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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 communist apparatchik of a low level, but on the other he does not care much about ideology and is keen only to serve his own interests. His vices are very much the familiar 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 communists 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 using 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 Wierzbicki 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
