Masters of the Universe (Bruges)

Helena Dalli MP penned an article in today’s Times (Politicking in Lilliput) in which she attacked PN’s councillor Cyrus Engerer for daring to insinuate that Labour’s councillors had it in for him because he is gay. Tut tut. Here at J’accuse we can see where the Labour MP is coming from and we do not need much convincing to realise that Cyrus’ is a ploy to distract from the troubles of the ill-fated Sliema Council and PN’s participation therein. What we did not appreciate were two shots by Ms Dalli MP that had absolutely nowt to do with the issue.

Firstly, in a manner most unbecoming to a member of the house of representatives (and more becoming of certain sections of the pink blogging media), Helena of Labour takes a dig at Cyrus’ name. What has Cyrus’ name got to do with the price of fish? Unless you were to detect ancient Greek vs. Persian vs Trojan undertones the dig at Cyrus’ name is completely gratuitous. Helena then moves on for the kill. Proudly parading Labour’s credentials in the pro-gay camp Helena raps Cyrus for not realising that ’twas a Labour government that decriminalised sodomy “in the 1970s, when being gay was considered a matter of shame by many and the word pufta was used liberally and meant as an insult to homosexuals and others.” Now that’s one hell of a history lesson. The angry MP goes on:

But, then, they wouldn’t teach these things in the one-year Masters degree course in political science at the College of Europe in Bruges, would they? Although they do teach students the necessary skills to research a “fact” before making claims, as opposed to relying on gut feeling.

Say what? Now I had no idea that Cyrus Engerer also attended the college I consider to be my second Alma Mater but forgive me for feeling a tad bit involved there. Since when are the achievements (?) of a Malta Labour government of the seventies in the field of sodomy an important part of the syllabus in a Masters degree course in political science? Should we really be tut-tutting all the way to the Belfroi that the lecturers in the “one-year” (sic – as against a five year Masters I guess) course failed to examine the intricate details of Labour’s massive movement for homosexual emancipation in the seventies?

Forgive me Helena but much as I may agree with you on the whole Cyrus charade and deviating tactics you really have shot yourself in the foot on this one. Labour might have come up with decriminalising sodomy in much the same manner and habit as PLPN have of legislating the obvious 50 or so years too late but Labour is also the same party whose secretary general was overheard describing a (I have to say this) “talk show host” as “Pufta” over the mic during a public meeting. That was early in the twenty first century not late in the twentieth. I doubt whether rights of homosexual persons have really been so well championed by the nouveau PL – and I sincerely doubt that any of the truck riding, violence distributing, hell raising bastards let lose in Mintoff’s era were in touch with their feminine side by the way.

As for Bruges. It really tickles me that an exponent of the progressive moderates’ agglomeration still believes in the kind of classist bullshit which il-Perit (Rhodes Scholar by the way) had gotten us used to. I am very aware that the Bruges scholarship is currently underfire in certain quarters for other reasons that are absolutely unrelated to the academic standards. I can proudly say, for one, that I got the scholarship on my own wind without any parrini or recommendations in the background. I can also proudly claim that the Bruges experience was very much like a Saint Aloysius’ sixth form abroad – once you make it in you are left to your own devices. Simple really – by handpicking a bright bunch from the start (no modesty intended – and when there are no saints pushing idiots into the system – something I cannot deny could be happening nowadays) the College of Europe needs input little else to guarantee an elevated standard. Voilà.

By misleadingly drawing the Bruges degree into your article you only succeeded in alienating your readers (at least the un-modest intelligent ones) from the main thrust of the argument. Bravo.

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J’accuse : Preliminary Round

My mind’s been elsewhere this week since I’ve had to deal with a horrible combination of deadlines and convoluted case-work that managed to distract me to no end from my usual “side-job” of diligent observation and general filling of the pages of the ether with bits and bytes of bloggery. If I had to be frank I also think that the distraction has a lot to do with the beginning of what is generally known as the scholastic year. Mayans and Aztecs may have perfected the calculation of calendars and the passage of time and Popes may have adjusted the number of days in the year and whatnot but there is something about the scholastic cycle that is bred into the very make-up of the people of my generation.

I actually still wake up in the morning expecting the sound of the cockerel on the radio, as we were wont to here many years back while we were getting ready for school. That would be followed by a quick rush to perform the morning ablutions, showers and more before slipping into uniform to the sound of the sports newsreader maliciously mincing the names of teams while reading the football scores. Thursday morning could be quite a treat, especially during the earlier rounds of the Champions Cup, UEFA Cup or the sadly missed Cup Winners’ Cup.

It would become a virtual geography lesson replete with the most exotic of pronunciation twists as the sports reader would battle his way around such tongue twisters as Twente d’Enschede (they’re back), Lokomotiv Leipzig and Jeunesse d’Esch. I’d have a mental countdown , cringing inwardly as he approached the names of the more famous teams with the linguistic ability of a blind butcher culminating the experience with that ever so painful “Rijal Muddrid”. Somehow the ubiquitous omnipresence of the world of football has killed the charm of such pleasant moments and we have morphed to the daily observation of errors of all kind in the world of online news.

Varteks Varazdin
It is ironic that with the proliferation of European nations and the multiplication of clubs participating in UEFA competitions the young ‘uns of today rarely have any idea of the genealogy, geography and science behind every participating team. In my day (I hate these moments that make me feel old but hell it’s over twenty-five years ago now) I’d know that Jena was the city from which Karl-Zeiss hailed and by the time I found it in the Encyclopaedia (Caxton’s) I’d also have discovered that it would be famous for lens making.

I have surprised denizens of relatively unknown towns (by continental standards, no offence intended) with my knowledge of their local teams. True, it’s a geek’s world but hey, those were the pleasures of a pre-teen child in the era before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Now they play football on their PlayStation (great game by the way) but fail to gather the fruits of serendipitous knowledge that comes along with the fun of football.

Chernomorets Varna
So yes, this is the time of the year when the body sends signals that we have moved up one level as though I am living in some imaginary Pac Man world and we’ve moved from cherries to bananas. I’ve got no new schoolbooks to cover but I’ve still got that funny itch – 25 years on from the last time I started a primary school year. It’s not just the start of school but also exam time that gives you that funny feeling. It’s a bit like the whole world is programmed to work in bursts. I also have discovered that people from other nations have a different sort of “clock”.

Take the French for example (and most other people in the Grand Region i.e. Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg, and Rhineland). The school season seems to work in eight week bursts. Basically every eight weeks the kids have a substantial block of holidays and their parents get a supposed moment of respite. The effect it has on the general populace is a general feeling of lightness of being for those of us who are left behind (traffic in the morning is blissfully absent) while there is a general rush to fit in another family holiday. French kids do not have the same kind of “clock” as ours you see?

Go Ahead Eagles
Enough of the school and football talk though. This drab week will remain notable mainly for the funerals of the unfortunate victims of the explosion that is already fading away from our collective memory. Trust me, it will be business as usual before you can say “hoist by my own petard”. Incidentally the whole expression of being hoist by one’s own petard comes from the early use of gunpowder in warfare. Sometime after the Great Siege in Malta armies developed units called “pétardiers”. These men were charged with the carrying of explosive gunpowder on their person as well as other paraphernalia that allowed them to create an explosive in situ.

One of the things a petard-man had to carry (petard being the French word for bomb at the time) was a wick that was constantly to be kept alight. “Lucifers”, or as we tend to call them “matches” were not yet easily available so the poor pétardier had to carry the lit wick, the gunpowder and cetera and cetera. As wars developed into a series of elaborate sieges during the period known generally as the Thirty Years War, the job of the pétardier would be to follow the sappers who had been busy digging tunnels close to bastions and once on site to plug sufficient explosion into a hole in the wall to blast it to Kingdom Come (protestant or catholic).

There was a slight snag. The pétardier’s equipment transformed him into a walking trap. He could literally explode at any moment. Just like most machines in the early period of gunfire this was a very unfortunate circumstance. What with guns backfiring (one in four times the gun injured the user) and loosely manufactured gunpowder life on the front was not easy. So pity the poor pétardier who with a brusque movement or a sudden jerk suddenly manages to ignite the gunpowder on his person and disappears in a bang and a puff of smoke. You see? Hoist by his own petard.

Portogruaro Summaga
bert4j_100919But this week also brought us a stranded boat and a papal visit to the land of Henry VIII and Rowan Williams. That the Fernandez story was probably the most newsworthy this week accounts for much of the current dry spell in blogging. As for the Pope, poor Benedict. I couldn’t help wondering how he felt as he sat in Westminster Abbey across from Archbishop Williams reading his speech during evening prayers in his quasi-comic german accent. His papacy has been plagued by the whole issue of paedophilia and dark truths of the church. Benedict compounded his current PR position by sort of implying that such evils as Nazism were the product of atheism. He actually used the term “godlessness” which is slightly more equivocal and at least in my book implies more the kind of person who as strayed from god rather than someone who does not believe god exists.

In any case we live in the age of the touchy and false tolerance and political correctness. Benedict’s anti-godless words infuriated the atheist community and they once again presented the common fanatic front that we have gotten used to nowadays. Anyways. My biggest question in this not too reflexive a moment is simple – while I understand that popes must look like a more sober version of Santa Claus is it really necessary that they move and speak like robots? Rowan Williams may look like a wizard from the Harry Potter series but he does have the advantage of looking alive. As I type Williams has started to address the congregation while the Yoda lookalike is doing his best impression of a statue.

I apologise. This restless banter is the product of the nausea caused by the switch in season. A general lack of concentration, a doubled workload and a lapse of inspiration are to blame. I cannot really be bothered by the ailments true or imagined of the leader of opposition, the continued failure to address the needs of regulation in the firework industry and beached boats making the headlines, not to mention the lack of progres sin the regulation of party financing. Sadly even the lone columnist misfires every once in a while and this promises to be that once in a while for me.

Intercettati FC
While the recharging of mental batteries on the columnist front is taking longer than usual (also thanks to the dearth of bloggable material) we will soon be back in the thick of the political season. It is getting harder to decipher the real politics from the mediatic spin. In my five years of blogging I have witnessed the gradual creation of a virtual Maltese reality. As the papers have adapted to the scene and as more temporary bloggers appear we get a parallel Malta that is being conjured up on our computer screens.

Dom Mintoff’s hospitalisation provided us with the latest flurry of quasi-obituaries since Guido De Marco’s recent demise. Once again the noticeboards on the ether were filled with surreal proclamations and wishes as yet another window on this psychedelic island of weird customs gave transfrontaliers like myself a picture of the island we left behind. I met a Romanian person today who is a manager at a Luxembourg gym. He has been here for 27 years and we discussed the feelings of nostalgia for our respective homelands. He had an interesting observation to make – basically the nostalgia we have for our countries is for a country that no longer exists. For both Malta and Romania have continued to change in our absence. They will never be the same.

The land of Kinnie & Twistees I left five years ago when I embarked on this adventure to the forgotten duchy is no longer the same. On the other hand there is this parallel universe online that is a new, different Malta that seems to somehow occasionally cause ripple effects in the real world. So as the school bags are packed, the books covered and the lunchbox prepared J’accuse is still gearing itself for the new season. Have a good Independence Week.

www.akkuza.com is really in need of a good Kinnie (Zest). Can you match each heading in the article with a European nation? (Don’t bother with the last one, nobody does really)

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Raptor Camp

A great report on MaltaToday about the work of CABS monitors in the Maltese countryside merits as much attention as possible. Private individuals attempt to fill the administrative lacunae and shortcomings by providing valuable assistance to the ALE officers. “Raphael Vassallo spends an afternoon with BirdLife and CABS monitors in the Maltese countryside looking for that very elusive of species: poachers.” (MaltaToday)

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31.07.11 – End of the World?

What with all the Mayan calendars and other superstitious nonsense about the end of the world in 12.12.12 (jeez… thank god for Gregory and his tiny adjustments), the last thing we need is another freak announcement about the end of the world being nigh and all. Don’t fret. We don’t have any insider information just yet, nor have we decided to kick off a new sect of the Advent of the Terminal Moment. Nope. We have sighted a near world-shifting moment that will be overlooked by millions of people the world over but it is world-shifting just the same.
Ferran Adrià, the mastermind behind Restaurante El Bulli has announced that the world champion kitchen of gastronomical bliss will be serving its last dishes on the 31st July 2011. It leaves us plebs who have never been to the famed restaurant and who still counted it among the “100 things to do before I die” will never be able to savour the pleasure and enjoy the relative exclusivity of the much-praised works of Chef Adrià and his team. It’s a bit like being a viking who has just been told that the Valkyries have gone on permanent retirement and Valhalla is being redesigned as a retirement home for the elderly on the lines of a Costa del Sol dump. So be it. Let’s face it. There is NO WAY we will make it on any list before July 2011. Ferran will not stop there though. There are new projects ahead and we hope that this time we will find a way to squeeze in on the waiting list.

Speaking to The Times (UK) Adrià complained that running the restaurant is no longer like it used to be. He compared it to Groundhog Day – knowing each day what will happen. So Adrià is on a quest for new horizons and excitements. We are more than willing to look forward to the next trip…

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All that Fuss in Sliema

Today’s breaking news is that Robert Webb lookalike Cyrus Engerer does not enjoy the confidence of the majority of Sliema councillors in his bid to be the new Deputy Mayor. The PN doo-doo is really piling high in that fortress of nationalist behaviour and there seems no end to the woes – disciplinary and others – facing the General Secretariat. Only last week Lawrence Gonzi paraded a new set of standards for PN elected local councillors and now there is a mini-revolt against central diktat.

For the no confidence motion in Engerer is also backed by a PN councillor – Mr Edward Cuschieri. Cuschieri has the backing of sufficient members to propose himself as the new Deputy Mayor. Spinmeisters will once again dismiss the goings on in Sliema as an insignificant fuss … but surely once the big machinery was set in motion to ensure tat the right hierarchy was in place this constitutes another setback to the PN?

That Robert Webb Look

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Do You Feel Lucky?

Writing in yesterday’s Sunday Times, Inhobbkom Joseph told anybody who cared to listen that he was “deeply saddened” after the nation “experienced another frustrating and an-gering fireworks tragedy”. He went on to tell us that we have waited too long for legislation on fireworks and that he too lives in dread of the next explosion. It might not all boil down to Joseph’s dad being an owner of a chemical importing business (of the kind used to make fireworks) but Joseph’s Times appeal smacks of opportunism of the highest PLPN degree. While Lawrence was on radio pointing fingers at some sort of PL protectionism for the failure to regulate party funding (and PL answered with their own dose of just as predictable finger pointing) Joseph had a little problem.

He had to look like he was in favour of taking action against the irrational way in which the whole firework industry is managed and run. We are used to Inhobbkom’s reactions now – the moment public feeling is on a high about something, Joseph is quick to leap onto the bandwagon and tell us how he feels and empathises with the people’s situation. He then promises some form of knee-jerk legislation that might (only might) solve the problem. In this case though there are too many ties that bind him to the situation. The ugliest tie of them all, and the most difficult one to shake off will undoubtedly remain his dad’s business. There’s no two ways of going about it. Now J’accuse was among the first to insist that Joseph should NOT be held responsible for his father’s deeds and actions. In saying that we do not even intend to imply in any way that Muscat Senior is responsible in any way for what has been happening.

We are bound however, to take the role of the Senior into consideration when Junior tries to create a Private Lives of Saints moment with his parable of the old man who lost his palm saving a kid. After a lot of faff about the history of firrework legislation (probably written for Joseph not by Joseph), the Times article ends in a little parable:

I was inspired to write this article by a man who years ago at a village feast saw a young boy he barely knew parading an unignited petard which he was banging against a wall. The man lunged towards him, yelling at the boy to stop what he was doing because the firework may go off. He managed to seize the petard. As soon as he did so, it ignited. The boy was unhurt. The man lost part of his right palm.

Had the man failed to act, the young boy would have lost his arm, his eyes, possibly his life.

During his long term in hospital, the man, a humble salesman who earned a living from writing and carrying boxes, learnt to write with his left hand and how to handle things with his disabled body part. Years of practice led him to re-learn writing with his right hand.

He never complained, always feeling it was his duty to save the young boy, whom he did not know, and he would undoubtedly do the same again. That man was my father.

You might be moved to empathise with the father – and indirectly with the loving son who is being “martyred” by the spin in cerrtain quarters. We are not. To us this parable is equivalent to the story of the weapons dealer who walks in on a kid playing with a pistol and ends up getting shot while wrestling the pistol from the kids’ hand. We could come up with many more distressing stories of the kind but the end game is really not that difficult to perceive. Even in Joseph’s parable the danger is not represented by the child but by the petard. The petard is a dangerous product whether or not it is manufactured under the right conditions. The point at issue in Malta right now is whether the country can afford protracting its lackadaisical approach to the whole matter.

That Joseph has such close ties to the firework industry is unfortunate. That he tries to turn this tie into some story of a martyr and a saint instead of coming clean about his ties is even worse. The same goes for each and every MP and politician who is into the clans of firework enthusiasts and festa committees up to his neck. MaltaToday have published a list of these MPs (well done sleuths – still waiting for newspaper version though). That these clans of enthusiasts might operate with the illegal secrecy of weapons dealers might not have been any clearer had not the Malta Independent on Sunday broken the news that there actually were witnesses of the Gharb explosion but they are refusing to speak.

We have Joseph coming up with biblical parables worthy of George Preca, we have a body of MPs torn between the votes of the faithful and reasonable action and we have an industry worth millions of euros and thousands of votes that seems to be reistant to all forms of intervention.

In wondering whether we need new regulation politicians just need to ask themselves one question:

“Do I feel lucky?… Well do you, punk?”

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