In this Saturday’s column, he limbers up for his weekly rant with a mild jog of resentment directed at his subjection to the “mental conditioning”, ahem, of society’s right-wing milieu. In more words than are strictly necessary, however, the tale of acculturative woe soon sees our plucky Licari-as-Oliver-Twist hero rip defiantly at the frontiers of intellectual constriction. “Please sir, can I have some more cultural evolution,” he seems to be saying.
Flash forward and it’s all flower power, free love, poetry readings, titled berets, rive gauche, existentialism, Sartre, Godard, but not, and please pay close attention, any mind-altering drugs or liquor that would only reduce the user to spouting incoherent, inconsequential and pointless claptrap. So don’t in any way misread this sentence, for example:
“As article followed article in the conservative press - which promised me that it had room for my thinking that the evolution of a country had to pass the test of elimination of poverty, hardship and, especially, arrogance - I became more and more convinced that the glass of water necessary to swallow the conservative pill now required a bucketful of a stronger liquid.”
Even wanting to feel sympathy for the calamitous predicament that so consumes Licari, it is far from clear what it is that he is trying to say. This deficit of clarity is in large part a consequence of what Licari thinks is a sequence of imagistic triumphs, but what is actually a man with a woefully inflated sense of his lyrical powers. A useful illustration:
“Around me there were people who spoke of "the others" as incapable of comprehending thinking and less bent on brushing their teeth. But at the same time, they slammed me with their bad breath and, when challenged to discuss without laughing and shouting, they idiotically accused me of trying to crack glorious tradition - a parody of Religio et Patria.”
As if you cared, what he is trying to say here, in his trademark pompous manner, is that some people did not agree with him about something. And as a sign of his contempt for those that go around randomly abusing people and high-handedly dispensing their rambling opinions without being asked to, he goes and makes some friends who do agree with him.
“I understood that their conviction of thinking was indistinguishable from rigid self-righteous mould. So I bid farewell to the stinking fold.”
That is perhaps just as well, as his lamentably personal approach to settling differences of outlook would only result in countless awkward cocktail parties and ensue in costly dry-cleaning bills. For Licari, his erstwhile reactionary companions are now hateful, psychologically diseased “racists” dwelling in a “dank dungeon” in a “sediment of their varicosed (sic) mental convolutions.”
The words chip and shoulder spring to mind.
Upon reading further, however, one is struck by the sneaking suspicion that the true purpose of this ill-composed diatribe may in truth be more mundane than Licari is letting on. Possibly out of boredom with the love tribute to his own earth-shattering insight, Licari’s outpourings of mental vacuity begin to take on a distinctly partisan hue.
Having cast off a couple of overt political references to Nationalist Party, the Christian Democrats that kick in “the teeth both Christianity and Democracy” (Ho ho, readers!), he gets his hands dirty with the business of political satire.
“The MLP is mistaken to think that many Labourites would have to emigrate following another PN electoral victory. Indeed, emigration is not cruel enough. It is more cruel to oblige people to live in a country where jobs and promotions are for the less competent conservatives. Ask those who went to see the Ombudsman and others who did not even bother to do so.”
And of course, for anyone that despises those that always see corruption in others, there is, er, this:
“… Labour is keeping to itself some more interesting stories about corruption and will divulge them just before the election date. I suspect that Labour is also searching energetically for more corruption stories and may discover a few more things in the coming weeks.”
On and on it goes, like a party balloon slowly having the air let out of it. All the energy and demented idealism of the column’s intro descends into a laundry list of whinges about whatever it is that has popped into Licari’s head on that particular week.
But to give him his due, for thigh-smacking chutzpah, he does leave the best till last:
“While not agreeing with its stiff military-sounding name and its lack of letters to the editor [Note: For him to write to, presumably], I agree with Maltarightnow's advice: ‘The best challenge in life is to believe in what you are.’ Friends of friends have tested this successfully.”
And could friends of friends be an immodest reference to himself, one wonders.
