After 1989, we have an artistic and intellectual elite in Poland that is probably the worst in two hundred years. By this term we mean people who want to take responsibility for the country and lead society not only politically, but also artistically, intellectually and morally.
The elite is defined as a person who is self-sufficient enough to assume community responsibilities and promote the development of the country. It is no coincidence that Arnold Toynbee called good elites a “creative minority”, and when they rest on their laurels and stop responding to the needs of society, they are only a “dominant minority”, that is, still an elite , but still burdensome. anti-development, and just plain stupid.
In our country the world of the establishment is turned upside down like nowhere else in the Western world. Our heroes of public life would like to look into the wallet of every family and see what they spend the legendary “500 plus” on, but they can make a world-famous film themselves and at the same time hide the fact that they spent 300,000 PLN for this purpose at the City Hall from Warsaw. There’s no mention of their finances, especially the semi-oligarchic fortunes of Walters and Kulczyks, except that poor Kowalski has to prove he didn’t drink too much or smoke too much on Social Security. Our elites rate our culture low: for them Polishness is provincial, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, but they cannot be judged because they will immediately claim that it is aggression and hatred. Our aristocracy can put their money in the European Parliament, in state subsidies or in public institutions, but Poles, no matter what, are greedy for money and vote for a specific party for their thirteenth pension. They tell us that we must let in immigrants from all over the world, otherwise we will become xenophobes, but of course we should not invite them to the salons of Ostaszewska or Stuhr, but to our residential areas and to our streets. In their opinion, they remain the essence of elegance even when they go out to shout ‘PiS’ or ‘faggot’, but we are the ones who are supposed to be portrayed as sadists from ‘Zielona Border’, anti-Semites from ‘Wesele 2″ or primitives from “Pokłoś”. They can even correct, delete and add historical sources, as Engelking and Grabowski do to the applause of Newsweek and TVN, and try to correct them, Pole, and we will make you a fascist and a PiS supporter.
The working class will still drink champagne, but only through the mouths of its post-PZPR representatives. For actors and celebrities it’s a rainbow march, but for citizens, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a “Nazi rally.” Finally, they are surprised that people no longer want to support, admire and applaud them after vomiting.
However, it is difficult to assess whether these elites are as bastard or even more bastard than those of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, when money was taken from strangers, careers were made elsewhere and ordinary Polish culture was dominated by many French . powder and Italian perfumes.
After all, they visited the West and brought something from that West to Poland: Renaissance painting, the technology of digging canals (nowadays they say that if nature doesn’t dig it itself, it’s not allowed!), and scientific news about a balloon that flies into the sky.. Even people from Targowica like Potocki and Rzewuski left behind palaces, collections of works of art, foundations of schools and churches – politically they were equally disgusting, but in terms of civilization they were somehow more fruitful. Nowadays our elites rarely enter the Western salons – Netherlands in cinematography, Tusk in EU structures, Tokarczuk in the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the rest actually stay on the Vistula out of compulsion and the more he announces that after another PiS victory he will “really leave this time”, the more he has nowhere to go, because no one wants them. The gates of science academies, film studios, publishing houses or think tanks are not open to them, they are not here of their own free will, but for lack of alternative, annoying themselves as much as we do.
We will struggle with them for decades to come, and we have little choice: they can lecture and insult us from the perspective of the new administration’s allies, or they can lecture us from the perspective of frustrations filled with self-love. I know what I prefer – what about you?
Source: wPolityce