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.