June 8, 2011
Czechs love to complain, and this year the topic on everyone’s lips is corruption in the parliament. “They are robbing us of millions, hundreds of millions,” an abstract artist told me. “The political system has us voting for parties instead of individuals. The parties make coaltions that no one likes and that’s how they wield power in the government. The crooks are the sons and daughters of the old communisis, and they are just the same thieves as their parents, only worse. The communists had Moscow watching over them to make sure they ran the place the way they were supposed to. These thieves answer to no one.” There is a pervasive cynicism in the electorate and a pessimism about the direction of the country. A cab driver put it very colorfully, as the Czechs do: “There are too many roosters running the dump heap.”
Many of the younger generation have gone to the US to work and to gain English skills, and I found their willingness to converse with me — often interspersing phrases in English into their Czech — something new. A waiter at the Pod Slavínem restaurant, a Volkswagen supplier who sat next to me on the plane, the abstract painter who ran one of my Pensions with brilliance and enlightenment, the waiter at U Libušky in Brno, and his boss Michal, who had me driven gratis to the bus station (“because the taxidrivers are as crooked at the politicians”) — they were all more voluble, it seemed to me, than before.
The Volkwagen supplier told me a joke (fór in Czech, a narrative style borne under the last regime). What’s the difference between a retired middle-class American and a retired middle-class Czech? Answer: they both can afford a trip to Prague twice a year.
Here is my favorite church, the Diensenhofer late-Baroque St. Nicholas on the Old Town Square.
gmc
