Cynical political adverts of our time

Here's an ad for a Polish political candidate from the SLD party. Any Polish readers care to translate the message at the end? It's slightly odd because Poland's such a conservative country: yesterday's election results returned a business-conservative party ahead of the cultural-conservative party, which is pretty depressing.



When I taught political communication, one of the themes we addressed was the replacement of policy communication with brand/lifestyle political ads. Here's an Austrian one which is both highly sophisticated and utterly, utterly cynical: my non-Germanophone students were stunned when I revealed at the end that it was a political advert. Entirely lacking in policy ideas, it trades on the idea that no attractive woman would ever sleep with a liberal.

Sound over sense

One of the things I really like about travelling abroad is the way in which English is taken up as somehow glamorous and applied to brands, often in poetic and unexpected ways, like found poetry. We do it too: the accursed panini (invented in the 1970s, and it's PANINO, people, unless you're ordering TWO) springs to mind. Panini, all boys know, make football stickers.

When in Poland recently, I saw two clothing lines which tickled me: Hefty Fine and Lover Parrot. I imagine some designer was idly leafing through the Porthmadog Times or similar local paper while on holiday and the phrase 'Hefty Fine For Local Yobboes' caught her eye: a brand was born (unless it's ripping off the Bloodhound Gang album). Lover Parrot, on the other hand, defeats me.

Sweet relief - back at my desk

Good morning all. I'm back in the office, having largely recovered from my Polish exertions.

It's a weird experience, being in a team. On the first day, I knew two of the fencers a little. By the end, we'd worn the same clothes, eaten the same food, undergone similar highs and lows. I'd learned their names, their fencing styles, a little of their psychologies, what kind of support they wanted (and didn't want), how they coped with victory as well as defeat, how to engage their attention and when to leave them alone - and then it's all over in the time it takes to collect bags from the conveyor. A quick goodbye, hand them over to their parents and those intense days become the past, relationships stored away for a year to be reactivated once more at the next event.

I'll miss the cosmopolitan air of Wroclaw though - the Poles were very friendly and curious about our band of England-jacketed kids. Great cheeses and sausages too!

I've added some more photographs: a few more by me, some by parents and some by fencers. It's interesting how different they can be. The fencers' shots are all of people rather than places/things, and they're much more personal: the subjects are more intimate and idiosyncratic because the picture is being taken by an equal and a friend rather than an official.

We met Andy's ancestor in the museum!

Details from medieval paintings in Wroclaw museum

Good Polish cheese. 

Coming back holds its own joys too - seeing friends, sleeping in one's own bed, settling back into my own office chair ready for hard work (which is lucky, because I've got to write a whole conference paper by Friday).

Jak się masz?

Hello all from Sunny Poland! It's beautiful here - apart from some of the architecture, and the people are lovely (though Wroclaw is the home of Radio Rodina, pretty much the Catholic Radio Mille Collines.

I'll post some pictures when I take some, probably each evening. The competition's called Challenge Wratislavia, by the way.

The journey here was, well, eventful: seven hours on a late coach to Stansted, almost missing my connection. Sleep was prohibited. Instead, I experienced life in the raw. The coach was packed with the desperate, poor and mentally ill. That includes me. As I boarded, a nasty racial dispute blew up. The three Donegal women (all wearing pyjamas and dressing gowns) objected to an African gent wanting to sit next to the male in their party - he wanted to sleep across both seats. Before long, they were proclaiming that they'd 'catch AIDS' if he had the 'cheer' next to them, and when he responded fairly rudely, they threatened him but told the driver that he'd tried to punch them in the face… this hostility continued for 200 miles.

Meanwhile, I was surrounded by cockneys who a) compared criminal records, b) used a variety of racist terms for every ethnic group while reassuring each other that they weren't racist and c) compared experience with 'brass', which is slang for prostitute (see Helen Walsh's excellent novel, Brass).

As you can probably imagine, I didn't greet the hordes of cheery young fencers with entirely the appropriate degree of joy when I stepped off the coach at Stansted. Still, all uphill from here, eh?

Playing the Złottery

If any of my Polish friends and students wish to swap £ for Zloty they have lying around, I'd be very grateful. I'm also happy to import Polish delicacies on request, except for alcohol (the trip I'm going on is completely dry).

Footnotes from history

One of the cultural things we did in Wroclaw was to visit the Panorama. Inside a fairly bold concrete building was a huge (15 metres high, 120 metre long) painting, cunningly blended with a real foreground. The subject was a battle near Wroclaw (Raclawicka) between Russia and the Polish rebels, led by Kozciuszko (pretty much the only battle the Poles won against anybody for several hundred years - and they lost the war). I'd heard of him in relation to the American War of Independence but didn't know anything about his fight for a free Poland. He was a cool guy and we should all hail him!

But this panorama had a fascinating history which was rather glossed over. Painted in the 1890s, it was stored by the Soviet regime for years after WWII, before being finally put on display in 1985. I can understand why the Russian-dominated USSR/allies wouldn't want to encourage Poles to visit a display of nationalist, anti-Russian pride. What I'd like to know more about is the decision-making process leading to the reversal of this policy. Poland was under martial law from 1981-1983 following the deviationist-nationalist activites of Solidarity. Was the decision to display the panorama a concession to Polish nationalists to placate them, or did it signify recognition in government circles that to survive they needed to disassociate themselves from the USSR?

I like Poland

I like their food, their friendliness and the way they fence. More photos here (link fixed) though they probably aren't that interesting if you don't know what a parry-riposte is (like most epeeists). Little in-joke there.

Well done to all the girls (and their supportive male 'buddies'). Congratulations especially to Miranda Stratford, who won her event convincingly.

That's all, folks!

Probably for a couple of days, anyway: I'm off to Poland tonight as part of the England Youth Fencing team management. Should be a lot of fun.

WITAMY WE WROCŁAWIU!

I'm going here for Challenge Wratislavia - looks fantastic - except that I'll be in a windowless sports hall chasing infuriating - sorry - highly talented young fencers for four days, before going back to the airport. Maybe I'll see some of it from my window… except that looking down on the ground from the air brings back the horror. Heavy things shouldn't be up. They should be resting on solid things.

How capitalism works pt. 324

Dell Computers have decided to pull out of Ireland and build their PCs in Poland. Fair enough, you might think. They've taken an economic decision to relocate in a cheaper country. 

Except that the Irish government subsidised these carpetbaggers, and got suckered into basing their economy on bigger and bigger payouts for mobile industries who could then push off to an even cheaper country at the drop of a massive cheque. Dell, according to Slugger, have accepted a Polish offer of €52 million to leave Ireland in the lurch. Off goes another multinational, having been paid to open up, forgiven the taxes due by local companies… The Poles know that Dell won't stay once they actually have to invest in the factory - no doubt they'll end up in Burkina Faso, Somalia or Haiti if they can find a skilled workforce which will work for food. The Irish government knew the score too - but considered that a good photo-op and headlines about major corporations coming to Ireland more than made up politically for the hit to the exchequer. 

What really annoys me is that Ireland and Poland are seriously pro-capitalist states, doing business with dyed-in-the-wool capitalist companies, but they're all happy to operate socialist economies with regards to corporate entities at the same time as rejecting socialist solutions for the actual citizens.

Culinary experimentation

My continental housemates and neighbours asked me to cook a traditional British Christmas dinner for them yesterday. Although we started with a Polish Borscht with ravioli-like parcels as a donation from some of them, the rest was standard fare. The results were intriguing - everybody liked turkey, some were amazed by sprouts (!), pleased with parsnips, impressed by my cranberry-and-burgundy sauce, and everybody absolutely hated Christmas Pudding, which shocked me to my marrow. 

Then they all trooped off to the West Midlands' worst nightclub, Oceana, while I went to bed, exhausted and old.