More to beer than meets the eye
Thumbs up to the Sejm Marshal Maciej Plazynski for having the guts and prescience last week to remove from Parliament's agenda a vote on a bill that would make all advertisement of alcoholic beverages illegal.
The law currently permits the advertising of beverages containing less that 1.5% alcohol. But 34 Solidarity Election Action (AWS) deputies want that level reduced to .5%, effectively barring Polish beer producers from any advertising on the local market.
In booting the bill from the agenda, Plazynski argued that the Sejm's schedule is already backed up and lawmakers have more pressing issues that require immediate attention. Three examples from history show why the draft law should never make it back.
In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin introduced the doctrine of Socialist Realism, which defined acceptable Soviet art as that which portrayed reality not as it was, but as it should be. Adhering to the law meant a creative life spent coughing up idyllic scenes from collective farms or factories where sweat-less workers harvested or pounded out a new Soviet reality.
While some complied, for a legion of other unofficial artists, creativity knew no bounds. Undaunted by official regulations, painters and sculptors produced work in back-alley ateliers that achieved commercial and critical success on the international art scene decades before the socialist realist doctrine became defunct in the early 1990s.
A similar flouting of limits took place in the United States earlier this century when Prohibition led to the flourishing of unregulated back-street breweries that produced all the liquor the black market could absorb.
Contemporary free-market Poland also shows that ingenuity knows no bounds. When the Sejm set the current advertising limits in 1998, beer producers and ad houses teamed up to pump out a slew of entertaining non-alcoholic beer ads, whose amusement value lay both in the ad itself and in the way it made fun of prohibitionist-minded lawmakers.
Any new ban introduced in the Sejm will undoubtedly unleash a new generation of innovative solutions. As it is, foreign brewers will continue to reach Polish living rooms via satellite. Polish brewers are already talking about registering as foreign firms to do the same.
Parliamentarians should now exhibit some of the same creativity being used to flout their decrees and use it to implement laws that will truly make a difference in the lives of Polish citizens. Here are 201 hints: pass a law that would require healthy drinking water for Warsaw residents. And get a move on pushing through the 200 laws the country needs to have in place before it has a chance to make it into the European Union. That's a lot of room for parliamentarians to try to prove that creativity truly knows no bounds.
