I.M. Beck - quote unquote

Who'd be a Nationalist politician, ay?

Your supporters spend something in the order of four years and 11 months of a five-year term moaning and groaning at your performance and how you're useless at governing and how the country needs a change and how you're a waste of skin and so on and so forth, then switch into "Vote PN or bust" mode for the last four weeks of an eight-week campaign, only to switch back into moan and groan mode yet again just as soon as the Cabinet is appointed.

That's pretty much what happened this time around, again.

An illustration, taken pretty much at random, is a series of letters and comments I noticed about the re-building (or lack thereof) of the Royal Opera House.

As always, "Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells" (well, from Swieqi, which is our equivalent) has started chuntering on about how this government promises things and doesn't deliver and how we've had that ruin on Republic Street for so long and how the Danes (or was it the Finns?) rebuilt their own opera house in nanoseconds.

How about this for an idea? Why not leave the ruin as it is, a monument to the fallen, a stark reminder of the futility of war, the horror of non-war armed conflict, the dangers of international unrest and all the other euphemisms for people dying because other people want to impose their will on them?

It could be cleaned up slightly and made into a better public space than it is, and it would be a living memorial of man's beastliness to man. I can't help wonderiong whether this wouldn't be a much better solution to the question of what to do with it than creating yet another architectural cliché of the type of which we've seen too many since the 1960s.

Deathwish 2

No, this isn't about the Labour Party's current travails. This first appeared in my blog on the electronic version of this paper, but I am moved to repeat it, because it is important, to a degree.

It is said, with I don't know what level of accuracy, that when Stanley Kubrick took stock of his film of Burgess's A Clockwork Orange such was the level of depravity and violence that had been plumbed that he wanted it removed from general distribution himself.

Times change and you can catch the movie on many channels, as well as buying it for mere euros, but that doesn't make it any less violent and unsuitable for the immature. There is a watershed in advance of which responsible broadcasters are careful what is shown. As always, the eagerness with which people jump on bandwagons to avoid being sued is such that even shows such as Frasier or That Seventies Show get bleeped if a character says something an American would deem unsuitable for childish ears before 9 p.m.

And of course, what an American would find objectionable, once he or she has been told that something might be objectionable, is laughable.

You can imagine my horror, however, when on MGM Classic (I think it was) being broadcast on cable by Melita (I'm sure it was) at 7 p.m. last Friday week I was privileged to witness two full frontal rapes, one of which was of a mentally-handicapped girl who then proceeded to leap through a glass window and impale herself, in glorious colour, on a railing.

Now, I'm as partial as the next man to some gratuitous sex and violence but this was really, really graphic and stomach-churning. The movie was Deathwish 2, with Charles Bronson and acting that was truly diabolical and it started at 7 p.m., when parents throughout the MGM catchment area (which is pretty much all of Europe) are allowed to assume that their kids won't be watching the gang-rape of an immigrant woman and then of a handicapped child, and the bloody death of both of them, in nauseating detail. I know Melita will argue it's hardly their fault since all they do is relay this stuff, but hey, that's not my problem - instead of wasting its corporate time trying to achieve geometric balance in the local political arena, perhaps the Broadcasting Authority could do something useful.

Berlusconi secret PN agent, say Greens

I'm not particularly au fait with Italian politics but I do know that the Nationalist Party (ours, not theirs) has very little effect on the outcome of the poll there. In fact, it is probably safe to say that the existence or otherwise of the jolly old PN affects Italian voters not one jot, if not even less than that.

Thus, if I might be permitted the luxury of being moderately cruel, I don't think the Greens can point fingers at the PN any more. You see, they got as thorough a kicking in Italy as they got here, if not more so.

Truth be told, as it always should, a cursory glance at the reaction broadcast by the Greens up north after their debacle echoed quite faithfully the excuses made here - it was all the nasty big parties' fault, us poor saintly Greens were kept out by the horrid monoliths, wasn't our fault, promise, whine, whine.

That's probably quite true, so far as it goes. Politics is a tough game, played by big kids, and never is the adage about getting out of the kitchen if the heat is too much for you truer, for all its being a platitude, than it is in the context of politics.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if the Greens want to play politics, than they have to play by the rules of the political game (more accurately, by the lack of rules).

In the jungle, big animals eat smaller animals, which is why monkeys scurry up trees and screech imprecations at the big animals rather than trying to compete with them on the ground. Get my point?

Boycott China

Whether China's treatment of Tibet deserves a boycott of the Olympics I'm not entirely sure but I am pretty sure that the arrogance with which they took delivery of the Torch, making sure that any protest was "ignored" (euphemism for shoved brutally out of the way) rather tips the balance towards a boycott being the only way forward.

A boycott will, no doubt, be disappointing for all the athletes whose lives have been geared towards qualifying and competing but the solution to that would be for the International Olympic Committee to depart from tradition and set up substitute competitions, defining them, for the purposes of the exercise, as the Olympic Games.

They can be held in other countries, countries which exercise a real respect for human rights and which do not rely quite so much on blanketing out any opinions that do not quite live up to the regime's expectations and, when this fails, resorting to what can only be described as brute force to elbow objectors out of the way.

But that's hardly going to be a solution, because it will mean that the grand panjandrums of the Olympic movement won't be able to preen and pose in one place, congratulating themselves on their sporting prowess, said prowess being demonstrated, of course, by the athletes who actually have to sweat.

A sea view and more

In fulfilment of my obligation to provide you with the requisite information to enable you to stuff your face, I will record for posterity that on Saturday last, lunch was taken with 'Er Indoors on the upper terrace of the Seaview Restaurant in Mġarr.

Great location, decent service and very decent food combined to afford us a highly enjoyable meal.

Since I'm on this low-carb thing still, which can be boring, it is important that the stuff I can eat (fillet, for instance) is good and, I am pleased to report, Trattoria Palazz, having re-opened their kitchen last Wednesday for us after the Afro-Cuban Jazz concert at the Manoel, supplied a fillet that was more than good.

Incidentally, is it only me (or should that be I?) who finds that jazz, even when played by superb musicians, as it was last Wednesday, loses something when presented in theatre mode?

To be fair, though I can appreciate the excellence of the playing, this idiom doesn't get me as much as a tight blues or rock outfit does, so I find myself wondering why it all tends towards sounding a touch self-indulgent.

You know, the band kicks off with a tune, then everyone stops while one of them shows off his talent, then they play together for a bit, stop again and so on.

Maybe it's because I'm not actually too old to rock'n'roll, though I am too young to die. An honourable mention to the first few to recognise, by e-mail, the reference, with bonus points for the name of the album in which the reference-phrase first appeared.

imbocca@gmail.com, www.timesofmalta.com/blogs