Labour's Babes (for the uninitiated, the female columnists who seem to get melty knees at the mere thought of Joseph Muscat and the Labour Party in general) tend to lambaste me, on occasion, for tending towards bringing up the past all the time.
This is because it has become fashionable for ladies of a certain type to come over all superior about how smart and progressive it is to be critical of all things pro-PN (or what they understand, not necessarily accurately, to be pro-PN) and dumping on old fogeys like me for living in the past is a really, really, really cutting edge way of showing this.
Sadly for the little dears, though, it is Labour itself that has suddenly taken to living in the past even more than heretofore. This has now lumbered the ladies with a rather large dilemma upon the horns of which to impale themselves. You see, it's all so yesterday to invoke the past (conveniently for Labour, its past is so horrendous that the Babes' slavish attempts to bury said past are very welcome) and when the past actually pops up and bites you on your pert (or less than pert) derriere, you're stymied just a little.
Attentive readers will have noticed, of course, what I'm on about straight away.
Mere days ago, just after Dr Muscat and Owen Bonnici made a pretty good play at capturing the sympathies of people like me (fat chance they have) by appearing to align themselves against the rector's idiocy in causing the prosecution of the guy who was misguided enough to publish something graphic in Maltese, some bright spark seems to have come up with the idea that linking Labour with Dom Mintoff and vice-versa is a good notion.
Just as an aside, I don't want to be unfair on Dr Bonnici, to whose credit it goes that he has consistently advocated artistic freedom in the face of rectorial fundamentalism. The same can't really be said for his leader, who hopped onto this particular bandwagon, as usual, just a beat too late.
I'm looking forward to having a quiet giggle, incidentally, when the soon-to-be appointed Parliamentary Committee on Obscenity starts tying itself into knots over trying to define acceptable naughtiness.
It was Chris Agius who suggested in the House that the house where Mr Mintoff was raised should be preserved.
This led to immediate, and highly profane, wise-cracks about how we're going to get a Bethlehem in Cospicua (Mr Mintoff was dubbed Is-Salvatur (the saviour) many, many moons ago, geddit?) but leaving these cracks aside, one has to ask: Is Mr Agius joking himself, or what?
Mr Mintoff, for reasons that to me and people like me, are unfathomable, is held in something like reverence by a certain type of person.
By me and people like me, on the other hand, what he is held in is something closer to distaste, not to say contempt.
Mr Mintoff the man may or may not be the very acme of civility and affability but, having met the bloke only once to my knowledge, I am unable to comment.
Mr Mintoff the Prime Minister and leader of the Malta Labour Party, on the other hand, led the country while the police were attacking University students on multiple occasions, scuttled past medical students chained to the railings of Castille without having the guts to confront them, allowed the introduction of bulk-buying and the dismemberment of the economy, ignored every union except the General Workers' Union, witnessed the rise of violence and intimidation to unprecedented (and since unreached) levels and watched the country being brought to the brink of destruction.
Mr Mintoff clung on to power when more than half the country voted him out and, when he eventually decided it was probably time to move on, he lumbered us with a successor who's managed to distinguish himself by being arguably a worse PM than Mr Mintoff.
These are pretty random up-rakings from the past to which I'm sure Labour's Babes will react with their tedious imprecations to me to forget the past.
The fact remains, though, that, due in no small measure to Mr Mintoff and his failure to give effect to basic tenets of democracy, or to exercise any control over the less civilised elements of his party, in essence this country passed through an era, from 1971 to 1987, of erosion to our basic rights and virtual collapse of the physical and economic infrastructure.
To the Babes, then, I would respectfully point out that it was a current Labour MP who suggested immortalising Mr Mintoff and reminding us all that Labour today is the spawn of Mr Mintoff's yesterdays, just in case we had forgotten and just in case that photo of the old boy skulking at Labour's door a few days ago had slipped our mind.
Sometimes I wonder precisely what it is that the Labour Party is trying to do.
And to end on a nice guy note, it's time to dig out all those old coins (and lira notes for that matter) and send them to the YMCA so they can cash them in for the benefit of the homeless. Go on, you know it's worth it.
imbocca@gmail.com
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