Ho-hum...let's have a look over the past couple of weeks' news-y goodies...

** our PM and Transport Minister have been gliding about the wild blue yonder like pashas on posh private galleons as they dart hither-and-yon across the Mediterranean -- Rebicek with his family and those J&T poobahs in tow, dollars and high-class hookers joining the party, Topolanek with his mistress who walks over dead bodies to get to the man holding the nation's highest office. (Mark my words -- I'll say the same thing about Paroubek and his Slovakian man-killer when he gets the electoral nod come 2009).

** our two poor emaciated "Johns" who said "namaste" after going foodless for 21 days, this after failing to secure the Ghandi-esque salt riot-y results they avidly sought to engender by their current fast against Missile Defence's radar base (aka "hitting a bullet with a another bullet") in Brdy.

** (as per page A3 of this morning's MfD) Czechs -- yet again -- demonstrate their abiding penchant for "Ostrich Creep," afraid of venturing beyond their own chatas (country shacks of beer and love), with nearly 29% of Czechs (of 606 polled by the Median agency) preferring Croatia, the rest a delectable combo of Slovakia, other destinations abroad, or plainly preferring to stay home in the CR, afraid of their own shadows.

** reporters from the country's largest news agencies succeeded in secreting themselves inside our nation's top hospital ICUs and surgical wards, to rifle through Czech patients' medical charts like oversexed juvenilles in search of the next acid trip (sorry, I might be dating myself here).

** the on-again, off-again war with the current head of the Czech Health Ministry over whether Czech employees should be paid for the first 3 days of official sick leave...or not. You want my suggestion? If Specimen Employee A causes her/his own sickness; as in, if s/he goes out the night before, gets drunk or eats bad carbo-rich unnutricious food (egs. knedliky, svickova, veprova polevka), rather than not being paid for the first 3 days of sick leave -- such irresponsible recalcitrant employees should instead pay their employers for being such children.

Etc.

~~~~

Today's post, however, had more to do with the things we should miss about the Bad Old Days.

Even so-called "non-Communist dissidents" (btw, one man's dissident is another man's former, ahem, card-carrying Czechoslovak Communist Party [KSC] member) enjoyed the slower, quieter times under the Hammer & Sickle, and here are some reasons why. This, of course, comes courtesy of one of my dear friends who used to work for the StB (Statni bezpecnost, or "State Security Services," for all of my readers abroad), and who drives me to the airport when I fly far away from our fair republic on business trips.

1) More time to read. People were smarter, in a way, theoretically-speaking because they had more time to sit on their bums to read. Czechoslovaks could cite theories, ideas, and various acceptable works of art because they had time to read real bound books. You know, those same ones Czechs still cover in wax paper or other home-made dust jackets and use sticky tabs to bookmark their last gander into its various pages with.

2) More time for love. Compare the '70s and '80s Czechoslovak birth rates to today's. How many Husakovy deti (n.b. children born during the Gustav Husak normalization-era, when grey was the colour and despair was the overwhelming feeling on our cobbled laneways). Basically, sex was about the only parketa where Czechs and Slovaks (when they weren't at church expiating themselves for their sins or for hating Czechs) could experiment.

3) Other human virtues could be cultivated, instead of crass consumerism. When the profit motive didn't reign supreme and when people didn't evaluate you strictly for how much you could contribute to their bottom line, we behaved better towards each other. We cared about our neighbours more, even if we couldn't exactly tell who was reporting on our movements and activities to the Authorities. No matter, though, because in 1983's Czechoslovakia, the world was going to hell in a handbasket, pronto.

4) Anti-Americanism and America-bashing had a real ring of sincerity to it. Unlike today's situation when Praguers, Czechs, and other Central Europeans, more generally, have dug in their calloused argumentative heels against the USA and its Allies, yet strangely bite the same hand which feeds them. Note to all US-haters: expatriates, former Czechoslovak exiles from Komanco-times (note to my non-Czech readers, "Komanco" reads as "Commancho" in English, which is a euphemistic term used by young Czechs in the modern era to describe the Communist times, or who choose to be politically-correct) and other Westerners alike were and are the primary change agents who brought (and bring) all your wonderful consumerism to our fair republic today. Don't knock your meal ticket! It's gauche and crass.

5) Existentialism, irony, and biting self-hatred served a useful purpose during the '70s and '80s. When you felt like doing yourself in with a straight razor during Komanco, you were making a genuine statement of tragic Shakespearean proportions. And it was real, because as I've mentioned, who would've thunk it during the early eighties that Wall Fall would have occurred, Gorby would have been elected Soviet head honcho, all that glasnost and perestroika, that Mandela would've been released, or the advent of our poet-president? Who?!

So, as you can readily see (or hear), though Czechoslovak-flavoured Communism had its nasty share of:

** show trials.
** Stalinist-inspired insanity.
** forced labour exiles to Jachymov to toil endlessly in the uranium mines.
** stool pigeoning on your neighbours in exchange for privileges and Tuzex coupons.
** consumer goods shortages.
** female-supplied sexual services for hard currency to be spent at the Tuzex shop.
** expenses for running hot water for showers.

...there were considerable advantages as well.