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PARTISAN REVI EW
Kriseova: Yes. At the beginning, she did not know how to be First Lady.
Now, she does it perfectly. She is on the boards of many foundations.
She is doing wonderful charitable work, but people don't appreciate it.
I once told her, "They will appreciate you after you are dead, don 't
expect anything while you are alive." Sometimes she is desperate about
how critical and unfair the journalists are.
Kurzweil : Journalists are unfair all over the world.
Kriseova: Havel is badly treated by journalists and the media. Unfortu–
nately, journalists don't have the proper education, because they now go
to work directly after school in order to earn money.
Kurzweil: Well, I don't think that's very different than In the United
States.
Kriseova: In the United States you have some serious newspapers, which
have some interesting columnists. More like in Germany, for instance,
the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
or
Die Zeit.
We don't have that. We
have more and more rubbish.
Kurzweil: That's part of journalism these days, because the more rub–
bish you print, the more readers you get, which means more advertising
and more money.
Kriseova: It's the tragedy of this world. Mankind is getting more and
more stupid. Nobody doubts that.
Kurzweil: In
Partisan Review
we try hard to stay on a higher level. But
" little magazines" that don't play down to the lower level of readers
cannot get much of a circulation.
Kriseova: This is the same thing on another level. Anyway, I think that
Havel has made a few serious mistakes, but who would not have done
so in this position? Count von Schwarzenberg, who was the chancellor
in the Castle in our time, during a discussion with some dignitaries once
said: "Imagine you have an aquarium with fish, and you make bouill–
abaisse out of the aquarium. And now, in our situation, we have to
make an aquarium out of the bouillabaisse."
