Licari in the Stars With Diamonds

In Brian Aldiss' 1969 novel, Barefoot in the Head, a young man wanders around Europe after it has been bombed with hallucinogenic gases. As the drama unfolds he increasingly gets caught up in the collective hysteria, which climaxes in a crazed messianic crusade. Predictably, the story is hard to follow at times as the hero's perception comes under the influence of the poisons in the air and the narrative drifts into a hazy stream-of-consciousness style. And that's what came to mind as I read Anthony Licari's column on Saturday. Dr. Licari is a lecturer of psycholinguistics at the University of Malta, which raises the very real possibility that he may be experimentally exploring the edges of communicative dynamics under the influence of indeterminate substances. Tramal perhaps.
His trip starts innocently enough with a stroll down his memories of Qui-Si-Sana, but the ears of anybody trained to the gibberish of drug crazies will prick at the claim that the proposed car park will result "illnesses and the unforgiving cancer". Just for the heck of I googled the words "car park" and "cancer", and in the first result I found words that might surprise Dr. Licari, who obviously isn't the kind of doctor you should go to with a slight cough:

The cost of the car park is estimated to be £11m and will be funded mostly by the Trust and Cancer Research UK.

Fittingly, after struggling to stitch together just over a hundred words of dewy-eyed reminiscences of his youth, he moves on to rambling, of which he is a fan and practitioner. This time he rails against the "arrogant" and "greedy egocentrics" who forbid crowds of birdwatchers from trampling over their property.
After that, it's Gonzi's ghost writer, habbaziz, human rights in Turkey, GWU, homophobia, and the cold weather. The erratic eclecticism of subject matter is bad enough, so you would hope a judicious editor would not inflict this on Times readers who will have already endured the flatulent silliness of I.M. Beck, who has taken a break from eating from kebab vans and gone for a meal at Wigi's in St. Julians. Since I'm on the subject, logically you would think that as you saw Andrew Borg Cardona waddling into your restaurant the chances were that you were going to get a mention in his column, and that therefore he should have the meal discounted. This matter requires investigation.
But after gustatory richness of Beck's prandial exposition, to fit in with the company, is Licari showing off. I list my own personal selection of favourite quotes:

"...Without militancy, trade unions would be kindergartens organising three-legged races and ring-a-ring o'rosies - at the end of which we all fall down..."

"...Opinions implying that most paedophiles are homosexuals are totally wrong and mix lettuce with wind..."

"...During this terribly cold winter, in order to beat the ear-lobe and prostate freeze without spending half your wages on artificial energy..."

And for sheer hypocrisy:

"...I don't believe that the article by Lawrence Gonzi in The Times of January 5 was written by himself but by a speechwriter. It is too full of barbarisms and other linguistic clumsiness to be worthy of a Prime Minister..."

It might be a good thing that there is nothing to put in the newspapers other than the mutual sniping between politicians and Licari's weird effete prating. Though it might be a little less maddening if one could even understand what is being written. I'm sure this segment on habbaziz means something, though I can't for the life of me work out what:

Rightist writers defending African irregular immigrants conveniently forget that demi-christian moralisers have always tried to mock the cultures of African peoples. Often they referred to them as habbaziz to make fun of them. The habbaziz has apparently turned to noble caviar.

The misspelling and disorientating context are certainly no help. The three sentences only barely follow on from one another. And has habbaziz has turned to caviar, or into it? Who are the demi-christian moralisers? Who is Dr. Licari and what does he want from me?