Time Waits For No MEP

You read David Casa and wonder why Shakespeare ever bothered. For every word that the Bard has either invented or replenished with new meaning, another one has been stripped of all significance by Malta's champion wallpaper impersonator.
For several sentences into his appropriately titled article "Turning the Page", appearing in Tuesday's edition of The Indpendent, he manages to drone pointless about the symbolic value of the new year:

"A new year is like a new chapter in a story. It is a continuation of the previous one that brings new changes and new challenges. This New Year, Malta will start reaping the fruit of our hard work. A year that brings with it alterations, both on a local and international scene. Changes we should learn from so that we will be prepared for future challenges."

Next time this man comes professing his beliefs in a bid to be given another go on the gravy merry-go-round (which goes nowhere, unlike its locomotive variant), dust off the remarks above. There you will find the words of a man with a mind admirably uncluttered by original thought. Or any thought at all, for that matter.
Redundant as it may feel, force yourself to parse the extract for its almost superb elusion of substance and rank tautology.
A "new year", Casa says, is like "a new chapter". A "new chapter", he adds helpfully, in "a story". Like an aboriginal tribesman taught how to read a watch, Casa is astounded by the notion of sequentiality and novelty. Though, of course, this is deeply insulting to even the most primitive caveman, who indeed understands perfectly well the mechanics, if not the metaphysical implications, of chronological progression. For millennia, human beings have measured out the seasons and even hewn stories from natural processes that underlie our earthbound existence.
If anything, scientific and cultural modernity has brought us to an intellectual impasse in this regard. We are taught in our schools that time is an arbitrary and abstract principle, a conceptualization of an inexistent fact. Even in story-telling, it is now foolhardy to assume that "new chapters" signify novelty, moving forward. Even as far back as Lawrence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" that crude simplification of the narrative flow was questioned. Some of Andy Warhol's infamous experimental films, Empire and Sleep, further tested the presumption that lies at the heart of this cultural postulation.
Indeed, when Casa implies that the "new year" is a " continuation of the previous one", you have to wonder where he stands on all the ideas floated in the preceding paragraphs. How, bearing in mind how far our collective contemplation of chronology has come, could anyone seek to argue that one year is a continuation of another year? This very though turns the brain inside — Casa's intention perhaps.
While this is all a remote possibility, what seems more likely is that Casa's are more political than philosophical. Maltese politicians labour under the puzzling conviction that the people are braying for their pearls of wisdom, read by the masses much like a Palestinian dispossessed might huddle over his thumbed copy of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion.
To whom does the possessive pronoun refer, for instance, in the sentence "Malta will start reaping the fruit of our hard work". Would it be cynical to suggest, maybe, that this stuffed suit Eurocrat party hack could be so presumptuous as to believe himself and his smug party burdened by messianic toil, like latter-day Stalins working by his night-lamp.
Having established the concept of chronological progression, for example, he alludes to Bulgaria's entry into the European Union, which he again implies (ungrammatically) might have benefited from his efforts:

"Being a member of the EU-Bulgaria joint Parliamentary Committee, I am very pleased of (sic) the success achieved by this country."

As though only the halfwits dumped onto these pointless committees can take pleasure in the accession of this "new" EU member. The corollary to this self-centered sentiment is presumably "Not being a member of the EU-Romania joint Parliamentary Committee, I am not very pleased of the success achieved by this country".
The game, based on Casa's ego could keep a particularly stupid child happy for hours. What about "having been born in 1968, I am very pleased of the independence of Swaziland"? But, "not having been born in 1969, I am not very pleased with the moon landing". Ab initio ad nauseam.
A whole article of meaningless and self-gratifying drivel, he rounds up with yet more claims of epic labour:

"Another 12 months of hard work are waiting for us. 12 months of challenges to improve our country and marketing our abilities to attract investment that will solidify our economy."

But David, with all this heroic Stakhanovite sweat you shed for Malta (and Bulgaria), how will you find time for these articles and your new website, www.davidcasa.eu?