helpful health reminders

{image from kindra is here}

These are in Czech.  You can tell because that looks exactly like Czech. :)

I don't speak Czech, but I still have a little Polish, and as you may know, once you get one Slavic language, you can kind of wing it with the rest of them.  Czech seems to me like impatient Polish.  (Or maybe Polish is patient Czech?) You just remove some of the unnecessary vowels and get right down to the framework, to the consonants, and you're speaking Czech. :)

Here are some Communist-era health reminders.

That first card up there, with the guy smoking, says something along the lines of "health requirement" up top, and then underneath his photo, it says "never."  This is good, sound advice that no one in that part of Europe actually followed at the time this photo was taken.  I would have smoked, too, if I had lived in CZ during 1968.

The toothpaste picture says "health rule" or "health law" up top (the Russian Marxists were very bossy) and then underneath it says "morning and evening."  Maybe more, if you're smoking.

Then the smiling picture says "health advice" (because they knew they were being bossy about the teeth brushing as a "law", so now they're trying to tone it down and just say "hey, we're just offering advice . . . take it or leave it") and underneath it says "all the time."

I can't help but think that an admonition to smile all the time would have gone over better if Russia were not invading Czechoslovakia with two hundred tanks and two hundred thousand troops at the time.

The last one with the guy doing what appears to be Semaphore without his flags says "health requirement" or "health need" up top, and then underneath it says "every day."

Let's review:

• Never smoke
• Brush your teeth morning and night
• Smile all the time
• Exercise every day

The Central European Marxists were so banal with their propaganda, you just want to scream.  Milan Kundera writes about this time in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists: You're the ones responsible for our country's misfortunes (it had grown poor and desolate), for its loss of independence (it had fallen into the hands of the Russians), for its judicial murders!

And the accused responded: We didn't know! We were deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!

In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?

Tomas followed the dispute closely (as did his ten million fellow Czechs) and was of the opinion that while there had definitely been Communists who were not completely unaware of the atrocities (they could not have been ignorant of the horrors that had been perpetrated and were still being perpetrated in postrevolutionary Russia), it was probable that the majority of the Communists had not in fact known of them.

But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?

and Judge on Trial by Ivan Klima:

when confronted by idiotic rulers and stupid laws, almost everyone feels enlightened and discovers within himself the capacity for useful counsel

and Open Letters by Vaclav Havel:

True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say? (Letter to Husák)

I'm sorry that I cannot recommend Kundera's or Klima's novels to you with a clear conscience, although in another time of life I read everything and anything either of them wrote.  And I still believe they are both astonishingly good writers (Kundera more so than Klima), but somehow the older I get, the more the substance matters, too, and I feel unwilling to steep myself in a moral code I disagree with.  I don't admire or wish to emulate Kundera's cynicism (I mean his cynicism about love and women and life in general -- I think his cynicism served him well when it came to politics, and I found much to agree with there) or Klima's romanticism (although again, his political observations are so astute), and both authors are fond of developing protagonists who are pathologically unfaithful to their spouses.  But both books (and other books they've written) give a very clear, very stark view of life in Central Europe during post-war Soviet rule.  The strength of their books are in the daily details, I think.  You get a sense of trapped, claustrophobic plodding along.

But Havel! Almost anything he wrote (either his plays or his non-fiction) is worth the time it takes to read.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.