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However pompous this may sound, we at the Voice document historic events. Last week was replete with news that in all likelihood no one in Poland would have predicted just 10 years ago. Poland a member of NATO? No kidding. A spy, Col. Ryszard Kukliński, receiving a hero's welcome in his native country? Don't make me laugh.
The final vote in the U.S. Senate in favor of NATO enlargement enlivened the media worldwide. Kukliński's return is a piece of more parochial news, but the Polish press is dedicating to it more or less as much space as to the issue of military alliances, trying to scoop one another with arguments and commentaries. Perhaps the media interest is directly proportional to the intensity of the guest's personal security (a short man, Kukliński can hardly be seen from behind the backs of his bodyguards). If so, then Adam Szostkiewicz is right in a comment for us that the visit has been elevated to a status similar to that enjoyed by a papal pilgrimage (see pages 5, 7 and 20).
If the number of bodyguards were the only factor determining media interest, probably no news program would have headlined Leszek Miller's being hit with an egg as he was about to make a speech at this year's low-key May Day rally in Warsaw. In Cracow, fist fights broke out at a similar event. The very fact that these events occurred means there was no security around. Yet all the media reported them. Did it do so only because right-wingers are good at throwing and better at fist-fighting? In my opinion, Poles are still deeply divided and full of hatred, and we will still be surprised on a number of occasions by events confirming this.
The right wing itself is having problems with the right wing. It would be interesting to see what conclusions Jerzy Buzek and his ministers draw after the government's newest policy toward the coal sector received a thumbs-down in Katowice, the prime minister's native region, on May 4, despite the fact that the coal-sector plan is assessed by the Business Centre Club as exceptionally favorable to miners.
After reading a letter from a regular reader in Szczyrk, in which he calls on other foreigners to share good and bad experiences from their stay in Poland in the pages of the Voice-because this is something that our paper lacks, the reader says-I wonder if the average foreigner, preoccupied with his or her everyday problems in Poland, is at all interested in the problems plaguing Buzek, or the egg flowing down Miller's jacket, or the words of wisdom from Kukliński. Will they reach for a novel by Sapkowski, if, thanks to our publication, some publisher decides to translate it into English, and will they go to Żelazowa Wola for a piano concert? Anybody willing to answer?
Magda Sowińska
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