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J'accuse : Pulses

The metaphor is normally “il-polz tal-poplu” − the people’s pulse. It’s the measure that most politicians used to go by for a long time. Ever since a few avant-garde British colonials decided to experiment with the classic idea of a republic and created a charter for “We the people”, the question of what people want was upped a few echelons on the political scale. It would only be a few years before the apocryphal uttering of “Let them eat cake” would signal the final straw for those who dared think that the man in the street’s opinion counted for utter pish.

We’ve gone full circle since then, and the equally metaphorical ear on the ground has become the staple food for many a budding politician. Too much so in fact, since the efforts to appease the masses and to pander to popular demand risks making a prostitute of our Madame Republic. The people’s pulse has become the bread and butter of every politician in the post-9/11 world. Values and party principles count for naught and the old -isms have become fantasies and fiction.

Thusly, a modern and progressive politician will praise a fascist Italian decision to not comply with international rules in the name of the national interest. “Mhux fl-interess nazzjonali” − now that’s a big one. If the “people’s pulse” leads to prostitution of political values then the modern concept of “national interest” and “common good” is an open invitation to a free-for-all in a whorehouse. J’accuse has bemoaned the dilution of party political values for years now − only to be derided as an “armchair critic” or self-important pontificator. It is only now that the mud is falling away from their fawning eyes that the former critics have begun to notice that our political “elite” is stuffed with the crème de la crème of incompetent lackeys.

Lima

Deprived as I am of first hand contact, I am dependent on the feedback provided by social networks. I am fully aware that they are not the full picture of the goings on in Malta but they do provide a particular snapshot and perspective. Take today for example. I gleaned from a quick perusal of online updates that the general mood on the island was a grumpy one that befits the religious occasion that was being celebrated. “A typical Our Lady of Sorrows day” wrote one punter − and it seems that the clouds were out and about in order to provide the right ambience for the solemn occasion.

It must be because Luxembourg is no longer as Catholic a nation as it once proudly was, but the deities that are failed to provide the same setting of decorum in this corner of the world. This week’s Le Jeudi (a weekly Luxo newspaper) carried a special report about the plight of immigrants. The series of articles was entitled “The frontiers of solidarity” and highlighted the issues surrounding the “politique d’urgence”. Luxembourg’s asylum seekers come mostly from the Balkans but the difference in nationality of origin does not mean that they face different problems than those we face in the Mediterranean.

The biggest worry is that the “massive influx” of asylum seekers from the Balkans would highlight the lack of receiving structures and that this would lead to the Immigration Ministry taking “hurried decisions on the fate of asylum seekers”. Sound familiar? Well, that’s not all. Luxembourg is also not very happy with the EU level of collaboration. NGOs in Luxembourg are angry that notwithstanding previous lessons that should have been learnt, nothing much has changed recently.

Lentil

On the one hand they will discuss the “Marshall Plan” for the Maghreb. On the other they will mention that in the case of the Sudanese, Erithreans and Somalis going to Malta it is not a simple issue of sending them back. The pulse in Luxembourg is clearly on cue. They are much more on the game than some of the politicians closer to the scene. Pulse-wise, there is something wrong when a progressive politician suggests taking advantage of the Arab Spring to boost national tourism. It gets worse when the same politician lauds Italy’s heavy-handed nationalism on the matter of immigration. All we needed was a Christian Democrat minister announcing new oil drilling projects while any potential Libyan protestors are distracted.

The pulse of the people is twisted. It is twisted because of an elaborate machinery that translates to GIGO (garbage in garbage out) in modern talk − or “you reap what you sow” in Luddite parlance. We are unable to see the hopelessness of a situation like a uniformed policeman telling dark skinned men to “Go back to Africa” but we will harp and harp on the “freedom of expression and need for censorship”. We have collectively fallen for the dupe that is “public consultation” in the divorce debate. We are struggling to cope with the idea of a modern open society when our instinct and upbringing keeps raising the ghosts of a nanny-state past.

47 varieties

And then there are our representatives. Our politicians of the future are deceiving themselves (and others) by unearthing the unwilling complicity of long dead heroes of another era. Only today I had a tiff with a Labour exponent who tried to link Manwel Dimech to today’s progressives. Neither Manwel Dimech nor Nerik Mizzi nor Don Luigi Sturzo would be falling over themselves to be a part of this political mess that we call parties nowadays. It is no secret to anyone, but the most baffling part of it is that most of us are content to continue to propagate the lie.

At the rate we are going, the political vultures will be pecking at a carcass that has offered a pulse too many for its hungry mouths.

Appendix

I almost forgot. This article is due an appendix of its own. The chief at the Maltese Translation Unit at the Court of Justice asked me to plug the next round of concours for lawyer-linguists. What does that mean? It means that suitably qualified individuals (yep, you do need a law degree among other things) should be on the lookout on the EPSO website as an open exam for the new intake will shortly be announced.

www.akkuza.com On the island for the Easter break.

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Zolabytes

The Absurdity of Football Time

Football fan Patrick Galea penned this piece as a facebook note. It could very well have been entitled “the Theory of Relativity as Applied to The Game”. He has kindly agreed for it to be reproduced here as a sporty/geeky Zolabyte. Cheers. (and Forza Juve of course)

It is not a secret to football fans that the working of the clock during a game depends entirely on how many times the goal nets have been favourably hit. And if your own team’s net is to be hit at all, just hope that at the very least it is hit favourably, that is, on the right side. The right side, as it turns out in these cases, is always the outside. The reverse applies to the other net, of course, and the inside of that net is where the biscuit is at. That’s football for you: try and score one more than them; and if you are a fan, hope that your team keeps your afternoon in tact and scores one more than the others, those gutless, hate-inspiring evil bastards.

And there’s 90 minutes of that.

Or so they say.

In truth, the time available for favourable net-hitting is like a new-age yoga instructor: exists in another dimension, and has a penchant for flexibility. Like the king of frustrating retorts when all you seek is a straight-forward answer: “it all depends”. It goes to show that whoever coined the term ‘like clockwork’ was not thinking of football time-keeping. Chances are he never watched a competitive football match either, because time during matches goes into Alice-in-Wonderland mode and changes its rhythm and tempo according to the digits on the scoreboard.

There is no news there. That the experience of time is subjective is hardly a Nobel-winning discovery. Indeed, this sentiment is captured easily enough by such common morsels of wisdom as “time flies when you’re having fun” and “clocks go slow at the place of work”. The ruling principle is obvious, time seems to speed up when you’re enjoying yourself, but drags on infinitely when you are not. But as well as this general idea has served the humans in their daily business, it just does not apply to football.

Masochistic tendencies aside, the general assumption underlying this point is that fans, being supporters of a team, should be enjoying themselves when their team is winning, and by obvious logic, should hate it when it is not. You would think then that a winning team’s supporters, being joyful of a favourable score-line, would hardly notice the time going by. But it doesn’t work like that. Time does not fly when your team is winning, especially when that winning margin is one measly frustrating goal and the contest has reached its final segments, around that 80 minute mark. No, time does not fly. It sticks. It lurks. It hangs around idling as if it were a sunny Sunday in a picnic park.

Lest some brave soul dares suggest that the sudden decrease in the pace of time is merely an illusion brought on by a heightened awareness of the clock, I can assure them that it is not. Proof: when a fan’s team is losing by a goal to nothing, or an equally gut-wrenching goal difference, when every bad pass, throw-in, or a millisecond stop is followed by glances at the clock, when fans are basically watching more of the clock than the game, time does nothing that resembles slowing down. It goes faster than you can say “Is that five minutes already”? Hail the absurdity of football time. Unlike other life situations, favourable circumstances in football do not always make time rush, and unpleasant ones do not sedate time into co-operation.

Substituting hyperbole with a dose of realism for a second (or an hour, depending on the score), I guess that the absurdity of football time owes itself to the perennial contest between optimist and pessimist tendencies inside the football fan. Indeed, none of the above applies if your team has a cushion of several goals or if it is losing by some. And most definitely, none of the above applies if your favourite team is Manchester United, who are practically guaranteed to score in the dying minutes whenever they need to (Fuckheads!).

The hazy optimism of the possibility of scoring and the reality of diminishing time to allow it, as well as its counterpart, the persistent pessimism of conceding and the slow and ample time that makes it possible, are only triggered by a vague sense of realism that anything can happen in football. Indeed, the optimist and the pessimist inside the football fan eventually synthesize to become the realist, the fan who knows too well about the possibility, or the probability, that their team concedes in the dying moments of the match, who has surrendered all hope, who knows that the elusive last second goal that would win points for the team will only ever happen if it is immediately followed by a ridiculous raised flag on the side of the pitch. This is the beautiful game. A game which constantly pits pessimism against optimism and the umpteenth triumph of one over the other leaves the loser mysteriously unscathed.

*****
Zolabytes is a rubrique on J’accuse – the name is a nod to the original J’accuser (Emile Zola) and a building block of the digital age (byte). Zolabytes is intended to be a collection of guest contributions in the spirit of discussion that has been promoted by J’accuse on the online Maltese political scene for 5 years.
Opinions expressed in zolabyte contributions are those of the author in question. Opinions appearing on zolabytes do not necessarily reflect the editorial line of J’accuse the blog.
***

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Mediawatch

The Times Blog

We may be working on slow mode thanks to the big move out of Lux City but that does not mean we have no time to note the big changes* in the Maltese Net World. The Times has chosen to wait for 11 days after the 1st of April to launch its spanking new online look. Thank the man in the sky for that otherwise we’d have suspected this was somebody trying to pull off another of those sophisticated pranks.

So here’s the new Times website lads… nothing more than a standard blog set up for 2011. Is that all they can do? Really? With all the resources at hand? I wonder who’s getting paid for this odd job… some lazy mutt with not much to think of beyond filching off standard templates that can be found on the net at the modicum price (prezz modiku) of 75$ (and that’s when you REALLY want to spend).

One of the greatest drawbacks of the new format will be that the ugly mutts of Bocca & Co will permanently feature at the bottom of the page like some eerie footnote.

Welcome to the Times 2011. It’s like J’accuse 2009… but darker….

*cheers to SL for the tip off.

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J'accuse : Living Expenses

It’s not just George Soros who thinks that the ECB might have chosen an inappropriate time for hiking its interest rates. For a very egoistic reason, I was pretty miffed too. A hike in interest rates and a parallel sucker punch delivered to the cost of living in Luxembourg struck right at the moment when I had just moved house and ‘inaugurated’ a new mortgage. That’s some bad Karma all right. The ugly monster of inflation threatens to wreak further havoc on our lives in the short term but hey… it’s the economy, stupid.

While my ‘problems’ might be limited to a shift in figures behind a decimal point, there are others whose problems are related to the “Cost of Staying Alive” (COSA). “The what?” I hear you ask. The COSA is a raw and dangerous version of the cost of living where the line between scraping a living and sinking to the bottom of an ocean is measured in the units of faith, hope and desperation. While we rely on the number crunchers in Frankfurt to make things right, those who measure their daily travails on the COSA index will depend on a multitude of decision makers and opinion shapers that range from the highest politician to the lowest common voter.

Blame

One of the side effects of the Jasmine Revolution in North Africa has been a worrying reopening of the borders that had been so effectively ‘sealed’ in the past by the partners in crime of our political establishment. With the likes of Gaddafi concentrating on more pressing issues than the policing of their countries’ borders (the Cost of Blackmailing Index), it was inevitable that the Mediterranean would refill with the Boats of Hope that ferry the COSA people over to the lands of the free. In the end, the Mare Nostrum is less and less a sea of convergence and more and more a Stygian theatre where many souls are drawing their final check before leaving this world.

In Greek mythology, Styx was the underground river that had to be crossed to reach the underworld in the afterlife. ‘Styx’ meant hate and detestation and the Mediterranean theatre has increasingly featured scenes of backstabbing detestation and an unbrotherly inability to cooperate successfully in the face of troubles. This week we watched the drama unfold of a Malta – Italy blame game during which time the souls of many men, women and children were lost. A little further up north, Sarkozy’s France (the one that acted swiftly to save lives in Benghazi) was protesting vividly with Italy for its practice of issuing Schengen permits to the Tunisians who had fled their country’s ills.

By the time Sarkozy and Berlusconi had patched up their differences, it was on condition that EU aid to Tunisia would be conditional on the patrolling of its borders. Same old, same old. Then on Thursday we also had a historic first when the island of Lampedusa pulled off the best Malta Bus Driver impression and yelled “Full Up” on sighting a new boatload of immigrants. The brave men on patrol boat P61 had to chug back to Malta having been shown that even the centuries-old laws of the sea are now being flaunted in the name of egoistic bigotry.


There’s no place like home

The blame game is played out at the expense of values. There remains no real reference point. The basic unit of the Cost of Staying Alive Index is life itself but this value too can be diluted if one’s life starts outweighing another. Gozo Bishop Mario Grech has rightly sounded the warning signal on that count − going so far as having to warn that: “Had some birds been killed, much would, rightly, have been said, while, in this case so many people had died, and many people stayed silent”. It was a biblical moment − testified in the New Testament. I looked it up… Matthew 6:26: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

Well even Jesus said so. Lately, both the big J and our heavenly Father are being unnecessarily inconvenienced on other matters. All the matters display our society’s continuous struggle to update its identity and feel comfortable with itself. Our politicians are engaged in another blame game on the divorce front − now it’s about lost votes. I’m still waiting for Joseph Muscat to shed some tears about the fact that the expat community still has to be shuttled to Malta instead of exercising its vote in an embassy or by post − what do the 2,800 have that we don’t?

While the politicians blame each other for the business of the dating of a writ and play up dubious constitutional disquisitions, the lost souls in this case are the ever increasing numbers of those who feel unrepresented by this farce. Then there was the AG’s appeal in the Realtà proceedings − I’ve stated elsewhere that the appeal itself will give us a necessary clarification on the state of the law on obscenity and pornography. Why the AG had to inconvenience any deities on this issue is rather baffling though.

Slovenly

Our national identity is in a period of great flux. How ingrained are the Catholic values of neighbourly love in our lives? When we look in the mirror do we really understand the image that we see? Which snapshot of our community is really us? Is it the police who defy the rules of logic and prohibit the sale of alcohol in a concert on some disproportionate pretext? Is it the hunters who plan to defy the Spring Hunting rules? Is it the spewers of hate on online billboards?

Is it the churchgoer who cannot digest the fact that the last words of a Nigerian soul on a sinking Boat of Hope were “Please Jesus Save Me”? Is it a politician who abuses the word “conscience” one time too many? Is it the political party that devotes more time to deception than to creative proposition?

What image represents the Maltese psyche? Can we sit down and write an essay portraying what goes on in an average Maltese man’s mind? Will we be comfortable with it? And in the end… will we end up in court defending the essay from the accusation of its being obscene and pornographic?

I’d ask God to help us but I’d like to think that Sunday is still his day of rest.

www.akkuza.com – expensive thoughts for a Sunday afternoon.

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Postal Voting

Here’s how modern democracies work. We got this notice in the work mail. It was addressed to all persons of Spanish nationality. You can open the link and even with a rudimentary level of Spanish you will soon understand what is going on. Yes. That’s right. They’ve got elections coming up so they are being asked to register so as to be able to vote by post. Simples no?

Click here to read the document.

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Walk to feed Guatemala

A Zolabyte with a difference. A friend of mine has asked me to plug this event that is raising money to build a project to provide food in an area of Guatemala. It’s a long, long walk for a good cause. There’s all the contact details you need at the end of this post. Picture shows the route for the walk.

As though last year’s 24hour walk wasn’t ENOUGH, TOUGH AND GRUELLING, this year we will be organising and attempting an even longer walk on the

9th April 2011
27 hours non-stop!!!

So keep it free…

This year we will be walking to raise funds for a MEGA good cause. The funds will be used to build a project to provide food in an area of Guatemala, This will not only help to feed families in the area of Lake Izabal in Guatemala but will help to create jobs. This project will leave long term benefits, since it is sustainable and will help the community, help itself.

The two of us seasoned walkers, will be volunteering to walk 27 hours NONSTOP around Malta, covering an approximate distance of 130km!!! Longer than running 3 consecutive full marathons!!! A further 3hours on top of last years tremendous effort, which left us feeling knackered with a few nagging injuries which lasted a few months but feeling extremely exalted.. We have been training even harder than last year to ensure that we are physically and mentally fit for this challenge.

The walk will start at 9am near ITS in St. Julians and will end…
27 hours later back at ITS

You are all invited to WALK AS LONG as you like 10min, 30min, 1hr, 3hr 8hr, 27hrs :))) or as much as you like. Get your friends to sponsor you for this mega good cause or register for €5. Click here to download the registration form.

Call us, Email us, or Facebook us for sponsor sheets and more info!!! If Walking is just not your piece of cake, you can just simply donate money by sending an sms on:

50618071 for a € 4.66 donation
50619203 for a € 11.65 donation

For more information contact us on:
email: 27hourwalk@gmail.com
facebook: 27 hour walk
mobile: 7994 2727

Please help us by inviting your friends to our facebook group, emailing this and passing the word around.

Looking forward to seeing you there, lets walk together for a good cause!

Lara Gerada & Brandon Pace

Donations may also be made at the following account:

HSBC ACCOUNT NO: 071017552051 /

IBAN NO: MT89 MMEB 4471 6000 0000 7101 7552 051

*****
Zolabytes is a rubrique on J’accuse – the name is a nod to the original J’accuser (Emile Zola) and a building block of the digital age (byte). Zolabytes is intended to be a collection of guest contributions in the spirit of discussion that has been promoted by J’accuse on the online Maltese political scene for 5 years.
Opinions expressed in zolabyte contributions are those of the author in question. Opinions appearing on zolabytes do not necessarily reflect the editorial line of J’accuse the blog.
***

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