PITY THEM

Much as I am loath to interrupt the oodles of fun that the people commenting on the preceding blog to this seem to be having, it’s time to put up some more irritating thoughts, so the easily-riled (the ones who have had a sense of humour by-pass amongst them) can have a new target.

A modern phenomenon is the way www2 has made access to the media so much wider. Geeks will forgive me if I’ve misunderstood the concept of www2, which I am taking to be the more interactive Internet – the evolution of the ‘net into a forum for personal input from everyone and his sister, be it picture publishing, “face-space” networking, music and video “sharing” (aka piracy) and blogging and commenting. The latter two (blogging and commenting) have almost merged, as blogs with a wide and/or active readership (ahem...) seem to take on a life of their own after the author has released his or her thoughts, in a more or less structured way, into the virtual ether.

In the old days, as I’ve had occasion to remark, you wrote your column, delivered it to the editor (Beck used to be hand-delivered, then faxed and now emailed) then waited a couple of days to see it in print. A week or so later, if you’d poked someone in the metaphorical eye, there’d be a letter to moan at you.

Now, you bash it out, press the button and, depending on the extent to which editorial control is exercised, up into public view it leaps. It takes some self-discipline to edit and make sure you’re saying what you want to say, so quick is the process. My few words of solidarity with Dr Karl Chircop, for instance, were slightly misunderstood at first, and on re-reading I can see why.

The speed with which the original piece is produced is as nothing, though, compared with the speed with which reactions are put into circulation. Again, the only real constraint is the extent of editorial control – taking time to consider the response certainly hasn’t caused any delay between reading and commenting.

In fact, while a thinking process of sorts clearly takes place, it certainly can’t be said that due consideration is given before the send button is pressed. For many, many of whom are classifiable as Lil’Elves (what a conveniently irritating word) the important thing is to scream and shout at Beck or ABC (not that there’s really any difference) If it’s possible to inject an element of smugness and personal insult, to say nothing of political invective, at the same time, then so much the better. For the life of me, I can’t see what the Lil’Elves have about which to be so smug, given that the MLP, their political grouping of fervent choice, has been a serial election-loser for about twenty years, but to read some of the comments, you’d think they’re lords and masters of all they survey, entitled to pronounce imperiously about anything and everything.

When you also take into account that the next General Elections are five years away and they’re going to have to face the electoral music with those two Deputy-Leaders and Jason Micallef “helping” Joe Muscat and his poor CEO, you have to wonder whether they’re whistling in the dark even at this early stage in the game.

If you want evidence of my many detractors’ eagerness to heap effluence on me, look at the reaction to a couple of comments (comments, mark you, not a whole column or blog) I had made on the war of words going on between the two foundations debating the works being proposed for St John’s. My only point was that instead of a concerted howl of “NO NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO” going up, it might have been more constructive to engage in proper technical debate, with all the facts and expert opinions coming into the mix. The reaction to this point, which I made in my usual style (which perhaps those less familiar with puerile English public school humour might not readily grasp) was amazing: I was accused of advocating the proposals and acting arrogantly in trying to stifle public opinion.

To the latter part of the charge, if push comes to shove, I’ll put my hand on my heart and plead guilty, but only in the sense that I am intolerant of people who think they know it all when, clearly, they have no basis on which to ground this self-image, and I don’t care who knows it. To the charge that I’m advocating the proposals, however, Not Guilty, Your Honour, I don’t even know what’s in them.

Moving on, www2 allows the self-delusional to give vent to their peculiar notions like never before. Take, for instance, the reaction to my blog last week about the way an award for the defence of human rights to Dom Mintoff can only really be taken as a piece of dark, black humour. Out of the woodwork popped all manner of elves, showing their true colours with a vengeance.

We had a veritable panoply of people telling us that Mintoff in fact deserves to be elevated to the saint-hood, since it was apparently he who, out of his own pocket, fed, clothed and otherwise ministered to the needs of the down-trodden. Never mind that it was public money that provided this much-needed succour and that many of the measures were going to happen anyway, our socio-economic history being what it was, nope, Mintoff did it all, super-hero that he was. You’d think he wore his underpants outside his trousers and flew faster than a speeding bullet.

To read these people, many of whom have cogent personal reasons to be grateful to Mintoff’s manner of running things (work that one out for yourself) you’d think that Malta was governed in a benignly democratic fashion, with rights and benefits being showered liberally onto the heads of all citizens, irrespective of their political colour, the only blot on the landscape being the scurrilous criminals in the Nationalist Party.

Those of us who lived those times, on the other hand, know the truth.

Step out of line to photograph the police during a demonstration and you were beaten, physically and hospitalised. Fail to toe the line, say as a Judge of the Constitutional Court, and you were brutally cowed into submission, with your court suspended. Take industrial action not ordered by the General Workers’ Union and you could forget about promotion or advancement, that is if you had a job at all at the end of it. Have a political opinion different to that of the regime and you might as well be a non-person, while the incompetent, the inept and the downright corrupt trample over you in their rush to stick their noses in the troughs and pick out the plums.

Am I exaggerating? If so, I’m sure the people who have been sticking up for Mintoff over the last couple of weeks will continue to churn out the party line, ignoring the clear and present danger that the silent majority will start to understand why many of them, the older Lil’Elves, feel obliged to give the old devil his due. Dr Faustus must have had the same constraints in his latter years.

Reading back over the above, I can see that I’ve achieved quite a bit, giving virtually every single one of the people who get off on slagging me off something with which to be getting their rocks off. I’ll close, though, by publicising a certain Vince Cachia, who responded to the news that Air Malta was to start allowing guide-dogs to travel with their owners with such cynicism and egoism that he got me and Mr Franco Farrugia agreeing with each other, which is quite a feat.

Mr Cachia wrote, in the course of demonstrating that humanity is not necessarily an attribute that all humans possess, that “civilised people do not travel with animals”. Many people found his attitude reprehensible and my reaction was to let this oaf know that civilized people give due consideration to the needs of those around them, a concept that is clearly alien to people like him.

I went to point out that I'm sure that if he happened to be sitting next to someone with a guide dog and he objected, an upgrade would be provided. The upgrade, of course, would be in favour of the person with the dog, both of whom would object to sitting next to Mr Cachia but be too civilized to say so.