STANISLAW BARANCZAK
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.therefore, intellectuals should think twice before they start antagonizing other
social groups by demanding special privileges for themselves. But Bochenski
also emphasized what enthusiasts of a market economy tend to forget: the
supposedly high-brow kinds ofcultural activities and areas ofculture must not
be simply scrapped just because they do not bring profit. Subsidizing such ar–
eas is not a special privilege: it is a necessary investment without which the
nation's tradition, sense of identity, spiritual resourcefulness, and moral
principles may not survive.
It's a different question, of course, whence the subsidies should come.
Those in Poland who opt for culture to be left completely to its own devices,
'Just as it's being done in the West" only reveal their monumental ignorance
of the facts , such as the existence of federal, state, or city support for the arts
even in super-capitalist America (limited as it is here), not to mention the en–
tire system of individual and corporate tax-exempt donations. There's the
rub: the Polish tax laws are still not very clear in this respect. Before
Poland's new millionaires (billionaires, to be exact, since a million
zlotys
is
slightly more than the average monthly salary these days) are given this
sort of incentive to support culture, then, it is crucial for the government to
provide a cushion that would soften the impact of the economic reform on
culture's producers.
In the eyes of the opponents ofa subsidized culture, however, this idea
raises the ugly specter of the government's control over culture, a thing of
the past that certainly nobody, not even a struggling artist, would be eager to
bring back from its grave. One major way of exerting such control has been
happily abolished: early this year the Parliament unanimously disposed of the
hated Main Office for the Control of the Press, Publications, and Perfor–
mances, thus ending forty-five years of preventive censorship in Poland. But
for quite a long time censorship hadn't been a real problem: even before
1989 it had grown lax, as if the censors sensed the institution's imminent
demise. And since the emergence of the Mazowiecki government there has
been, ofcourse, practically no such thing as a forbidden topic or an illegal way
of publishing an author's thoughts.
(As
a result, freedom of expression shows
its ugly underside too: at least such a strange thought visits the mind of a
sworn enemy of censorship such as myself, as I look at the walls ofvener–
ated monuments of architecture in downtown Warsaw covered with political
graffiti and glued-on posters, or as I watch a television report of a brawl
provoked by a group of skinheads wearing T-shirts adorned with swastikas,
serving as bodyguards for the Congress of the Polish Right.)
The Polish bookstores I visited offered everything from books on the
Katyn massacre and denunciations of Gorbachev's imperialistic policies to sex
manuals and soft-core erotic novels (with not very much in between, to be
sure: the struggling publishing houses seem to be aiming at quick profits by
selling formerly forbidden fruit, before they secure their existence enough to
