Ameryka My America
SKALSKI, ERNEST
THE VIEW FROM POLAND Ameryka My America By Ernest Skalski Warsaw The dominant chants at the compulsory demonstrations of my youth were silly sing-songs attacking President Truman for...
...America has held out the greatest promise of liberty here since the days when Poland was under the exploitative domination of one foreign emperor after another...
...Such a tenacious faith in the U. S. can be vexing, and not only for Americans critical of their own country or for Western Europeans critical of America...
...Today we feel only the self-respect America has helped to restore to us, and its returning Poland to a position of significance in the world...
...As for the Americans, they may compete vigorously in business or on the job, but they do not scream at each other...
...They praise themselves, they think of themselves as being important, yet at the same time they are not altogether sure of their place among the nations...
...Invariably, after looking around to make sure no informant was within earshot, the loudest chanters would then recite sotto voce an equally silly verse, calling on President Truman to drop that bomb because life here was so unbearable...
...After World War II, political principles spurred departures more than material concerns...
...But I'm speaking about bread again, when I am supposed to be speaking about freedom...
...But they are unable to influence the vast majority of their fellow citizens...
...America's blunders, even its crimes, do not taint its benevolent deeds in our eyes...
...The point I mean to make is that thanks to America, Poles feel freer in their own country...
...Indeed, they have become part of Polish everyday life...
...George Bush did, and was received with proportionately less enthusiasm than would have greeted his predecessor...
...He did not believe America would disappoint him...
...where everyone is out for himself...
...It is therefore not surprising that Poles consider Ronald Reagan the greatest American President...
...While the Pole longs to go to America, he has been warned most of his life that the wolfish laws of capitalismareespeciallycruelintheU.S...
...They do not fight over a piece of merchandise in the store...
...The idea of an America as good as it was mighty could not be uprooted from the minds of fascinated Poles...
...Embassy who humiliates him by repeatedly denying a visa, nor the immigration officer who might not let him stay can spoil his dream...
...He also has the chance to become rich, to make a stunning career...
...Ready to take any job, aPole soon finds work in America and earns more than he ever could at home...
...Now about freedom...
...Neither the consul at the U.S...
...Aside from its tangible value, that fulfillment adds to Polish self-esteem...
...To begin with, the other Poles he meets have not grown fangs...
...Still, he felt more liberated than he had ever been...
...Formerly, he would have had to work most of his life to save enough money for some minor comforts...
...Should he decide in time to return to Poland for good, he will similarly enjoy a new status...
...It was he who forced Mikhail S. Gorbachev to give up missiles in Europe, who obtained from the Soviets genuine concessions on disarmament...
...The man in the street knows what he knows...
...After just a few years in the U.S., he can buy himself a well-equipped house and a good car...
...Moreover, the dollars in his account, or hidden under his floor, will afford him not only a standard of living but a sense of security otherwise unattainable...
...Debts are calculated in dollars, even if the money is borrowed and returned in zlotys...
...Americans aware of their country's weaknesses are irritated by this admiration, just as we were annoyed by Western Leftists who, until recently, cameto Poland looking for confirmation of their Utopias...
...We do not remember Yalta—Yalta is falling to pieces, anyway—we do not remember the years of waiting...
...inspired in Poles...
...He soon discovers, though, that the reality is very different...
...If he suffers a serious accident and lacks insurance, there are always people who will help tide him over...
...Reagan never visited Poland...
...So one can imagine the powerful emotions news of Lech Walesa's trip to the U.S...
...It is a difficult expedition, but it pays...
...You buy a used car, for example, with dollars, not zlotys...
...A Pole would leave behind the protective structures of family, community and church to start over in the U. S. True, once there he tended to seek out the old dependencies in the Polish ghettos...
...THE VIEW FROM POLAND Ameryka My America By Ernest Skalski Warsaw The dominant chants at the compulsory demonstrations of my youth were silly sing-songs attacking President Truman for using the atomic bomb...
...But this one is a rather frightening place at first...
...They cannot solve all his problems, yet they do what they can to help him take his initial steps...
...Masses of people from my poor country have been streaming across the Atlantic over the last hundred years...
...Here was this most important country about to acknowledge us in the person of an electrician from Gdansk...
...For several generations now, America has lived up to Polish expectations by fulfilling our two fundamental needs: bread and freedom...
...He could make his own choices—he was free, for instance, to escape from freedom...
...More often than not America fulfills our expectations...
...Photographs of his home and car will dazzle those left behind...
...Nowonder the average Pole perceives America as a paradise...
...Or as a conspiracy directed from Moscow...
...are better off...
...It was he who staunchly said No to Communism...
...Poles regard the anti-Americanism of the Germans, the Dutch and the Japanese—who owe their freedom, security and prosperity to the U.S.—as a mental aberration...
...Paradise is never easy to get into...
...All the world knows that at Yalta President Roosevelt sold us down the river to Stalin...
...Neither could those who fled martial law in the 1980s...
...In short, it turns out that the United States is quite hospitable after all...
...Goods and dollars sent or brought from the other side of the Atlantic improve the general living conditions...
...The new arrival quickly learns, too, that if he becomes gravely ill, a doctor may well forgo payment...
...The painful irony is that consequently many in Poland who have never been to the U.S...
...Although few Polish immigrants achieve that kind of success, they all can hope for it...
...In Poland, as well, many people, particularly intellectuals, are exasperated by this attitude...
...The Communist authorities tried vilifying jazz and pointing to the racial discrimination in theU.S., to no avail...
...The first wave of postwar emigrants would have stayed to help rebuild their impoverished and devastated country, but they could not abide being enslaved by the Communists...
...The Poles are a proud people, but they are also insecure...
...They need to have their worth attested by others...
...In Poland, however, we also know that the deterrent of American bombs and missiles prevented the spread of Communism...
...So will the Western gadgetry he might send to his family, and the dollars...
...Embassy and executed two young men who were frequent visitors for allegedly planning a murder under its influence, but those scare tactics didn't work either...
...And who can say if he is right or wrong...
...Simply making the pilgrimage to America, to an advanced civilization, immediately improves a Pole's standing in his countrymen's eyes...
...Nevertheless, Iamnotgoingto make the usual qualifications...
...They could not hope for anything before...
...The President himself—second only to the Polish Pope in the national affections—would decorate Walesa with the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest honor a civilian can earn...
...Even an announcement that the potato bug (Colorado beetle) was being dropped from American planes onto Polish farms did nothing to undermine the Poles' admiration for the U.S...
...Acknowledge us in the most official and ceremonial way possible...
...This article was translated by Anna Husarska...
...Every American President is for us by definition great, but Reagan—viciously portrayed on Communist posters during martial law, as Truman and Eisenhower were under Stalinism—ranks at the top...
...They closed down the Information Center at the U.S...
...Ernest Skalski, a previous NL contributor, is a senioreditor of Gazeta Wyborcza, the independent Polish daily...
...The average Pole did not seem to mind, though, that the President promised relatively little aid...
...there is enough for everyone...
...Let me start with bread, since it is the more obvious matter...
Vol. 72 • November 1989 • No. 17
