The phrase to be a Charlie is a moderately old English one, meaning to behave a bit like a berk. I outline this for those who don’t have the ineffable benefit of an Anglo-Saxon sense of humour, unlike our well-beloved Premier Joseph Muscat, who smelt the coffee so well after the elections a couple of years ago (how time flies when you’re having fun) that one of the first things he did was “buy” a coffee house, a premier one at that.
But the Charlie that my title evokes is not a human being but an institution, though it can be said, actually, that the institution itself made something of a Charlie of its headman, who is actually called that. He did try to counteract the silliness quite quickly, truth be told, but seriously, someone needs their surplice pulled.
It won’t have taken long for the more perspicacious among you to have come to the conclusion that I’m ranting about the ludicrous statement issued by the Church about the silly rolling pencils craze that seems have swept the internet and, as a result, enthralled the massed ranks of the easily impressed and impressionable.
It’s becoming clear exactly how the dear chap managed to persuade so many people to vote for him
No, I’m not talking about the voters who, in their majority, put Premier Muscat in the fantastic position he’s in, able not only to smell the coffee but to buy the best of it and a cafe from which to dispense it, too. It’s about silly little school kids and their equally silly parents I’m on about.
Instead of issuing a short, snappy two- or three-liner telling people to grow up and explain to their poor little terrified munchkins that all that was happening was that the blasted pencils were simply obeying the laws of physics, someone within the higher echelons of the Curia saw fit to say something on the lines of “yes, it’s probably explainable but, hey, you never know, this might be Beelzebub girding his fiery loins to transport squadrons of kids wailing and screaming to the lower reaches of Hades. Now be afraid, very afraid”.
I know that certain interpretations of the Christian Faith require acknowledgement of the possibility that there is a “spirit world” but seriously? In 2015, we have to get this sort of twaddle being spread about?
The Archbishop put it perfectly: where something is explainable, explain it, don’t stir up superstition and mindlessness. We have enough of that already, he didn’t add, though he didn’t really need to.
I don’t normally read the print edition of L-Orizzont, because there’s a limit to just how much justification of Premier Muscat and all his works I can take, but on Tuesday, at the crack of dawn, the Monday edition was one of the few papers available to peruse while I was waiting to strap myself into a metal tube to go up the Smoke.
Not up in smoke, up the Smoke, look it up. Or ask Anglophile Premier Muscat.
And do you know, for the General Workers’ Union’s newspaper, one of the most important stories was about how Rosette Thake, the PN’s new general secretary, shock horror and stop the presses, didn’t attend the Sette Giugno commemoration.
She didn’t attend because she didn’t get an invitation, of course, and considering that the government didn’t see fit to invite Renzo Piano to the opening of Parliament’s new home, is it so surprising that no one was surprised that they didn’t send her one?
After all, this is a government run by a party whose MPs didn’t see it necessary to be in the building when an Open Day was held. They had better things to do than rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi, they’re Labour MPs, important to a man.
And to a woman.
And to a... but you get my point.
That, folks, was an important story for L-Orizzont. I didn’t expect them to run a headline about how the Speaker had underlined that the Sette Giugno rioters had been sent down for a year for firing into the air. He didn’t go on to make the obvious comparison with the way this bunch treat people who discharge their service pistols “into the air” (and hit the back of a fleeing car) but you’d have thought that L-Orizzont, being always so eager to become hot under the collar about everything, would have done it.
Headlined the story, I mean. Oh, I forget, it’s not GonziPN in government, everything goes.
For instance, I don’t think that L-Orizzont are going to be aiming at trying to get a Pulitzer for their reportage on the Gaffarena scandal. Not that the rest of the conventional media had been exactly falling over itself to dig up the dirt on Premier Joe’s dubious dalliances with the friends of friends of friends that so used to exercise Premier Muscat’s predecessor in high office within the Malta Labour Party, to be fair, but they’re starting to get their act together now.
But back to the scandal that L-Orizzont is not sweating about.
Premier Muscat has said he’s not guilty of anything untoward but this is a bit disingenuous because he is the prime among the happy band of brothers and the buck stops with him.
As opposed to our bucks flowing out from him, in the direction of Sai Mizzi’s husband’s wife, the Cafe’ Premier guys, Henley & Whosit, the Jordanian Degree Flogger, the seekers after rehearsal space, convicted criminals, rewarded turncoats and the Good Lord knows how many other undeserving causes.
People were surprised when Premier Muscat got elected. Not so much at the fact that he was, in retrospect that was pretty inevitable, especially with the perfect storm that Lawrence Gonzi was faced with, but at the scale of the win.
Now that all the pigeons are coming home to roost, with all those pipers lining up to be paid for playing Premier Joseph’s little ditty, it’s becoming clear exactly how the dear chap managed to persuade so many people to vote for him, even without the mass hysteria of “Charlie, Charlie”.
What’s also becoming clear is how much Premier Joe’s elevation to High Office has cost us, the poor sods who have to pay for it.
But getting back to GaffarenaGate (forgive me for my lapse into tabloidian, where everything’s rendered cutting edge journalism by tacking ‘gate’ onto the end of a word) how do Labour’s trolls and tame lil’elves manage to get themselves into defence mode when it is clear that Mark Gaffarena was being handsomely compensated for his entrepreneurial skills round about the time when the Cafe Premier debacle was seeing the light of day?
It’s no wonder that among intellectual circles, when you want to wish someone good fortune, albeit with your tongue in your cheek, you invite them to “Go get the Gaff in Arena”.
Spoken quickly, it has a certain ring to it, like that Zucchero song.
No food splendidness to end with this week, for assorted reasons. We were in London for a couple of days and, one evening, we stopped by this place where they put on opera.
There was this guy by the name of Joseph Calleja, in something called La Boheme and, for some reason, people were raving about him, so we had a bit of a listen.
Kidding aside, I sometimes wonder whether, as a country, we quite appreciate just how adored this guy is: on Wednesday night, we heard, and saw, how much, and why.
The audience was veritably spellbound and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
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