Beating plowshares into caducei*
After the reconstruction of fierce battles between Wehrmacht and Read Army units, the people’s wallets depleted in the course of a two-week-long feast demanded taking a sober look at life. Stark reality pushed the patriots wearing both blue-yellow and orange-black ribbons towards the same trench on the social front line. One wants to eat, undergo treatment, change the worn-out clothes – in a word, to tackle everyday life problems that are very far from the heroism of our ancestors. When you see employees reluctantly heading for offices and factories and the paralyzed arms of cranes hanging over construction sites, it becomes clear that there is no labor front line in this country.
We do not like to work – not at all because the Tatar-Mongols and Russians embedded a share of idleness and laziness in the Ukrainian genome. By the same token, genetic affinity with the Chinese cannot save North Korean comrades. There is something else here.
We have developed our attitude to work in the course of the past hundred years’ evolution – first under the hammer and sickle of total egalitarianism, and then in a tender embrace of Mercury. But even with wings on our slippers, we still failed to become a country of burgeoning business. Selling your own and reselling somebody else’s is not the same thing. Therefore, turning the caduceus into the sword and the plowshare, we focused on service.
Governmental institutions and ministerial domains are vying annually for leadership in corruption. The Ukrainian Olympus’s financial attractiveness is breath-taking. Why should you go to work as a carpenter or a steeplejack if wages remain Soviet-style? You can reap or hammer but earn just enough to have a meal. We are one of the few countries that display poverty in spite of a high employment rate. One of my Facebook friends wrote some tear-jerking lines about South Koreans who grind away for years without having a day of rest – what we need is their industriousness. But even if we suddenly have workaholics who stay at work for 2,400 hours a year and take just a three-day vacation (as is the case in South Korea according to Forbes), this would hardly change the social climate. Work can, of course, be measured in hours and joules, but it is not paid for in these units. Instead of struggling for the wages of a plantation Negro, it is better to make your way as a “white man” of the system.
All those at the bottom are striving for the top and middle of the Ukrainian hierarchy. Like fries raring to fill their air bladders, they jump out of the water, gulping for the financial oxygen that never reaches the lower depths. Minutes of risk on the surface are worth dozens of years of work on the seabed. If the media is something to go by, Ukrainian bureaucrats “take” from 24,000 to several million at one go or a banknote a minute in the case of traffic policemen and document issuers. Who on earth will work in a country of cushy jobs and lazybones, where average monthly wages do not allow one to meet his or her basic needs?
How can we create incentives for fair work in a deep-rooted system of thievery, bribery, official extortions, and illegal seizures? This question sounds equally nasty to both the government and the opposition. How many energetic reformers, who had been swearing to change the world, tripped over and quietly changed executive offices for legislative rooms? Reforms tend to founder when reformers do not begin with themselves.
Any changes in the direction of financial flows upset the existing balance of forces, much to the detriment of party sponsors’ wallets. Even half-measures clip the wings of the subordinate staff. You just try to convince a regional-scale clerk that his regular salary and pension should be leveled with those of a skilled factory worker – as it is done in Europe or China, the country our managers love so much. On the next day after this decision, administrative buildings will go empty and there will be nobody to organize grain-sowing campaigns, rallies, data collection, and territorial control. The system will go bust. For this reason, the crucial problem of the development of the creative potential of a once hardworking nation is so far supplanted with fighting corruption, fascism, gays, languages, gas contracts, and common sense.
This fight is not a free-style or Greco-Roman arm-twisting – it is a graphic and parade-like solemn demonstration of force and actions after hundreds of rehearsals. The fight conquers people’s hearts with its spectacular and expressive spirit, which raises a masked man above those who open their face and launch a business. The fight spellbinds young people who choose the heroic professions of police and customs officers, prosecutors, judges, and taxmen. University law schools, overcrowded like draft boards during a war, are the true places of concentration for the system’s main means and forces, where everybody is happy to serve the Fatherland instead of working. This is our struggle.
THE LATTER WILL BE THE FIRST TO TAKE US BY THE SCRUFF OF THE NECK
While Red commanders from the Party of Regions were dancing to the songs of Svoboda “nightingales,” the world came under a totally different threat. The situation called to mind an old joke about a WW II guerrilla’s diary. Do you remember it?
“May 5, 1942. The Germans knocked us out of the forester’s hut.”
“May 6, 1942. We knocked the Germans out of the forester’s hut.”
May 7, 1942. The Germans knocked us out of the forester’s hut,” and so on.
The last entry: “The forester came and drove us all away to hell.”
In terms of our political clashes, there are two foresters: the crisis and global climate changes. The latter may be the first to take us by the scruff of the neck. It was reported in May that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air had reached an all-time high of 400 per mil. There was a stir in the world even before this report. Governmental commissions and organizations, foundations, and even individual farmers all over the globe began to simulate the weather and precipitation situation in order to know what to sow and where to run. It turned out that, in spite of a uniform temperature distribution on the planet, every region will have a climate of its own. Moreover, these regions may shrink in size to half a Ukrainian oblast. In other words, if Vinnytsia is showered with rains, there will be not a millimeter of precipitation in Uman. Pinpoint weather forecasts are becoming the main weapon of meteorological centers and institutions that depend on whimsical weather in many countries. As usual, we don’t care about this. We just feast our eyes on pretty television girls who point to various sides of Ukraine with Swan Queen-like gestures. We can still find a weather report in the Internet. But who will share with us a forecast about climate changes in Ukraine, changes in subsoil water layers, growth of the population of pest insects, house thermo-insulation programs, regional variability of the heating season, and many other important things which the countries that surround us have been dealing with for decades? The daily wants of humankind pale before our strategists’ petty scheming around the party priorities hidden in their office chairs.
“GAY BOYS, TWIN GIRLS”
Following up on a voguish topic that fascist bosses liked so much, we can say for sure: the Nazis persecuted gays. The communists did not persecute gays. Having organized a sexual revolution after the October coup, they immediately saw that gender freedom could not discipline people and chose to just cancel all forms of sex. Now that every schoolchild knows about “it,” political parties have chosen to focus on this eternal subject. Everybody – from the Pope to the chief of a remote prairie tribe – has aired their opinion about same-sex love. But our “parteigenossen” are still in two minds. The modern-day Communists are biding their time. The historical fiasco about atheism and negation of business taught them to exercise restraint. What if a love not typical of Lenin will come in handy, as church and private property did? The Party of Regions, which stands above the vanity of the world in material terms, does not object in principle because Patriarch Kirill himself is for the freedom of choice in love. The Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc? The picture is clear: can a party whose flag bears the heart oppose the latter at work and at leisure? And UDAR the leader of which has been adequately showing the beauty of a male body in the ring and at photo sessions? No, these parties cannot possibly oppose the double yang and the double yin. Only the Svoboda patriots, who glow with health, youth and passions, reject Freud and display the paradox of a political libido separated from the sexual principle. One could think they are of Hassidic, rather than Cossack, descent. That’s a pity. Politicians must fight for support from different voters, including those with whom they do not share sauna sessions. It’s not that their votes are decisive. Simply, attitude to a minority, including a sexual one, is a criterion for judging whether or not the majority is democratic-minded. This being so, “gay boys and twin girls, you’d better go to Batkivshchyna!”
*The caduceus is the staff carried by Hermes (Mercury) as a symbol of peace. It served as a badge of protection for ancient Greek and Roman heralds (Concise Encyclopedia).
