Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the best one of us all? That special magic mirror of Snow White’s evil stepmother would have come rather handy earlier this week at a joint press conference at Castille between a Global Winner and a Local Winner.
“We’re excellent friends ho ho ho,” both said to the audience, patting each other and engaging in man-hugs. Then they proceeded to elbow each other off the way, playing Who’s Best. “You lost, I won,” said one. “I won here, and you won there,” said the other. “You are a local winner; I am a global winner,” retorted the first, changing topic quickly, so, like Batman, he had the last word and denied the Local Winner the possibility of a last punch.
“Are these for real?” texted a friend of mine, “or am I watching House of Cards?” I texted back: Lord spare us for everyone is getting the beating-on-the-chest Trumpitis tick.
A while ago, a kind reader wrote to me on behalf of her 19 friends suggesting that I avoid writing about the upcoming President of America because “who cares about Donald Trump… to each his own… worry with what’s going on here, not in America.”
Hmm. I am not so sure: this week Trump is going to become the President of the most influential western country in the world (shush, don’t worry Mr Juncker, you’re still the most global of them all) and his manner of speaking, his approach, his testing the limits of democracy, is already trickling down and influencing the rest of us.
What’s stopping us from planting windmills off the coast of Malta? Maybe bulky windmills are not as sexy as a chunky floating storage unit fuel tanker
This week marked the end of the Obama era. Whatever Barack Obama’s political failures – and sadly there were many – I will always consider him one of the greatest contemporary orators and motivator of hope. I think he showed us that despite its flaws, democracy alone can create solidarity and such was the gist of his emotional parting speech: “The idea that for all our outward differences, we… rise or fall as one.”
In the end it’s not the individual egos that wins, it is the collective souls. If only the mirror on the wall would say that each time it’s summoned.
■ Meanwhile, in another cloud, the Knights of Malta, with whom we are interminably linked, are having a tiff with Pope Francis. It’s about condoms. The Knights of Malta with their 13,500 members and 100,000 staff and volunteers provide healthcare in hospitals around the world, and go to war zones and natural disasters. One of their projects, coordinated by their Grand Chancellor Albrecht von Boeselager, was the distribution of condoms in facilities run by the order in the developing world, such as Myanmar.
It seems that ultra-conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, the Vatican’s envoy to the Knights, was terribly displeased by this condom business and engineered the sacking of the Chancellor without the blessing of Pope Francis.
Cardinal Burke is one of Francis’ top critics, a hardliner on enforcing church teaching on sexual morals. Which means that he is the kind of chap who does not want divorced people to receive Holy Communion and he thinks Catholics ought to have 10 kids if need be rather than use condoms.
Pope Francis, who has always appealed for a more merciful and pragmatic approach, has set up a Vatican investigation commission to look into this, but the Knights are refusing to cooperate.
The controversy has been simmering for weeks, but as I write, it has escalated. The fight is now not just as a battle over the investigation, but a sign of opposition to Francis’s papacy because he is viewed as too progressive on issues involving social doctrine. Clearly, Cardinal Burke needs to get a life and the Knights of Malta ought to restart their project immediately and stop blocking the way for Pope Francis’ investigation. Let’s hope common sense wins this battle.
■ One of the things that comes with living on an island is the wind. Subconsciously our lives revolve around the wind: “Kemm hu riħ illum”; “Il-marelli x’jonfoħ”; “Kien se jtajjarni”; “Anzi waqaf”.
Therefore, my perennial question is: with so much wind all year round, why is it that we don’t make use of it? The Dutch have really honed into it. All their electric trains are now 100 per cent powered by wind energy from wind farms across the country and off the coast of the Netherlands. One windmill running for an hour can power a train for nearly 200 km. Their national railway company operates about 5,500 train trips a day and has announced that its 600,000 passengers daily are “the first in the world” to travel thanks to wind energy.
What’s stopping us from planting windmills off the coast of Malta? Ah, wait, maybe bulky windmills are not as sexy as say, a chunky floating storage unit fuel tanker.
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Twitter: @KrisChetcuti