He's Behind You!

MADC is making a slightly unfortunate offer in promoting its Christmas panto:


Just one more reason for the children to be afraid.

I, Saviour Balzan, Is Clever

It is nice to think that an opinion set forth should be a decantered goblet of wisdom poured from a sage vessel of learned introspection, rather than the verbal equivalent of soiling your trousers when all you meant to do is break wind. In an ideal world, a thought expressed could be a distillation of education, wit and intelligence.
And yet, there comes a point while reading a recent Saviour Balzan column that brings to mind one of the best-known scenes from the biopic of Iris Murdoch, Iris. In the latter stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, Murdoch is comforted by life-long partner and husband, John Bayley, who tenderly recalls her vast body of written work, which she struggles any longer to comprehend. In a rare and dramatic moment of lucidity, her memories flood back and in sad, stilted measures, she proudly intones the words: “I … wrote … books.”
Now, she may have been completely gaga at that stage, but that scene demonstrates dramatically what even a mind withered by disease can achieve. Some will say that Murdoch was cheating in the first place, because not only did she bash out a few books in her time, but unlike Balzan she had probably read a few as well, without having to resort to the Internet for basic general knowledge.
All this being a roundabout way of saying that it never ceases to amaze how the pig ignorance of certain Maltese journalists forces them not only to filch material from the Internet in lieu being cultured, but also to think they stand any chance of getting away with it.
One might imagine that Balzan would have been too old to properly enjoy the cartoon Dogtanian in the mid-eighties, but it is evident that is where most of his knowledge of 17th century French royal intrigue comes from if his article on Richard Cachia Caruana is anything to go by. Well, Dogtanian and, of course, Wikipedia _ the refuge of every journalist in a hurry.
Just to back up a bit, Balzan attempts in his column to cast Cachia Caruana as the sinister behind-the-scenes operator _ a narrative so hackneyed and past its sell-by date that, oh my word, is that Smells Like Teen Spirit that I hear in the background? But witty to a T, he ploughs on with his distressingly idiotic attempt to draw a parallel between Cachia Caruana and Cardinal Richelieu.
Not that Balzan introduces the parallel that simply. Which is where his wicked and dimwitted scheme of plagiarism goes so terribly awry. For more, read ahead:

“People call him RCC. I prefer to simply call him “Cardinal Richard”, like Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu. Consecrated as a bishop in 1607, he later entered politics, becoming a secretary of State in 1616.”

The similarities between the two figures are striking, now that Balzan mentions them. Not, however, as startlingly identical word-for-word as the biographical notes on Richelieu provided by Balzan and Wikipedia.
A tip here for the aspiring plagiarist (as opposed to the pathetic, failure of a plagiarist that is Balzan): Change the odd word here and there, or Google _will_ catch you.
Also, try not to show off with additional detail like the date of Richlieu’s consecration as bishop. When even your mother is surprised that you have learnt to tie your own your shoelaces, you should not expect us to believe that you know _ off the top of your Cro-Magnon head _ that:

“[Richelieu’s] chief foreign policy objective was to check the power of the Austro-Spanish Hapsburg dynasty. Although he was a cardinal, he did not hesitate to make alliances with Protestant rulers in attempting to achieve this goal. His tenure was marked, among others, by the Thirty Years War.”

Again, as an aside, the parallels with Cachia Caruana are eerie.
The problem with Balzan’s article though goes beyond the mere impudence of thinking that copy and pasting out of an offline encyclopedia could pass for erudition. The cack-handed stupidity of trying to shoehorn this historical analogy falls even on the merits of Balzan’s own poorly written article.
He insists on never actually referring to Richard Cachia Cachia by name _ preferring like some loner ham-radio enthusiast to refer to him cryptically as RCC _ which tends to undermine his attempt to describe the villain as a dark and secretive master of shade and deviousness.
His (stolen) crib notes on Richelieu also do little to preserve the wretched, still-born baby in a shoebox misery of his argument:

“Cardinal de Richelieu was often known by the title of the King’s “Chief Minister” or “First Minister”. As a result, he is sometimes considered to be the world’s first Prime Minister, in the modern sense of the term. He sought to consolidate the monarchy and crush domestic factions.”

Unless the mention of the monarchy is some unfortunate reference to queens, it is again hard to see the relevance of all this. Other than, that is, 2,000 words-plus don’t just write themselves and it will be a cold day in hell when Balzan actually has to write his whole column himself.
The said conceit behind this piss-poor hatchet job on Cachia Caruana truly begins to unravel before your eyes, when Balzan (again pilfering liberally from his fount of all knowledge) reminds us that:

“Richelieu is also known by the sobriquet l’Éminence rouge (“The Red Eminence”), from the red shade of a cardinal’s vestment. Well, RCC is undeniably l’Éminence grise.”

Well quite. And if he were not so lazy and easily distracted to read past the introduction of the Wikipedia article, he might have learnt that the term “éminence grise” was actually applied historically to quite another person altogether.
The clue is in the term really. François Leclerc du Tremblay _ Cardinal Richelieu’s right-hand man _ was a Capuchin friar who wore grey robes, as Wikipedia helpfully notes.
Is that, therefore, what Malta is doomed to? Opinion by plagiarism, penned by individuals whose very existence serves purely to act as a flesh-and-blood adjunct to electronic knowledge.
Next time you see that ruddy-faced goon staring out at you open-mouthed from his column portrait, just remember that:

“Richelieu is also a leading character in the novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, as well as the film based on the same, in which he was portrayed as a main antagonist, and a powerful ruler... even more powerful than the King himself, though events like the ‘Day of the Dupes’ show that in fact he very much depended on the King to keep this power.”

Well, that settles that then.

Saving the World, One Article at a Time

Imagine the scene five centuries from today as wild-eyed mutant people sail the high seas Waterworld-style in search of juicy kelp and human flesh upon which to feast. On one of his many deep-sea expeditions, a gilled subaqueous scavenger chances upon the remains of Malta International Airport, where a handful of the fabled winged machines lie stranded in their watery grave. So much for the inflatable slide, a modern-day reader might be tempted to observe.
Through a little window he sees seated rows of putrefying bodies, little knowing that most of the ones toward the front of the plane already looked like that when they were alive. Drawing on his mutant strength, the door comes away with ease. The pickings are rich – casserole upon casserole chicken and beef, not to speak of a panoply of water crackers and processed spreadable cheese. Sure, dolphin and seal meat is delicious, he thinks to himself, but there is nothing like chicken to really spice things up.
But suppressing the excitement of finding so many dry buns and plastic packets of unsalted Danish butter, he reminds himself that what he is looking for is much more important.
“How did this happen? Who has the solutions? What could we have done to avoid this? This is what we seek,” he intones to himself, somewhat redundantly.
After all the years of searching, however, his day had come. For on this plane, of all places, was a surviving copy of The Times of Malta dated Nov. 7, 2008, tucked hermetically inside a pouch and held in place by the decomposed knees of a dead Foster Clark’s powdered drinks sales rep in row seven.
On the surface, a wise old man carefully leafs through the sun-dried parchment and nods sadly as the secret of what went wrong is finally revealed.
It turns out that the onerous task of saving the planet was entrusted into the hands of gibberish-spouting buffoons.
If it isn’t clear by now, it should be explained that we are dealing here with a masterwork of non-speak penned by none other than former Malta football team manager Pippo Psaila:

“True to its electoral promise of placing the environment at the top of the national agenda and its work plan for the next five years, the government, through the budget for next year, has, for the first time ever, put in place a holistic macro plan for the environment.”

Using up a year’s supply of punctuation, Psaila’s opens his manifesto for a brave new world doomed to drown in water and drivel with the kind of self-aggrandising style that befits his ilk. What managerial guide was he trying to read while holding upside down when he learnt phrases like “holistic macro plan”.
Woe to us that are subjected to this tale told by an idiot, full of claptrap and nonsense, signifying nothing.
To give him credit, Psaila is not shy of aiming high. The budget of 2008 aims to address no less than “global warming and climate change,” he argues, and shame on anyone who thought it was just a quick-fix sting on hapless shoppers and galoots driving cars that would be better suited to driving up and down Route 66.
Just in case the reader had forgotten just how holistic this budget is, Psaila is on hand to drive (environmentally) home the point:

“This is the first time ever, as far as I can recall, that such a holistic exercise has been launched…”

Read the article itself if you feel you have to, but rest assured that the most environmental thing to do with the hard copy would be to use it to line the birdcage or wipe your bottom with it, as people in Malta were forced to do in the 1980s. If you feel compelled to print the article out and use it as loo paper though, it is unlikely anyone would begrudge the compulsion.
The Russians used to do with their copies of Pravda, after all _ often out of choice. And the tone of that publication is what springs to mind when Psaila offer his laundry list on how the Party will save its people.
To précis one main points, the government will subsidise businesses to become more eco-friendly. But why summarize when Psaila himself puts it so succinctly in this elegant, flowing 91-word sentence:

“While advocating growth and economic regeneration, the budget provides key economic players with the right synergies to operate in an environmentally-friendly context where initiatives, such as the energy performance certification prior to the issuance of a development permit, the allocation of €33 million to promote the generation of energy from clean and renewable sources and the provision of €10 million for business and industry to invest in cleaner and sustainable technologies, combined with support for the compilation of energy audits for businesses, are all part of a very clear strategic direction.”

Moving on to transport, he rambles on pretentiously about how heavy emitters of “particulate matter” will have to cough up (along with along with anyone driving behind them) for their excesses. Again, he is too diplomatic to say that what he means is the Bob Marley-loving Ford Escort fanatics and assorted other working-class miscreants that will insist on driving only the cars they can afford to own.
And finally, Joe Citizen (his term) himself gets a look in:

“The possibility of exchanging high-consuming/cost domestic lamps for energy-saving ones through a voucher system is not only a far-reaching initiative but one that makes a difference in household expenditure and will go a long way to mitigate the announced increase in the utility tariffs.”

Although Psaila cannot compose a proper English sentence to save his life, he is cunning enough to shove the question of utility tariffs right to the end. Even then, it is casually dropped in almost as though it were a manifestation of natural will, as opposed to a policy endorsed by his visionary political associates.
The offer of providing Joe Citizen with a shiny, free light-bulb, a la The Sun, brings to mind that old gag. How many Belarusians does it take to change a light-bulb. “Vot is light-bulb, please?”
Is this shallow gimmickry and crass way to buy off the electorate with shiny trinkets, as though they were Native Americans trading their beloved land for pox-ridden blankets and coloured beads? Not according to Psaila:

“This budget has truly set the stage for what has to be Malta's future in energy generation and conservation where, through the initiatives announced, not only has the government come up with the first ever national strategic direction of some substance but has put in place those synergies to promote and foster a real culture change in terms of consumption and the source and application of our energy mix.”

The old man is indeed wise, but he has no absolutely no idea what exactly synergies are. Staring at the newspaper, he sighs ruefully and after a short while he sits back and smiles to himself contenting himself with the slim consolation that as bad as things might be, there is no longer anyone alive on the planet who will tell him that “it really is the case of putting one's money where one's mouth is and avoiding the usual rhetoric linked to topics such as the environment.”

The Downward Learning Curve

“Hey teacher,” sang a cherubic choir in overwrought prog rockers Pink Floyd’s seminal hit, Another Brick in the Wall, “leave us kids alone”.
Few students through the decades have failed to engage with the sentiment at the heart of that song, namely that schools are little more than chambers of repression where learning happens by accident. But no classroom is complete without its clutch of nerds and teacher’s pets, which is where poor Christopher Bezzina steps into the breech.
To give him credit where it’s due, he opens his column The Capacity to Create Better Schools with an assured, telegraphic intro that is Dickens without the verboseness, Melville without the tortured introspection:

“We are living in exciting times.”

So far, so good. There is certainly no problem with setting the bar high, but let’s remember that this is The Times we are dealing with here. When it comes to bars, the Olympic gold here is in the limbo dance not the high jump.
Fittingly, Bezzina torpedoes all his early promise with possibly the most unwieldy, and definitely the least interesting, sentence ever committed to paper:

“They are exciting times for those who want to be directly involved and engaged in the educational reforms promised by the Education Reform encompassed in the amendments to the Education Act (2006), in the Reform Agreement entered into between the government and the Malta Union of Teachers in July 2007 and the various policy documents that have come out through the ministry responsible for education over the past few years.”

Bezzina is supposedly in the business of assuring quality in the education sector, which holds out no great promise for whatever tedious government initiative about which he is writing about so uninspiringly. Then again, he is a technocrat and a satisfactorily grey one at one, so no more should and could be expected of him other than the parroting of hideously vacuous government policies. The educationalists churned out of the University of Malta need to be employed somehow, after all, and what better way than getting them to overhaul the teaching sector like monkeys typing out the complete works of Shakespeare.
Could anyone be blamed for finding this paragraph, for example, as inspirational as watching a dog being run over:

“Both the Education Act and the subsequent Collective Reform Agreement (2007) recognise the need to create a context for professional learning to take place within schools and their networks and outside, and to have professional staff that work within the networks and support the networks from outside to improve and enhance the learning capabilities of everyone - adults and students alike.”

Bezzina is apparently never happy with a sentence unless it is far too long, contains at least one date and repeats the key word no less than three times. Networks anybody?
But if Bezzina is the willing executioner of this largely uninformative puff piece on how the government is saving Malta’s children from certain unproductive cretinism, who is the enabler?
An abettor of inadequacy or excess can take several shapes, from the small-time pimp to the street corner crack dealer. A most disturbing manifestation of this abusive role was shown in a Channel Four documentary in Britain some years ago about the weird and perverse men that feed their gargantuan wives to states of such criminal obesity that they can barely walk. The women become so fat, their layers of overlapping skin putrefy and turn black, unseen but detected by the sensitive nose.
It is a disgusting and cruel form of indulgence that has found its home contentedly on The Times’ editorial board, where quality assurance might as well be a tin of chocolates. Nothing is too dull, badly written, rambling and uninspiring for the weasels that get paid for copying and pasting straight from their inboxes into the publishing software.
Bezzina is little more than a pride gourd to inflate, who will provide the reams of inconsequential copy to fill all the newspaper space The Times’ utterly lunatic advertisers will not buy.
So, to get back to the article… It drones on about improvement, learning, experience, network, unifying ethos etc. And then ends with the obligatory platitude about the future, God help us:

“It is indeed an exciting time to be in education. Together we can make a difference for the youth and young adults of tomorrow.”

Indeed, indeed.
Indeed.

[Sic] Comments

In his reprehensible treatise The Revolt Against Civilization (1922), American historian and racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard laments what he perceives as the burgeoning menace of the untermensch and the burden it heaves onto the back of the ruling classes. Dwelling on the outcome of the then-recent Bolshevik revolution, he sniffily decries the notion of "natural equality" as understood by political radicals, in Russia and beyond.
Thankfully, these disturbing concepts of human stratification are little more than an ugly relic of scientific racism. Then again, too see what bedlam was unleashed when the Times of Malta website handed over the keys of the asylum to the inmates, one wonders whether Stoddard may have been onto something when he called the for the gates of civilization to be guarded.
As any faithful reader of The Times' online edition will know, the newspaper some months ago started enabling its readers to leave comments on any article, opinion and news as it may be. Sceptics, the underwritten included, scoffed at the clumsy and inept execution of the initiative.
Submitting a comment requires volunteering a quantity of information that would have satisfied even a devoted Stasi operative. In fairness, the criteria are a few degrees less stringent that those required to get a letter published in the actual newspaper. It would be no surprise to learn that The Times might once required attachment to letters to the editor to include a set of fingerprints, a mimeographed copy of a birth certificate and a signed statement from the local parish priest.
In these enlightened times, all the website asks for is a name, surname, e-mail address, town of residence and a telephone number. And to judge by the tone and volume of the comments on the site, just about anybody can qualify for connection to the telephone grid these days.
On a visit many years ago to Cairo zoo, I saw the dreadful sight of a flange of baboons pouncing on an unfortunate cat foolish enough to wander into the primates’ giant enclosure. The cat’s death was mercifully swift, but what followed was a terrifying and discordant cacophony of shrieks, grunting and dust-throwing as rivalling congresses argued over ownership of the limp corpse.
Exchanges of views on The Times website never fails to bring this tragicomic image to mind. Gratefully, the comment strands never stray far from utter absurdity and ploughing through them is a joy that vindicates the drudgery of day-to-day existence.
Picking an article at random, Sunday’s issue features the heartening news that Labour Party deputy Karl Chircop’s condition has improved slightly. Quick as a shot, the insanely pious F. Camilleri logged on to seize victory in what has apparently been a stimulating debate elsewhere on the healing powers of prayer. Not content with his unseemly celebratory dance, he follows up his own comment some 18 minutes later with this:

“This is GREAT news.
Thanks be to the Lord and Our Virgin Mary of LOURDES.”

People who capitalize their computer-based correspondence do so because they want us to imagine them shouting the words in question. So reread that snippet and try to visualize F. Camilleri shouting, the veins in his temple throbbing, in a dark room on a Sunday and imagine the monitor flecked with tiny projectiles of foamy saliva on that final sibilant.
Camilleri’s comments invariably kick off the familiar sight of an incrementally more and more indecorous crossfire of what could generously be termed as opinions. Indeed, the bulk of what The Times’ readers commit to the website has all the intellectual tone of what results from a fat man sitting on a whoopee cushion.
A story about the Mediterraneo Marine Park denying cruelty to dolphins, elicits these remarks among others. From Eric Gahn:

I wonder what [Mediterraneo director Pedro] Maghalaes would say if HE were kept in a small cage with a controlled supply of purifed air and made to jump for balls and through hoops so he could earn his keep in the small cage.

And Franco Farrugia:

Well said, Mr Cuschieri. What if dolphins could talk! (sic)
And indeed, patrons are more guilty than the keepers themselves!!!

An indignant howling-at-the-moon letter from faithful old fart John Guillaumier to complain that Paceville is no longer as it was in the days of his youth in the 1960s, “when a better class of tourists than nowadays led to the establishment of the first night-clubs and restaurants in Malta”. This kind of letter, along with the perennial favourite about how Maltese is apparently a pointless language and should be abandoned forthwith, is always guaranteed to generate the standard slew of replies.
Guillaumier’s better class of backers include Ray Axisa:

So True, what a dump Paceville has became (sic), well done with your comments.

And Joe Buttigieg:

A trip to the continent recently revealed how Malta has become the dirtiest and shabiest (sic) place in Europe.

On the other side of the argument is a disappointingly sensible set of people with unreasonably reasonable views.
The Times has in a rare effort tried to instil a climate of democratic expression on its site. What it has ended up with is a verbal version of Pong, where one opinion burped onto the site provokes, by some yet unformulated law of physics, an equally banal and ridiculous response.
But of you’re forced to choose between watching YouTube clips of chimpanzees falling out of trees and reading The Times comment pages, then you know what the right choice is.

Better Late Then Never

It was a bit disappointing Alfred Sant's first column after coming out of hospital was not titled Proctologist.

Sunday! Bloody Sunday!

Whoever says Sunday is the day of rest has clearly never been troubled by the weekly ordeal of ploughing through the newspapers. The chore is mercifully only a self-imposed feat of masochism for media junkies.
But spare a thought for Joe Vella Bonnici, a martyr to the cause of punditry when he is not performing his duties as chief executive officer of the Institute for the Promotion of Small Enterprises. There is almost nothing about the Sunday papers that doesn’t cause Vella Bonnici to break into a cold sweat. They’re too big, too colourful, have too many adverts, and cost too much. As if that weren’t enough, there are too many of the damned things.
With seven newspapers to process, there just aren’t enough hours in the day, he notes. Especially when, oddly enough, more people are “getting glued to their computers or television sets”.
Vella Bonnici is bewildered by the weak influence wielded by the invisible hand of market forces on the price he has to pay for his reading material:

“One would have expected that this intense competition would drive their prices down. Still, they keep going up.”

But after cynically and sarcastically casting doubt on the value of the papers, he concedes some ground to the impact of commodity prices on the cost of publishing the weeklies:

“There could be other considerations, such as the weight of paper used…”

But Vella Bonnici wavers between caustic misgivings and pietistic devotion in his views on the Sunday papers. Indeed, for all his criticisms, he describes the process of reading the weeklies as “worshipping on the sacred altar of journalism”, a frankly disturbing image with hints of the black mass about it.
But in a sharp switch in tone, Vella Bonnici reverts again to a position of cavilling denunciation:

“Sunday papers too have their share of sermons. They all speak on behalf of the truth. As Joe Jackson chanted way back in the 1970s, ‘Sunday papers don't get no lies... Sunday papers don't got no eyes’. Or do they?”

History does not relate whether Jackson was thinking of Roamer’s Column, Lino Spiteri or Adrian Muscat Inglott when he penned those lines, but other verses from the song suggest otherwise:

“If you want to know about the gay politician,
If you want to know how to drive your car,
If you want to know about the new sex position,
You can read it in the sunday papers, read it in the sunday papers.”

That stuff is usually in The Times on Thursdays.
It transpires, however, that there is a reason behind Vella Bonnici’s folly. And it is not just sour grapes that he has not been offered his own slot in any of the papers on Sunday.

“Why do I bother to read the Sunday papers? It is mostly in search of inspiration for my opinion pieces. It is not easy to find what I want, especially as I am never sure of what I am looking for.”

At this stage, it is tempting to take pity on Vella Bonnici, as one might on a drunk tramp trying to climb back onto the seat of a broken bicycle. But the jaw-droppingly irony-deficient assertion that follows his plea for enlightenment obviates any such sentimentality.

“It is then that I realise that, not only do we have too many Sunday papers, but also too many opinion writers.”

Unmolested by any sense of his own ridiculousness, Vella Bonnici pontificates in mangled English on the relative literary merits of columnists, before hypocritically calling for a cutback in media output in the name of the environment. But wait a minute:

“Naturally, I speak for myself.”

Well, that’s alright then.