The ridicule of semi-peripheries

Zbigniew Rykiel
unpublished
The New Minister of Culture and National Heritage, and incidentally the First Deputy Prime Minister and a professor of sociology, forbade the performance of a theatre play authored by a Nobel Prize winner. He had not seen the play himself; rather he capitulated to the noisy terror of an extremist group, referred to as the Rosary Crusade, who identified the play as being 'non-Catholic'. They, too, had not seen the play but they were convinced that it was pornographic, spitting on 'Catholic
more » ... ', whatever that means. As such, they decided to act in accordance with the tradition of the crusades (cf. Sałański 2013). The minister announced he would not finance the play from the public budget; he dislikes 'pornographic' plays (Smith 2015) that violate the 'universally accepted principles of social coexistence' (Pre-miera..., 2015), despite the fact that the budget comes from the taxes of citizens, including from 'those whose tastes and aesthetic needs are different' (Prof. Wa-chowski..., 2015) than the minister's and the crusaders'. In this way, the minister transgressed the tradition of the crusades by including in the repertoire of his behaviours the traditions of the inquisition, including holding possession of the index of prohibited works. One fears that this is the first step in transforming the Ministry into one of Culture and National Virginhood, all the more so in the original Polish given the difference between heritage (dziedzictwo) and virginhood (dziewictwo) is linguistically slight. His brother quickly distanced himself from the minister's activities by calling his sibling an 'idiot' (Robert Gliński..., 2016). As Julian Tuwim prophetically stated in 1932, 'The Minister was late on the play / By five minutes and fifteen years' (Julian Tuwim..., b.d.). Nor can it be argued that the Ministry has no cultural programme.
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