I.M. Beck - quote unquote

I'm inverting my usual order of events and giving you the benefit of my views (pompous oaf) on matters social and cultural before going on to take the mickey out of our respected and revered political classes.

The first thing I have to write is that the heading to this segment is unfair in the extreme. It is not only Tony Vella who should get the accolades for the Voices Concert attended by now by many thousands. He will be the first one to thump me, in fact, for singling him out because this is a collective effort and one which surpasses virtually every other collective fund raising effort in Malta with the exception of the Kerygma Marathon, though probably the two projects are pretty close in numbers and preparation time, even if the volleyball players do sweat a touch more.

So, congratulations to all concerned, the show was superb. The sound was very good (which shows that you can get good sound at the MCC, Queen concert producers please note) the singing and playing, as usual, excellent and the organisation as close to perfect as you can get, even if the rigours of overtime and such-like hassles deprived last Saturday's audience of more than one encore.

The dancing was enjoyable too, especially for those who appreciate the aesthetics of this activity.

I'm not going to single out anyone, other than Tony Vella (whose energy has already earned him the nickname "Energiser Bunny" in another, more athletic (!) forum) and I'm doing this only to bug him, for praise, because it would be invidious to leave out anyone who contributed a supremely enjoyable evening. Beg, steal or borrow tickets for tonight or tomorrow night (I think they're still on) and have a blast.

Our good time was further compounded by the discovery of the Pasta Buffet at the St James' Cavalier, where an enterprising bunch have spotted a niche (i.e. the post-theatre mob of sustenance seekers) and taken it upon themselves to fill it and, thereby, fill the gaping appetites of those who have one.

I'm now eager to try out their a la carte, which has been described as pretty good also.

Hackling the hecklers

Quote the Malta Independent, which told us that the "crowd hackles Peppi Azzopardi" as he left Bormla after the programme on which Mr Mintoff had appeared.

I am led to wonder whether this was because Mr Azzopardi had raised said crowd's heckles. Just in case I am being too subtle, which is not a crime with which I am charged too often, let me just point out that when you want to harass someone during a public event, you heckle rather than hackle him, perhaps because he's caused you to raise your hackles.

But then, this is the same paper that decorated its pages with a picture of Dr Galea Debono, describing him as the Judge presiding over a trial by jury of a well-known importer of jewellery - sorry, that should have been narcotics - sorry, that should have been ... but you get my point. The only problem with the picture, which did its subject justice, was that it was of Dr Galea Debono the gentleman of the medical persuasion, rather than of his brother, the Judge. The good doctor has many fine attributes, of course, but being qualified to be a judge isn't one of them.

And it was also the paper that described Judge Tonio Mallia as a chairman of the industrial tribunal, a respected role to be sure but one which is quite a few rungs down the adjudicating ladder.

I'm just showing that I pay attention in class.

Where's rosinante?

Leading neatly on from the above bit (refer to the starting bit of it, if you would be so kind) I didn't watch the Mintoff/KMB duo on Xarabank, having better things to do with my time on a Friday evening (scooping down some superb Indian at Krishna in Gzira, if you want to know) but those who did devote their valuable minutes to watching them tell me that they resembled nothing if not the two grumpy old men in the Muppet Show.

My informants also tell me that Mr Mintoff at one point lost the plot completely and was about to inflict grievous verbal harm on one of Mr Azzopardi' side-kicks, not realising that the side-kick was just trying to be funny, which seems to be his role in life on the bus.

I am not fully up to speed on what it was that Dr KMB was doing there, though this may be because he wasn't, actually, doing all that much in the first place, other than acting as Sancho Panza to Mr Mintoff's Don Quixote. Or maybe that should be Dom Quixote, ha ha.

Taking the Spanish yarn on a bit, just to flog a dead horse, as it were, if these two elder(ly) politicians were Panza and Quixote, where was the broken down old nag, Rosinante? Was the almost dead equine creature, figuratively speaking, the two heroes' tired tirade in favour of isolationism?

Getting back to Mr Mintoff's monologue (what's new?) I hear he pulled his usual stunt and went right down to the lowest of the low common denominators, telling the assembled multitude that in Europe they will be telling what shirt to wear, what jacket to wear, what trousers to wear, what tie to wear and even, forsooth, what underwear to wear, under it all. Which, if it were even remotely true, would put Europe on a par with North Korea where, in the not too dim and distant past, Mr Mintoff had given one and all the impression that he had a spiritual home.

Getting back to the broken-backed beast simile that I invoked when wondering where Rosinante had got to, will I be blamed if I allegorise a bit and call the MLP, led ably by Doctor Alfred Sant, Rosinante? After all, the MLP, before Doctor Alfred Sant got his hands on it, was the war-horse astride which Mr Mintoff rode to battle, with Dr KMB bearing his lance faithfully.

I suppose I'd better stop flogging this one.

Shock horror

What a farce. The government owns a company and appoints someone it trusts as its chairman. This company is regulated by a Constitutional institution and can't do a heck of a lot without being scrutinised and ordered about by this institution.

But does this stop Doctor Alfred Sant and his faithful henchmen from creating a stink about the appointment? Of course not, it's almost as if Ozzie Osbourne had been made Pope or curator of the Bat Pavilion at London Zoo or something like that. Wails of horror and choruses of dismay rose from the minions and from Doctor Alfred Sant himself, though they do this so often, I suspect that they'd have done the same if the president of the MLP himself had been appointed to the chairmanship of Public Broadcasting Services Ltd.

For it is the appointment of my old friend Dr Austin Sammut to which I refer in describing the MLP's shock horror reaction, as anyone who has been following the papers would know. I hold no brief for Dr Sammut, who is quite capable of defending himself if he thinks he needs to, but the whining that greeted his appointment was wondrous to behold.

The problem arises, of course, from the fact that Doctor Alfred Sant, because of the position he holds at the moment, has to be seen by the faithful to use the yardstick that the MLP always uses, namely its own. In other words, because it is culturally ingrained in the MLP that partisanship and adherence to the interests of the party will always and at all times be deemed to be more important than carrying out your function professionally and with integrity, they have to assume that because Dr Sammut has certain personal convictions, he will allow these to interfere with his carrying out of his duty.

I don't think he will, somehow.

Right back at you

I didn't spot it immediately, but I was told that Mr Alfed Grixti saw fit to respond to one of my sallies and ask why, if I am a true and honest gent, I don't condemn the current lot and instead restrict myself to dumping on the MLP and reviving its less than salubrious past.

In fact, Mr Grixti was man enough to admit that said past was less than salubrious, though he drew the line at telling us what he had done to contribute at the time to making this past (the present then) less unsalubrious.

Would he be so kind as to tell us what he did to stop the nastiness? Not much, because the nastiness was there and remained there. Perhaps he wasn't able to do anything, being not much more than a lad at the time, in which case he is absolved, but maybe he wasn't all that worried about stopping it.

As to why I don't dump on the current lot all that much, I could say that I choose not to because their past - and their present - is not as foul as that of the MLP. Unlike Mr Saviour Balzan writing in The Circle last Sunday, I differentiate between the excesses of foulness to which the MLP descended when in power and the mistakes and foul-ups committed by the current lot, who, being human, make them.

Anyone who lived through the '70s and '80s knows that acting like Shylock and intoning the mantra "a plague on both your houses" (well, I think it was Shylock - an honourable mention to the first correction I receive through the steam-driven e-mail) is a cop out, nothing more and nothing less.

An apology

One of the excesses of violence to which I refer above was the orgy of frenzied reaction the students got when in the late '70s they dared contrary the regime.

My apology is directed at my friends and colleagues from the time, because last Saturday was October 5, the anniversary of the date when a number of medical students, backed by the rest of us, protested against their enforced exile after Mr Mintoff's government decided to pick a fight with the medical profession.

The fight spilled over into a fight against anyone with a brain and we're feeling the effects even now.

Sorry, friends, I totally forgot about it, even if the sight of the thugs, both in uniform and not, beating the living daylights out of everyone within reach, is indelibly ingrained on my mind.

And then Mr Alfed Grixti wonders why I dump on them. I'm just not convinced anything much has changed, given the way they threaten and brow-beat anyone who doesn't toe their line.

Murphy's law

The Irish are having a referendum about whether or not to accept the Nice Treaty, in which regard a "No" will impact (until some Eurocrat finds a way round it) on whether we get in after we do the right thing and vote yes ourselves.

In truth, to be sure, the dear folk from Eire are actually voting on whether or not they approve of their government, which, after a landslide victory a few months ago, has made a pig's breakfast of the whole thing, with memos about cost-cutting leaking all over the place and a corruption scandal of monumental proportions coming to the surface.

Nice has nothing to do with it, though of course that didn't stop the CNi from trotting up to the Republic, forelocks being tugged, to beg the nice foreigners to please, keep us out of Europe, we want to be thought of as second-class citizens, we've always been subservient toadies and we want to carry on just like that.

To be frank, the way the CNi went about this is mildly insulting. Not of the Irish, who will no doubt treat them courteously, if in bemusement, but of us. It's probably the first time in our neo-colonial history that a delegation went to another country asking to be kept out of the club.

Nice one guys, I really appreciate what you're doing for us.