DANIEL BELL
We drove by the new sports stadium in Praga, and A. remarked
that this was the first structure built after "October." "Notice," he
said, "no columns." The structure was simple and functional, geo–
metrical and abstract. It seemed to underscore an ironic point: that
the Poles, or at least the intellectuals, disapproved of Marxism not
because of differences about economic organization-most of them
still thought of themselves as Socialists-but because of differences
in taste, in culture. For the mass of people, the stumbling block
between themselves and the regime was their Catholicism; for the
intellectuals it was abstract art. In both cases, it was the past and
the future that dominated the minds of the people, not the present.
The Polish love for the symbols of the past
is
extraordinary. Not
only was the old city rebuilt stone by stone but even the old palaces,
the great houses of the Potocki and other ruling families, had also
been rebuilt, exactly to specifications. The fiercest national debates,
A. told me, had been not over the nature of the legal code or of
economic policy but over the symbols of the past: whether the
crown would remain over the eagle on Polish standards, and
whether the Army would wear the traditional Polish rather than
Russian uniforms. Legal codes, economic policy-these are "pieces
of paper," but the crown and the uniform are visible and real.
In the late afternoon I met Griffiths and a young friend of his;
The boy was almost a caricature of one's stock image of the new
"Americanized" youths. A sharp dresser-tapered pants, narrow·
lapeled jacket-he made an odd contrast to the double-breasted,
heavily padded suits that one commonly saw on the streets. He used
words like "chick" and "baby," whistled jazz tunes, and spoke
knowingly of Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis. When I told him that
the new jazz hero in the States was Ornette Coleman, who playOO
"abstract" improvised jazz on his saxophone, ·I was "in" solid.
He
took great pleasure in showing us around, in taking us to meet
his
parents. His father, an official in one of the Ministries and a party
member, lived in one of the new big developments in Praga that
I had seen earlier that day. The building was drab, the walls in
the lobby and corridors cracked and peeling. Although the house
was seven years old, only now was a stone facing being put over the
brick. The apartment itself was clean and large, though overstuffed
with furniture. There were several bedrooms and a large room
that,
