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Comrade Ragball and a Slimeball as Unigue Visions of the Other in Postwar Poland Suddenly a drop of bitterness, A hideous thought emerges: Sadat!$ The cold Egyptian pederast, The cunning and venomous adder! Didnt’ he bite my lips with passion?! Didnt he pretend to be so excited and put his rwk?? in my pockets?! And when he took everything out, The thief showed me the door in the Middle East. The character was obviously based on that of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, grotesquely distorted of course. Indeed, Brezhnev had a habit of kissing all communist dignitaries on the lips in greeting them. The poem’s culmination comes when Leonida is so delighted with her reflection in the mirror, or so drunk with her self-proclaimed infatuation with Dick (a reference to Richard Nixon), or with cognac, that she strips off all her clothes and stretches in front of the mirror in bliss. When the mirror is asked the ritual fairy-tale question, “(Mirror, mirror, on the wall) Who’s the fairest of them all?”, her reflection in it suddenly becomes yellow and ugly and the mirror mentions Tsarina Mao. Upon hearing this Leonida experiences such a shock that the whole Kremlin starts trembling as she wriggles naked on the floor in despair. Her subjects start coming in totally confused about what is happening, from which Leonida (Fig. 9) concludes bitterly that the dumb subjects never understand their ruler and must be dealt with severely: the people are the svolotch'® and shit, and must be whipped, whipped, and whipped! Conclusion: Ragballs and Slimeballs in the Contemporary Polish Press The concepts of Szmaciak and gnida have gained popularity in Poland over the decades since their first occurrence in the public space. For many dissidents in the 1980s and 1990s, Szmaciak was a synonym of an opportunistic grassroots communist party activist and was most frequently loaded with contempt. Nowadays the term is used essentially as a term of abuse in the political struggle between two parties of anti-communist origin—both right-wing: the nationalist, strongly Catholic, and socialist Law and Justice party (in power in the years 2005-2007 and since October 2015) and the liberal, promarket, largely conservative but nonideological Civic Platform (in power in the years 2007-2015). The term Szmaciak is mainly ° Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt 1970-1981, who is known for loosening close ties with the Soviet Union after the initial rapprochement. 9 “Hands in Russian. 1% ‘Scum’ in Russian. In this context the term could also be understood to be labelling people as swines. 389
