I.M. Beck - quote unquote

The silly season is over and our beloved politicians are settling down to yet another winter of dis/contentment, the dis coming into play if you're on the left side of the scale, the contentment if you're on the right side, though even as I click these words out, I realise that there's not such a difference between the so-called left and the so-called right nowadays.

The political game is complicated this year by the fact that it has been decreed from on high that the Malta Labour Party is to go into election mode. At least we have been spared, thus far, the oh-so-predictable headlines in the pro-Labour rags about how the election is to be announced next week, tomorrow, the day after or in 10 minutes' time. No doubt we will soon be regaled with stuff like this.

You can tell that the MLP has gone into election mode, of course. It's like summer, as soon as you get more than one swallow flitting about, you can guess that it's here, though in this instance, the swallows we're talking about are the actions that the spinners at the Glass Palace expect everyone to take when a tasty electoral morsel is placed before them.

And, yes, I'm fully aware that the immediately preceding sentence was convoluted to the point of incomprehensibility. What I was trying to say was that we're all being asked to swallow everything that spews forth from Labour's collective lips, so they must think an election is coming.

So, bottom line, it's time for the cheap shots and the silly gimmicks to start being paraded for our delectation, in the hope that the gimcracks and the geegaws turn into votes.

Have a ticket, not

If there's something that irritates everyone, to the point of expletives being expleted and teeth gnashed, it is finding that horrid slip of paper tucked under your windscreen wiper. Said slip of paper will have been produced either by a wannabe cop who has been tasked to raise as much revenue as possible for the local council in whose roads the warden plies his or her trade, or by an officious real cop who has forgotten that his or her task is to keep law and order and not annoy motorists.

I found one such ticket, a copper's one, fouling my windscreen last Sunday evening when I left the horseless with a couple of wheels on a pavement outside St Patrick's while I was undergoing a weekly bout of self-discipline. I freely admit it, the car was obstructing the pavement, as were all the other cars, which also got ticketed, but this did not mean that I wasn't annoyed by the 10 quid I had just been stung. I even resorted to the utterly puerile reaction of ripping the thing into little pieces and hurling them to the wind, so the Sliema local council will have to spend some of the money they had just got out of me in picking up the litter.

Yes, completely and unequivocally childish and, to boot, an offence.

It is a given that if something irritates people, Doctor Alfred Sant will seize upon it like a particularly enthusiastic rottweiler and shake it all about, rather in the manner of an angler showing a lure to a plump salmon, the salmon being the common or garden voter.

So, to his own self being always true, the dear fellow has come up with a promise, namely that when he is returned to Castille, he will ensure that the traffic warden system is revised. Considering that most people are extremely annoyed by traffic wardens, this in and of itself should be enough to guarantee that Doctor Alfred Sant will be Prime Minister come the day.

What, precisely, the erudite one intends to bring into place to control traffic abuses was not made clear. To be precise, as one should be if one is not Doctor Alfred Sant, what was not made clear by him was what, even vaguely, the erudite one was contemplating in connection with what system, if any, he would introduce to make even the mildest of mild gestures towards controlling traffic. This lapse is pretty much par for the course when Doctor Alfred Sant is golfing.

After all, when Doctor Alfred Sant said he would remove VAT if he was elected in 1996 (which he was, if only for mere moments) no one imagined he would renege on the pledge but the number of people also failed to imagine that he would replace it with a rose that with any other name smelled as bad. Smelled as bad, it should be said, to those whose noses were offended by anything that smacked of an attempt to control tax evasion.

Or should that be avoidance? I always forget which is legal and which a naughtiness.

It is the privilege of politicians, who depend on the votes not only of the analytical and the discerning but also of the shallow and the gullible, to spin their yarns and blow their tin-whistles to drum up the votes. It's lucky for Doctor Alfred Sant that the word platitude starts with PL and not PR, because the temptation for silly twerps like me to use it when parodying his by-now-boring Wednesday confirmation that his vocabulary, at least as far as pretentious preening is concerned is primo, primary and precocious, would be insurmountable.

Past triumphs

You can tell a party has gone into election mode when it starts simultaneously trying to woo the wooable and bolster the die-hards.

The MLP is giving this rather difficult task the good old college try, as witnessed by the thrust towards modernity characterised by the penchant its spinners have towards using the letters I, T, and C whenever they can, while at the same time dumping as much opprobrium as they can muster on the government's plans to promote the information technology industry.

This dichotomastic approach to policy delivery is evident even more emphatically when the die-hard diehards are being wooed. Mr Jason Micallef, it was reported, did his level best to stir up the good old boys when he thundered out his "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" speech recently. He was doing sterling work with the guys who missed the more robust approach Labour always took to the management of human relations, though perhaps he was also undermining the warm and fuzzy feeling that the potential New-Labourites might have towards his party.

If it had been a once-only event, you'd perhaps have forgiven the MLP secretary general for lapsing, but no sooner had Mr Micallef reminded us all of the excesses of Old Labour than his buddies started mouthing off about demanding a fair election and righting injustices and, generally, reassuring anyone carrying a Labour Party membership scarf that he or she would be well taken care of when the votes were counted.

All this change, and it all remains the same, if I might be allowed to corrupt a Gallic series of bon mots.

Wry ones

A couple of amusing paragraphs caught my eye last week. In one, Mr Philip Fenech, who runs one of the better establishments down Paceville way, in the course of his lobbying for low-cost airlines, gave Air Malta's management the benefit of his experience when he recounted how he had changed BJ's position in the market.

I know what he means, of course, and I also tend to see many of his points when it comes to lowering the cost of travelling to and from this sun-blasted rock, but I couldn't help smiling at the thought of Air Malta being run like a Paceville bar.

The other bit that dragged a smile to my lips was the story about how the Malta Tourism Authority's board members seem to have got their lingerie in something of a knot because they were being investigated in connection with some publicity that was being afforded the MTA that was not quite what the genii who had thought up the Brand Malta campaign had intended.

It struck me that the only people who worry about being investigated are the ones who have something to worry about in the context of getting caught.

Weekendery

We didn't do much last weekend worth reporting about on the social scene - dinner was had at Ambrosia on Saturday, but it was more of the same, so why should I need to recommend the place to you? You know very well it's a good place.

On Monday, the ancestor summoned us to dinner and we ended up at Mezzo on the Sliema Front, where we had quite a decent meal, thank you very much, so you can add that one to the list of places where you can nourish yourself on my say-so.

In closing, just a polite reminder that if you haven't got your tickets for Voices yet, you're still in time, though they're doing a pretty good imitation of pastizzi on a Saturday night in Rabat. All for a good cause, of course, so get on with it, why don't you?

By the way, Drogba is the man, don't you think?