Sixteen Degreens of Credibility

The dial on the Geiger counter of stupidity at The Times has finally spun off its spindle. There is no point trying to be all fancy about it, or approaching the painful truth in narrowing circles of inferences. What analogies can fully encompass the foolishness of the president of the General Workers Union.
As always, some balance must be struck in assessing the full scale of Salv Sammut’s assault on accepted norms of sense and coherence. Any newspaper editor worthy of that name should understand that their job is to edit. Usually this means re-writing and re-arranging, but just as often it means cutting. Understandably, the meek editors at The Times might be unprepared to incur the wrath of the leader of Malta’s most credible trade union. But they would have to do no more than direct to slightly more credible publications.
Taking a cursory look round the opinion pages of the days international press, there is some indication of how these things ought to be done. The influential Burt Reynolds-impersonator Thomas Friedman’s column about China in today’s New York Times comes in at a fairly substantial 800 or so words and succeeds in sticking to its subject from beginning to end.
Picking an article at random from Times of London, we find a modest 730-word diary piece by erstwhile-anarcho-Trotskyist-but-latterly-contrarian-libertarian Mick Hume. Even the pompous Sergio Romano only manages a positively Ethiopian 550 words in the Corriere della Sera. And so and so forth. Across all nations and media cultures, it is an accepted wisdom that opinion columns begin to suffer past the 700-800-word mark. And The Times of Malta is all the proof you need of that. By the time I.M.Beck is preparing to wind up and head for the restaurant-of-the-week home straight, the sneaking temptation to go run the car engine and pull out the rubber hose starts becoming very real. And he’s one of the vaguely amusing ones. Sort of.
Sammut’s effort, coming in it a wheezing 1,057 words, does not pay heed to these conventions of brevity, and his editors do nothing to help him out of the hole he digs himself into. It is a standard litany of pompous cretinism about credibility, a word that he uses no less than 16 times, so there is only a cruel kind of enjoyment to be had in savouring its details. The contrived attempt at erudition of the opening paragraph is only one instance of this cringe-worthiness. There he relates, with undisguised admiration, details from the decidedly un-syndicalist life of the Cynic Diogenes:

“It was in his nature to live in an empty tub and walk through the streets of
Athens with a lantern in his hands in broad daylight.”

That Sammut aspires to the values of a man that lives in a tub, an empty one at that, is probably quite revealing about his own credibility.
The article turns out pretty quickly to be Sammut’s riposte to a television program that he saw which he didn’t enjoy very much. Which is all fine, of course. Malta is quite used to having this bickering played out publicly like some kind of junkyard dog-fighting contest.
But at the point Sammut should probably have been thinking of making his concluding remarks, something odd happens. As he writing the frankly disturbing words below, his eyes wander off and, it is likely, his legs too follow suit towards the television set:

“Credibility is a universal problem. It could be talked about and scrutinised in
every sphere of life. But it most distinguishes itself in politics. This is the
arena where it is most violently raped.”

When he returns to his seat, he begins with:

“As I write, the news that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been found
guilty and will be punished for his crimes has just been broken.”

Just like that! And so what started out a slightly idiotic stream of consciousness item of recrimination becomes a thoroughly bizarre foray into international affairs, a subject that I was unaware came within the GWU’s remit.
Which brings us back to our original point. What exactly was the editor of The Times doing while he was meant to be pruning this article, or even better throwing it straight into the wastepaper basket. Hiding in a cabinet and waiting for Salv Sammut to leave the office is my guess.

Wholly Fool

Can a man be good without knowing it, or to phrase this quandary in Christian terms, can a man be good apart from revelation and the grace of Christ? The question has troubled the minds of some of the greatest moral philosophers and theologians throughout history. Thomas Aquinas would argue that for the man that could conduct himself in a model fashion within the civic context, goodness is indeed possible. But what is this worth in the absence of Christ?
Here, let us dwell upon the redeeming quality of logic and reason in the timeless dialogue with this enigma. Aristotelianism brings us frustratingly close to the essence of being, in its moral fullness and its complex examinations of goodness and its opposite; evil. And then, of course, there is Desmond Zammit Marmarà.
In the cosmic order of things, what is the moral value of a man whose essence, utterly divorced from the very slightest notion of either logic or reason, nonetheless lightens the darkest corners of the most melancholy soul? On what side of the Lord does the Punchinello archetype sit in all these grand celestial designs? The buffoon is after all a lord, if only of the absurd. A fool is sovereign over his own moral and emotional destiny, but is this autonomy a reward of subterfuge and low cunning?
Naturally, this is all the domain of mystery. To preserve the commedia dell’arte analogies, is Zammit Marmarà the comic and sometimes wily harlequin servant of countless opera, or the clumsy Petrushka of Russian folklore. An additional nuance to this query is lent by the latter figure. The original Petrushka comedies began to be sanitised in the early 20th century, at which point they were increasingly interpreted as a ill-coordinated marionette of childish appeal. Before then, in conformity with the often gruesome traits of Russian folklore, Petrushka was a murderous fool and no benign bedtime figure.
Perhaps, though, we are casting the net too far and back. For anyone who sniggered at the primitive spectacle a weeks back of a North Korean newsreader announcing her country’s entry into the ranks of nuclear powers, the tone and content of Zammit Marmarà’s latest column will seem strikingly familiar:

“I often meet people, whose involvement in politics is minimal, who ask me: ‘When one separates the facts from the fiction created by the Nationalist media about the Labour leader, who is the real Alfred Sant?’ Since Dr Sant will, hopefully, be Malta's next Prime Minister, this question deserves an immediate answer.

First of all, Dr Sant is a great leader. He brings out the best of the people who work for him, tolerates no incompetence but always adds a humane touch to all his actions…”

On this occasion, it is quite impossible to selective pluck quotable extracts as there as little in this article which cannot be savoured for full comic effect. All the text invariably evokes the kind of decadent laughter one might have imagined only existed in the performance halls graced by the Catholic Institute’s travelling troupe.
I have rarely seen an audience as gripped by hysterical laughter as the one I saw in Birzebbuga primary school reacting to some forgettable gag about pastizzi. For the more blue-eyed reader, it should be explained that this was an astoundingly gynaecological joke, which put lie to tired observations on the sexual immovability of the Catholic order, it must be said.
Anyhow, lest one should harbour illusions as to the virtuousness of the amusement to be derived from dipping into Zammit Marmarà’s breathtakingly craven musings, this is the level of wit we are operating on.
Which brings us inexorably to the opening point. What does natural order reserve for the joy and mirth that such tripe brings to the ordinary working man? Before rushing on to metaphysical matters, however, should the Maltese public not at least be urged to clamour for this man to awarded some sort of honorary republican order?