regime. He has been charged with attempting to obstruct the investigation into the leaking of operational details concerning an unsuccessful attempt by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA) to entrap Andrzej Lepper (former coalition partner).

Another person who had to be shut up was one Konrad Kornatowski, a former police chief, who - entirely coincidentally - had been due to testify before a parliamentary commission into all the skulduggery and shenanigans of the regime. So he was arrested. So was Jaromir Netzel, boss of PZU, one of the biggest insurers in Europe. They’re also out to get businessman Ryszard Krauze but he is fortunate enough to be abroad - possibly in a democracy, I can’t confirm that yet - at the moment.

Meanwhile Primesident Kaczyński appears on television and pretends not to be aware of the details of these perfectly routine police investigations. Ziobro, the boy wonder Minister for Justice, seems to be keeping a low profile, perhaps because he has hopelessly compromised himself time and time again.

On the plus side, the bus timetables in the provincial town where I am holidaying at the moment no longer define summer as lasting till the end of January.

Marcin Wojciechowski of Gazeta Wyborcza (Feb 13th) takes the unfortunate minister for agriculture, Andrzej Lepper, to task for questioning the wisdom of locating an anti-missile shield in Poland. “In matters of state as important as the missile shield only the competent members of government should speak out, not the minister for agriculture, and never outside of the country,” he writes, continuing “Lepper has broken both these principles” — principles which Wojciechowski made up on the spot. The idea of collective cabinet responsibility appears to be alien to both politicians and journalists in Poland. It’s perfectly okay here to blame Lepper for – e.g.– the pork mountain, even if you are in a coalition with him. And how dare a (democratically elected) farmer speak out about national defence, eh?

Andrzej Lepper, leader of Samoobrona, a farmers’ party, has left the coalition government. Primesident Kaczy?ski accused him of warcholstwo - brawling, troublemaking. In response, Lepper called this accusation “chamstwo,” which might be translated as “boorishness” but has also been translated on occasion as “assholeishness.” Although “warcho?” (troublemaker) may seem innocuous enough, the word has interesting connotations in Polish. Back in 1968 first secretary Gomu?ka used it to describe political enemies of the communist state - Jews in particular, in another shameful anti-semitic episode of recent Polish history. So perhaps Lepper was right when he accused Kaczy?ski of a “lack of political and personal culture.” If this is not “insulting a functionary of the state” I don’t know what is, so perhaps Lepper’s lawyers will find themselves gainfully employed in the near future.

I went up the country. It turns out that not all life in Poland revolves around pubs and discos. Out there the centre of social life is the shop — the only one for miles around — sometimes open on split shifts: 6 to 10 in the morning and 6 to 10 in the evening. On the bench outside the locals gather to drink — beer if their alcoholism is not so far advanced; otherwise fortified wine. Out there, away from the roads connecting cities, there are no cheery roadside bars serving pub grub. Nor are there little mom and pop restaurants tucked away in the oddest corners. You are more likely to find the ruins of a collectivised farm and perhaps an accompanying four-storey block of flats, incongruous in the rural surroundings. It’s not quaint. So people sit and drink outside the shop. “What do you do with yourself?” a friend asked two of them at one stopover in the scorching heat. The one who could talk said “I sleep a bit, I drink a bit.” The other felt his unshaven jaw with his invalidity pension-winning thumb-stump as if wondering who it belonged to. This is the Poland not so much left behind as ignored altogether. “What do you think of the politicians?” The depressed countryside is prime vote-harvesting land for Andrzej Lepper’s Samoobrona, the farmers’ party, target of much urban derision. “Thieves.” Even the one who couldn’t talk for fear his lower jaw might fall off if opened for any purpose other than to pour alcohol into his mouth joined in on that chorus. “And Andrzej Lepper?” “A madman.”

I know little about Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz but he seems to think along my lines so he is clearly a genius. Here is an article he wrote about intellectuals and ignoramuses for those readers who speak Polish.

I’ll just translate (clumsily) one sentence:

Lepper is the effect, not the cause, of the blurring of the criteria of decency, a blurring which was done earlier, and not by ignoramuses.

You have to hand it to Gazeta Wyborcza ’s pictures editor. Wojciech Olku?nik’s photographs in today’s paper of Andrzej Lepper as he slides his way into the job of deputy prime minister do much more to convey the newspaper’s disgust than the tedious and tendentious comment articles accompanying the news that Lepper’s Samoobrona party has signed an opening coalition agreement with PiS (Law and “Justice”).

Here’s a link to the front page picture. Unfortunately, the one on page four is not online.

I am proud and happy to report that I fell for all five April Fool’s jokes in the last Nie bar one.
That Jarosław Kaczynski paid a state visit to the US instead of his (identical twin) brother and president of Poland, Lech? Sure, why not?
That Minister Wasserman wanted to drain a lake in memory of Pope John Paul II?
That you can buy a paint that, applied to your car, eludes detection by police radars? Yes, I fell for that too, though in my defence, I assumed the paint didn’t work - only that people believed it did and were buying it.
That no ducks had died of H5N1 in Poland yet? Well, why wouldn’t you believe it? (There’s a complicated pun here on the word for duck and the names Kaczyński and Donald Tusk of the PO.)
That Andrzej Lepper, populist peasant leader, actually comes from an aristocratic background? Real life loves irony no less than writers.

Nothing is too absurd for Polish politics and life not to be true.

British public life is more staid, or perhaps its journalists less inventive, because all the Guardian could manage was a story that Chris Martin from Coldplay had gone Tory. Naturally I fell for that too. I’d have been a fool not to.

My fellow monkey, Shane Barry, is exercised by Irish politician Mary O’Rourke’s “working like blacks” comment.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: Come to Poland! Listen to these pearls of wisdom from Andrzej Lepper, leader of the Samoobrona party, and a man not long ago considered a political pariah but now moving closer and closer to the centre of power:

“The most dangerous nation for the Poles is the Jewish nation. They are everywhere. They are plotting intrigues everywhere.” (Nowiny, 18th Dec. 1995)

“Samoobrona is the hammer of God for what is happening in Poland. It’s not enough that Balcerowicz must go; he must spend the rest of his days in a work camp.” (Samoobrona Congress, 7th April 2002)

Balcerowicz is a neoliberal technocrat like - as Beatroot points out - everyone in Europe’s central banks. And, to show that the markets even have the power to reign in a raging anti-semite, here’s a more recent quote from Lepper:

“He [Balcerowicz] doesn’t have to go at all. He does what the law says, and he does it well. Any economist would do the same in his place.” (Puls Biznesu, 18th Nov. 2005)

The above Lepper quotes were gathered together in Nie magazine, Jan 12th 2006.