Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

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?

I’ve solved the economic crisis. After months of study and intensive thought I’ve finally cracked it. To be fair, I arrived at my earth-righting conclusion by standing on the shoulders of giants. I’ve been reading the newspapers, turning over in my mind the pronouncements of the experts, sifting through the policy initiatives of the finest political minds on the planet and tallying the melodious discourses of our leaders. The solution is this: we must all buy more cars. That will keep car manufacturers in business, which will keep people in jobs, which will mean they can afford to buy cars. Or wash each other’s linen – whatever.

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.

Romuald Rytwiński, director general of GM Opel in Poland: “The situation is still far from normal. 600 or 700,000 new cars should be selling on the Polish market [every year], not 200 or 300,000 as is the case now.”

Blackadder: “It wouldn’t have anything to do with leeches, would it?
Doctor: I had no idea you were a medical man.
Blackadder: Never had anything you doctors didn’t try to cure with leeches. A leech on my ear for ear ache, a leech on my bottom for constipation.
Doctor: They’re marvellous, aren’t they?
Blackadder: Well, the bottom one wasn’t. I just sat there and squashed it.
Doctor: You know the leech comes to us on the highest authority?
Blackadder: Yes. I know that. Dr. Hoffmann of Stuttgart, isn’t it?
Doctor: That’s right, the great Hoffmann.
Blackadder: Owner of the largest leech farm of Europe.”

In the last two years some 1.2 million people have left Poland. Since May 2004 2.5 million cars have been imported. (Polityka 2007: nr. 7) I don’t know what that signifies. Probably nothing.

Socialist Realist art (or “socrealizm”) was official dogma in Poland in the late 40s and early 50s and elsewhere for longer. Paintings, architecture and sculptures of the period glorify the working class and the achievements of socialism. Kitsch would be a kind word for much of it. Also striking is the resemblance to fascist art: there is a fascination with strong, healthy young bodies. See here, here and here for examples.

While wandering around an exhibition with its glowing reports of Polish Stakhanovs the other day I cast my mind back to the glorification and celebration of my own struggles for a better, brighter, capitalist future in Ireland. One afternoon the exciting news filtered down from on high that our section of the bank had in one day achieved the norm-busting feat of processing over one million pounds in car loans. We workers had outdone ourselves in the fight for a more car-filled future. Plainly, this extraordinary victory in the war against walking had to be marked and so our brigade leader announced that the following day after work we would go to the pub. The day arrived, another million pounds worth of automobile was put on the road and my fellow workers - women all, for progressive Ireland knew no discrimination - disappeared to change out of their work clothes into their civilian clothes (identical to their work clothes) before meeting in a local bar. Joyless, joyless. Even though the motoring public of Ireland was paying, each worker ordered precisely one vodka and diet coke or similarly emasculated product before trickling home, one by one. Where were the patriotic songs, the laughter, the collective buzz of making common cause? The rousing speeches?

Where was the company portraitist with his easel, painting a picture of me wearing a red tie?