It really fucking sucks to live in Poland

Saint Adalbert’s rib floats in Gniezno Cathedral, suspended in a reliquary of gold. Live vicariously through His bones; your own spine has been sold for scrap. American F-35s carve crucifixes into the sky. Old women sweep what-might-as-well-be-Cherbobyl dust from their window sills.

Every election is a competitive séance. They summon old nobles with their shiny cashmere robes and idiosyncratic moustaches, the Heroes of 1920 who bravely took back what’s ours from the Asiatic Hordes, the “cursed soldiers” whose hunting-Jews-for-sport hobby has been scrubbed from the biographies to really let the tortured-by-communists part shine; the ghosts rattle their chains and demand higher military spending. A jet engine whine fills the air. Solidarity is now a brand of energy drink stocked in small business franchise stores. Somewhere, a Lockheed Martin executive climaxes.

The malaise is a chemical thing. A concoction brewed from Prussian partition maps, IMF loan conditions, and the formaldehyde stench of John Paul II’s pickled corpse. The politicians ladle it into speeches: We’ll return to glory! (Which glory? The glory of the Commonwealth, a glorified slave society where serfs bled into the soil as nobles tried to learn French to fit in with the elegant West? (nothing ever changes)). One party desperately wants to return to and forever stop time in the year 1650 – while the other, laughing at the first for being conservative reactionary dimwits, counters with PowerPoints titled: “Poland 2040: The Dubai of the North”. News headlines forever rotate between the few classics. MIGRANTS ARE COMING! GAYS ARE ALREADY HERE! GERMANS WANT TO TAKE AWAY OUR CARBON! AMERICA DELIVERS ANOTHER BLOW TO MUSLIM INVADERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST! The villages are dying of irony. Tractors rust in fields where the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy subsidizes monocultures. Folk bands cover “Born in the USA” on spotless Suzuki fiddles to celebrate the nice gentlemanly job provider from Texas opening up a new factory in what used to be the potato fields. A parish priest blesses the new parking lot, sprinkling holy water on asphalt that sweats BP oil and the tears of Ukrainian refugees paid under the table to work 16-hour shifts (would you rather have me rat you out to the Border Guard??? Stack the fucking shelves, Ivan.) A billboard screams CHRIST IS KING.

America loves us like a meth head loves a scratch-off ticket. They give us Patriots (the missiles, not the football team) and we give them our sons: fresh-faced boys from Radom and Białystok signing up to guard KFOR bases in Kosovo, dreaming of green cards and the California sun. Dziękujemy, Uncle Sam! We’ll name a roundabout after you. Another de-communization bill signed; another street renamed from Rosa Luxembourg to Ronald Reagan. The Yanks love us when we’re useful – a human shield against the Asiatic hordes, a Mexico with better winter gear for outsourcing call centers. Sir yes sir, we’ll host your missile defense system. Sir yes sir, we’ll buy your fracked gas at triple the price. Our national sport is Stockholm syndrome. 35-year consecutive champions.

The ”left” is a museum exhibit. Political parties forever stuck with 0.5% support, known more for being running jokes than for any political program. They tweet about strikes  – cautiously, scared, like a cat slowly creeping up to food on the table, wanting to see how far he’s allowed to go, but ready to jump back as soon as the Owners raise their voice. Their entire base – three nurses, a postman who’s just waiting for the price of cigarettes to raise another złoty before he blows his brains out, and a Belarussian who sells pirated Kieślowski DVDs at the bazaar – drive for Uber between shifts. Workers of the world, forgive me, I have a 4.6 rating and a 1996 VW Golf with no heating. The only strike coming now is the heart attack striking down a 45-year-old logistics manager mid-Zoom call, when he hears his factory’s closing down, because the Masters found cheaper meat in Romania.

Our future is a pisanka – brightly dyed, hollow, liable to crack under the slightest pressure. We’re told to marvel at the colors: GDP graphs climbing, Praise the Lord, He is Risen, and Rising Still! Young people, the few of them who can afford to dream about the future, are too busy grinding Norwegian on Duolingo to care. Learn a language, escape a nation. The dream isn't socialism, it's a studio apartment in Oslo where the Wi-Fi never drops and the landlord can’t pronounce żołnierze wyklęci.

In the countryside, 5G towers are mounted on rotting thatch roofs. Self-driving combine harvesters run over a field where 8 different armies are buried. In the cities, tech bros inhabit glass towers that used to be Stalinist monuments. The few remaining bas-relief sculptures of heroic steel mill workers on the Palace of Culture and Science will be chiseled out for more advertising space. “He who lives in Poland does not laugh at the circus.”