An introductory editorial note
Many political scientists happily and honorably work, as they say, "in the profession". A few academic and research careers aside, this implies a wide range of managerial, administrative, analytical and activist positions in the public sector and civil society: ministries, local authorities, political parties, NGOs, think tanks and the media. For many other political scientists, however, for various reasons, this does not work. This does not mean that they are unhappy and that their hard-earned knowledge in political science does not at least in some way help them cope with life experiences more easily. In the general tumult of the labor market, these brave individuals honorably perform various jobs for which the Faculty of Political Science did not specifically qualify them. Inspired by the experiences and tribulations of such heroes of the contemporary precariat and small entrepreneurship, we bring the first in a series of comments in the Precarious Political Scientist series. We hereby also invite other political scientists from the country and from abroad, as well as other social scientists with comparable experiences, to contact us with their stories that they would like to share with the public.
Next Friday, from the pen of the same precarious political scientist, we bring the continuation of the episode Sailing is Necessary. In the near future, we will also publish episodes of The Wild Construction Site and The Road to Inclusion is Paved with Good Intentions, associated with the experience of the author who, in addition to working on the boat and in the construction site, was also employed by one of the associations for the social inclusion of "post-deinstitutionalized" persons with intellectual disabilities, developmental difficulties and mental disorders.
Izv. prof. dr. sc. Krešimir Petković
Dedicated to the crew from the sailer whose name I am not allowed to write due to the GDPR
The burning sunlight, the shimmering sea, the burning sunlight… It’s too much. An open palm was raised to cast a shadow, sheltering the squinting face. It seems that the merciless rays hit my head, from which polarized glasses and a cap were carelessly omitted. Dazed and confused, I didn’t have much of a clue about my surroundings. I only felt that I was nervously encouraging myself for an unknown goal due to the phantasmagorical change of scenery full of objects that shone, grew larger, and then metastasized and darkened. Behind the veil of shining spots, the island’s karst with rocks, maquis and pines gradually sharpened. Around me, I can see more transparently the full platinum ring on the stirring surface. I can make out the stones, the burnt grass, the lie. I'm sunburnt, but at least vitamin D will be created. “Come on, fasten that rope, dear mother of Jesus, are you slow!!!", the silence was interrupted by the piercing sound of the vigilant shouting. The identifying gaze falls downwards. I have a rope in my hands, I will have to tie it up. It seems I’m a rookie sailor who can’t even pretend to know what he’s doing. How did I get here? Ah, in short, “sailing is necessary”.
According to the historian Plutarch and his report from the book Parallel Lives, the origin of the famous saying is attributed to Pompey the Great. He was a supreme military commander, an excellent politician, a member of the First Triumvirate, a consul and, if the statues are to be believed, he resembled the Croatian singer Duško Lokin. Pompey received urgent authorization from the Senate to deliver bread, more precisely grain (not Ukrainian), from Sardinia and Sicily to Rome. However, the sailors had enough of everything, ever since Africa, and on top of that, a terrible storm broke out that would make navigation extremely dangerous and endanger their lives. Therefore, they hesitated to set sail. Pompey, in a flash and without hesitation, was the first to board the ship and with the exclamation “Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse!” issued the order to set sail. It seems reasonable that sometimes sailing is more important than life because it enables its continuation. That is, in my case, sailing is temporary source of income. Furthermore, it is an instructive life experience.
I am writing these lines because I lost a bet that within five years of completing my studies in political science, I would be working “in the profession”. The first thing I did after I’ve finished the last version of the diploma thesis was that I shoveled the rainwater out of the boat. At the time, I had no idea what the development of the situation would bring years later. My great-grandfather was a torpedoman, my grandfather a diver, my father started as a naval telegraph operator, and ended his career as a corvette lieutenant. The fateful hour struck, it was my turn. Like Willard from the Apocalypse Now, stunted in a small room with four mediocre walls of average civilian life, I met my mission. The captain called “pack up”. I became an auxiliary sailor, equipped with an iron will to do my best. The setting – a sailing ship, the route – Adriatic, the duration – summer season, the cargo – foreign guests.
When you get on the ship (besides having to take off your clothes and on no account throwing toilet paper into the toilet), you have to stop dealing with previous considerations and have a “clean” unencumbered head, not full of problems from the land and home, or misinformation from the Internet. Therefore, polemics about who is more responsible for the crisis in the EU, Germany or France, or the prognostic calculation of the time until a potential nuclear disaster, in the daily rhythm of waves and non-stop tasks of sailors are superfluous, because there is no place for such concerns on board. In the midst of the Russian-Ukrainian war and inflation, does the world need another comparative commentator – or, God forbid, a theorist – of the gruesome world and daily political reality? I asked myself, lying down and lost in thoughts, looking at the ceiling of the sailor’s cabin not even half a meter above me, the same one that has been eroded by the ravages of time, fungi and worms along with the parade of indestructible cockroaches, an integral part of every honest wooden ship.
When the safety of the ship partly depends on the seaman’s skill in applying the type of knot and the place and object of tying, it is important to know what you do and how you do it. After the initial unsuccessful work with the ropes on the cleat, the captain knew how to motivate me: “You are not here to think, but to do obediently! Alas, the political thinker in you resists. Stop with analytics, unlearn knowledge from books, don’t talk like the Wikipedia and don’t stand stiff with your hands folded. Don't think, act. We’ll beat it out of you, you’ll see.” Do, don’t think, listen. On command, captain! In addition, the somewhat Aristotelian mantra of the crew is that “a donkey thinks while the man ponders”, so I had to adapt, improve and finally become a man.
The dangers are countless. From unexpected storms, shoals for stranding, sharp rocks, loosened or tangled anchors and ropes, small boats without ship’s lights for potential collisions, cables that can loosen and destabilize the mast, to various malfunctions in the engine room. The generator and battery go out – blackout, you can't start the engine or drive tourists, drop the anchor, game over, pay for the hotel, find them a transfer to another boat of a competing company, and take care of the repairs yourself. When you accidentally pass over a net while sailing, dive in and use a scalpel for two hours to cut the coiled threads from the propeller, what can you do, it was destined to happen. There are more dramatic scenarios, however. Every now and then we hear in the media about someone dying at sea. The journalistic reports know how to frame the panoramas of island horizons with a dark veil. We follow the weather forecast, especially the application Windy. We look at it and don’t blink. Admittedly, sometimes you need to listen to the wisdom of experienced fishermen who, even by the feeling of tension in their operated bodily tissue or by the movement of clouds above certain hills, prophetically know when unannounced storm will occur. What they say, it stands as an “amen”. We honor them with “let any given lady give to you, water from her jug”.
Personally, the worst thing for me on a ship is when I screw up something incredibly in three minutes and then two experts have to come after me to fix it for the next fifteen minutes while inevitably muttering, "how can someone do this, what the hell is this, motherf...cker" The obtained certificates are useless because I feel like sinking into the ground and throwing myself into the sea, a bit like Bepina, a character from A Small Town, an old Croatian TV-show. Here's what I managed to – please forgive my vocabulary – screw up in a relatively short time (the contrite records of the damage I made):
Carrying the awnings, in the fall I leaned on the deck floor cover, knocked out and warped the adjustable holder and the sliding foot. A fellow sailor helped out with the Allen wrenches and a pair of pliers, but the footed deck lid will never be the same. The captain will kill me for being careless and sloppy.
I managed to clog and break the pump which, with the regulating valve, fills and empties the toilet. I also broke the handle of the tire for unclogging the drain. When repairing the blockage and disassembling the valve, the contents must not be spilled into the bilge or on the floor of the shower cabin, otherwise you will regret this mistake for days. In short, I regretted it for days. I also spilled hot wax from two lanterns on the fabric of the living room furniture. The captain will kill me for being so clumsy. Using SPF 50 sunscreen, I managed to waste 42 work shirts because the laundry couldn't get those yellowish stains out of the clothes. From now on I don't use sunscreen and I get red like a crab. The captain will kill me how many work clothes had to be procured. I cut the sun deck with the keel from the eFoil surfboard. The captain will kill me for what a pest I am. I ate in front of my superiors, they will flay me alive for not obeying rules and etiquette. When raising and lowering the seabob I wore the varnish off the wooden handle, I will have to sand and coat it all next spring.
When I went to disconnect the plug connected to the shore supply of the marina, the electrical current from the junction box of the anchored pontoon “stuck” to our adapter and cable. In particular, one of the three wires burned out under high voltage, the metal was burned on both sides and soldered into an indestructible alloy of our wires and theirs. Although I am not directly guilty or responsible for this, it does not change the fact that I feel guilt, although not a Brucknerian one, but still some kind of guilt.
They say “he who works, makes mistakes”, but this was a bit too much.
In addition to my failings, the captain hates civil servants, one of which, fate aside, I could have become in an another life. According to him, they sit in offices, walk around with documents, do not earn, but still get paid. They are paid from taxpayers' money, to whom they are basically useless, and, moreover, they continue to be vampires who suck the profits of entrepreneurs. Sailors don’t like them too much either. They are disgusted by the overblown and dysfunctional public service of pencil pushers: each of them is typing and when you look at him you never know if he is working or actually playing Solitaire on the computer. There is, of course, no party affiliation allowed on the ship, if someone is a member of any party, he flies off the ship on the first next Saturday during the change of guests
A modest working hypothesis would be that some seafarers do not tolerate “state” office clerks, because the latter mostly have annual vacations over the summer, when seafarers on catering ships for the transport of tourists urgently need to “solve papers” on the fly, and then by chance they encounter the state in the form of numerous embittered and rude counter workers (as a replacement for the ones who have gone on the vacation), who send them on to some other clerk, elsewhere and eternally later.
Anyway, if you want to anger the people who do the business of seafaring in a millisecond, tell them this: “The sea does your work, and when you do that little bit, you only do it four months a year, don’t you?” A decent retort is that the sea a respectable resource that we exploit in one way or another, but it does not steer, does not wash the deck, does not cook, does not serve guests and is not an employee. The four months of demanding work in this industry demand at least as many months of preparation and maintenance.
However, I learned that the sea is much more than an economic resource demanding to manage. The old sea wolf, relaxed kogo (ship’s cook) wittily asserted: “The sea is called the sea because the sea can do everything [More se zove more jer sve more]. Sometimes it hits you with a three-meter wave, sometimes it hits the ship’s plating with a log, another time it brings you an unexpected treasure, then it may take you to the most beautiful cove, but if it hears you being arrogant towards it and saying that you are the best, then, with the wind, waves and currents, it very quickly puts you on the test and shows you that you are wrong.” For me the violent sea brought an existentialist experience. During the storm at night, I fell into the sea between a sailboat and a dinghy, both in motion. We all had a good laugh at my clumsiness, but since then I fear death with a true awareness of my own transience. I stared down in awe at the sea’s black and dark blue color. I thought about Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Nietzsche’s abyss returning the gaze. And the ship’s cook together with me for a long time looked from the deck at the same matter Except that he didn’t just glance at it. Plop! The bait sank, and in the blink of an eye he pulled out cuttlefish and squid with it, which inevitably made him happy. He uses every moment, when the guests are outside the ship at dinner, to look into the abyss. But his abyss does not stare back at him, but rewards him with abundant portions of cephalopods. You just have to try.
I am comforted by the fact that there is no sailor who has not fallen into the sea and swam (or hit his head on a low head jamb). It happens to everyone.
And sometimes, during the break, we also throw ourselves into the sea because we want to take a bath and refresh ourselves. The captain, sensing this, also offered a Sawyeresque moment in this odyssey of struggle against poverty: “I have a special task for you. Everyone, go swimming!” After we plunged ourselves into the sea, he added to the hostess and to us: “Throw them the sponges. C’mon boys, scrub the water line, did you think you were only going to twiddle around?!” (To be continued.)
