Tuesday, April 01, 2003
The American military invaded the wrong country. They shoulda come to Poland.
Iraq has its problems, true. Maniacal power-hungry dictators are great fodder for the War on Terrorism propaganda machine. And Saddam and his two jolly sons, Odai and Qusai, just aren’t nice people. They’ve vaulted themselves into the international arena as the Global Three Stooges, only even more violent than the originals and without the laugh track. They torture the players of their national soccer team when they loose, for crying out loud! How’s that for group motivation? But let’s face it, these three are primitive apes whose ends will surely one day come. They’re not endemic of a system, they are the system. Get rid of them and watch the dust settle.
But the Polish bureaucracy? Ah, now there’s a camel of a different color.
In all my years of envisioning literary scenarios and watching tons of Hollywood shoot-‘em-ups pitting the redoubtable laconic hero against a Hopelessly Archaic and Corrupt System (you’ve seen that movie, haven’t you?), I had never imagined a cultural morass as self-contradictory, as maddingly inefficient, as homicidally dull and uncomprehending as The System here in this country I now call home.
Do I really need to relate any stories to make my point? We’ve all been there... The process of extending my tourist visa involved waiting in long lines with my then-fiancee’ at the Immigration Office to discover what documents I would need, then scampering around to acquire those documents and finally waiting in longer lines to present them. Only to be told - you can see this coming, can’t you? - we had the wrong information and the wrong documents and had to start over. Naturally, we were assured that nobody in Immigration could have misinformed any of Poland’s exemplary visitors and that the error was ours.
When we applied for permission to marry, we were informed it’d take 6 to 8 weeks for the paperwork to come through. It took 4 months. Now I’m applying for my temporary residency and I’m dredging hitherto untouched levels of despair. First I was apprised to register my address in Bydgoszcz since my wife hails from there (what are we, a newly post-nuptial Joseph and Mary? Is this Herod’s country?), then after I did and we later stood again in that same wonderful Immigration line, I was informed that I wasted my time in Bydgoszcz; I gotta do this all over again in Warsaw. And get this - the government wants me to submit a document that grants me permission to live in this country. So in the end I can get a document that grants me permission to live in this country.
In the meantime I can’t get a job, open a bank account, donate blood to the Red Cross, or presumably, spit or breathe within the national borders. That is, without the proper paperwork and infinite patience.
But I’d be remiss if I led you into believing it ends there with the suits (okay, not “suits” exactly; our government servants won’t ever make anyone’s Best Dressed list). This damnable mentality of the immutable, unfathomable Rules of Conduct has permeated a great deal of society. The Idea mobile phone company will only allow me to change my service plan on the monthly anniversary of my sign-up date. I already missed the first anniversary for the annoying inconvenience (to them) of my wedding day. And I recently spent a week wrestling with their service reps over what turned out to be an innate conflict between my phone’s internal answering machine and its voice mail. So why include both options on my phone?
The walls here in my new flat are paper-thin, so that I can hear every conversation around me. My upstairs neighbor, a petite elderly charmer, despite protestations to the contrary, is running an iron smelt in her living room, where it churns and booms! every five minutes day and night. All my neighbors swear the walls are thick and that the little charmer lifts nothing heavier than a tea kettle each day; And I recently embarked on a search for an RCA audio cable. The music store I went to told me to try the computer shop in Europlex. The computer shop pointed me toward the television establishment down the street. And the TV shop advised me to try the same computer store. Uh-huh.
In the meantime where are the bigwig Parliamentary politicos and head honchos of the corporate boardrooms? In various stages of resigning, threatening to resign, scoffing at others’ resignations, fielding death threats, inventing death threats, praying for EU intervention, beating the anti-EU drums, luxirating with their hands deep in the pockets of Big Media (or is that the other way around?) and deriding the French. Sometime all of the above at once.
Let’s face it: the soldiers should’ve landed in Prague and the beauteous Swedish isle of Bornholm, above Gda½sk (Germany would have been just horrible PR) for a two-pronged attack. The Czechs would be glad for the chance to knock Warsaw off the political landscape for awhile, and the Danes are always eager to welcome foreign tourists to their beauteous shore-scapes. That they would be wearing fatigues and lugging AK-47s is a trifle.
And then the American-led coalition (you have to wonder if their only allies would be Blair and the Brits) could do some real good. Take out the bureaucrats and the supercilious CEOs with their legions of mindless drones and try them all with that most heinous of war crimes: conducting a numbing war of attrition against their own. Then lock ‘em all up somewhere in a remote corner of Belarus, give them each a half-dozen eraserless pencils and two ruled tablets, and maybe fifty ancient typewriters for the lot of them and tell them all to rely on each other for whatever services they may require until the end of their days.
Or better yet, exile them to Bagdad. That’d topple Saddam’s regime without firing a shot.
posted by mark 11:56 PM
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