Oldal 389 [389]
Comrade Ragball and a Slimeball as Unigue Visions of the Other in Postwar Poland
no, it is not so tragic after all!
It does not differ from the face that much
So if you pour some Yardley on it,
Put on some cream, and then some powder,
It would be hard to make the distinction
But anyway, what does he care!
In his own Pcim he has respect ...
He’s got a snout—but of his own will!
‘Thus we can see that Szmaciak is on the one hand an embodiment of a commu¬
nist apparatchik of a low level, but on the other he does not care much about ideol¬
ogy and is keen only to serve his own interests. His vices are very much the famil¬
iar vices—drunkenness, womanizing, anti-Semitism, inflated ego, opportunism,
spinelessness, and so forth. So he is theirs and ours at the same time. This brings
him in line with the slimeball of the next section, who takes opportunism one stage
further in constructing the reality to meet his psychological needs (Fig. 8).
Gnida (Slimeball)
Indeed the writer Piotr Wierzbicki (b. 1935), who authored the concept and the
whole classification of gnidas (cf. Traktat 0 gnidach 1979), was under the influence
of Szpotañski. Literally gnida is the egg of a louse laid in the hair of an animal or
a human, but in the metaphorical sense it refers to a nondescript individual who
is scheming against somebody to damage the person—in other words a slimeball
(referred to as a slippery, slimy person by Urban Dictionary). Gnidas as Wierzbicki
defined them were “mainly intellectual characters placeable between red commu¬
nists and anti-communist opposition. In fact, the majority of the Polish nation”.
These were defined as “servile non-communists who inhabited Poland from the
autumn of 1956 till December 12, 1981”’ (Wierzbicki 1986 [1979]).
The characteristic feature of a slimeball was not just submissiveness, but us¬
ing his brains to serve his master in a highly refined way. He serves them with the
quiet work of his brain cells. A slimeball stands on two paws and thinks how to
justify the situation he has found himself in; in other words, he wants to prove
things should be the way they are. He must convince himself his actions are right
and in the process he continuously violates his own soul. Importantly, as Wierz¬
bicki argues, a slimeball does what he does mainly out of fear. Serving the reds, he
is at heart white, counterrevolutionary, prewar, reactionary, pro-Western, hostile.
” On December 13, 1981, martial law was introduced in Poland by General Wojciech Jaruzelski and
the communist regime. Thousands of active opposition members were imprisoned and many people died
during strikes and in clashes with the police. This constituted a turning point for many people, so far
coping with the regime and trying to coexist with it peacefully as “slimeballs” in Wierzbicki’s terms. Many
then decided to join the opposition and stopped cooperating with the authorities.
387