You Must be Kidding

It is said that parents should refrain from arguing before their children, lest this demonstration of domestic friction be interpreted as a compromise of authority. It was, therefore, distressing to see a squabble about child welfare, which has been as unseemly as it has been achingly dull, continued in Sunday’s issue of The Times. Dr Ruth Farrugia has elected herself as the referee of this arcane dispute between Frank Muscat and Bryan Magro, former chair of the Children's Board and policy co-ordinator in the Ministry of the Family and Social Solidarity respectively. Meanwhile, Frank Muscat also parries blows directed at him with another letter to the paper, which succeeds, and doubtless precedes, many others.
There is not much one can contribute on the specific subject of the controversy and it would only be a most foolhardy individual that would dare to trade blows with these world-class bores. And anyway, who could rival the death kiss stolidity of prose like that of Dr. Farrugia? But Farrugia is guilty not only of being a crushing bore, but also of subjecting the rest of the world to what evidently constituted the aridity of her day-to-day being.
It is quite possible there may still be some people who believe that the halls of power are populated by canny horse-traders, underhanded brokers and mercurial exponents of the elite. So how upsetting will it be for this people when they discover that the only persons in those hallowed halls are in the fact dreary drones whose very physical existence is only justified by the next deadline for the next monotonous ream of bureaucratic insignificance? Which is fine, of course. The world needs filers and clerks and data entry goons, for where would we be without them. But like Gogol’s Akaki Akakievich, they must surely realise that any attempt to rise from within the ranks of the meaningless scribe will certainly result in metaphysical annihilation.
But what do we have here? Instead allowing one pile of red-tape literature be subsumed by the next generation of similarly needless reports, Farrugia gives it an airing which it neither deserves nor needs. And she is not the only guilty of this. How often must lazy, ignorant ministers and MPs regurgitate the content of committee findings and parliamentary speeches under the pretence of being original or, Christ Almighty forbid, vaguely interesting? They take us for fool, and they are probably right to do so. They also take the editors of The Times for fools, which they are wrong to do. They are wrong as the editors of The Times are not mere fools, but half-witted dullard mildew of the very lowest order.
If one were so keen to read the written cretinism of the lumpen buffoons that vacate the chambers of the pompously named Ministry for Family and Social Solidarity, a visit to its website would fully suffice, one would have imagined. It is there that one can read such fatuous observations as this:

"Children are our most valuable natural resource. Moreover, research has amply demonstrated that the first few years of children’s lives are crucial in their development. This knowledge has inspired the Ministry for the Family and Social Solidarity to develop further this important building block of social policy."

That children are Malta’s most valuable natural resource is a sentiment of nauseating pointlessness. It is also false, of course. As Bishop Nikol Cauchi would be able to tell you, modern Maltese children are utterly stupid and unable to hold a pencil the right way up. They are also among the laziest, fattest and greediest in the world. It is hard to take any consolation from the fact that young people with these attributes will probably not possess the mental or physical faculties to commit crime. Though since future policeman will also probably be afflicted with similar gastric gigantism, we may well be looking forward to some amusing street chases in the years to come.
So, we have the dull and idiotically written websites, but we must still have this rubbish pushed under our noses by Farrugia and her boneheaded ilk? Is there any reason that cruelty to Times readers should be considered any less despicable than cruelty to children?