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Junior News

I really should stop doing this. It’s becoming a bit too much like taking candy from babies and I’m almost starting to feel guilty.

Assiduous students of the language, within the ranks of whom Lil’Elves don’t militate, will have noticed that I employed the word “almost” in qualifying the guilt I feel and the extent thereof. Since I’m only almost starting to feel guilty, I’m not yet feeling it to any significant extent, so I won’t stop, just yet.

What it is that I’m on about, incidentally, is the way I dangle tasty morsels in front of the gaping mouths of the Lil’Elves, the vast majority of whom zoom up for all the world like the enormous gobies that they are. If they weren’t gobies, they wouldn’t stick up for things like Mintoff and if they weren’t gobies, they wouldn’t fall for my jibes, every time.

Just so you’ll know, incidentally, a goby is a mazzun, the Maltese name for a fish that is reputed to be dead easy to hook. A bit like piscine versions of the renowned Pavlovian mutt, if you see what I mean, it rises to the bait with the alacrity of, well, a Lil’Elf defending the indefensible.

I’m starting to behave, I sometimes think, like a cheap comic, who knows precisely which buttons to push in order to get an easy laugh. You know what I mean: if I want to get people writing in, I make a silly crack about the hysterically funny juxtaposition of hunting and conservation, guaranteed to get the hunting fraternity up in arms, telling me that I’m a fool and a sartorially challenged one at that.

Some real fun can be had when I lift up the stone to expose the slimy little racists that squirm underneath. Here it’s virtually written in stone that I’ll get insulting emails and be told that I’m sticking up for criminals and all manner of guff, none of which obscures the basic tenet of my position: the fact that the country has a problem which the EU is doing precious little (from what we can see) to help solve does not absolve us from the basic obligations of common decency.

This sentiment, of course, offends all the WASCS (white Anglo-Saxon Catholics) who ignore the fact that they’re hardly white (not that this makes a difference) and certainly not Catholics.

Other gobies that rise to the bait are the assorted tree-huggers and muesli-munchers who seem to delight in objecting to everything all the time. You know the ones I mean, the ones who seem to have more time on their hands than is sensible. People with limited time prioritise and raise hell when it’s really necessary. We need a national conscience when it comes to preventing the rape of our cultural heritage, don’t get me wrong, but a bit of stopping to smell the roses might be called for sometimes.

While on the subject of NIMBYism, which very often gets itself intertwined into this subject, there’s a petition going the rounds at the moment not a million miles from where I live about some antenna or something that is being erected on some building or other. One of the reasons for the objections, apparently, is aesthetic, which is where MEPA and the owner of the site should be locking horns, without the need for petitions, while another seems to be based on the fact that the people who want this antenna put up haven’t proved that it’s not dangerous to human health.

I find this latter argument NIMBYistic in the extreme.

Why haven’t the people campaigning under this flag been campaigning against antennas all over the place, instead of only coming out of the woodwork now that it’s in their neighbourhood? And that’s quite apart from the fact that the scientific evidence is that there is no danger to health. True, you can’t prove an absolute negative, as any scientist worth his or her salt knows, so it’s easy for this particular brand of nay-sayer to make the specious argument, but the fact is, if this particular antenna is harmful to our health, every other one is, so the argument should be “let’s ban all antennas”.

Which is utter tosh and why, even if I’m asked, I won’t be signing.

Getting back to the school of gobies with which I’ve been having a bit of fun all summer, a whole army of them has swum into view. It seems it’s time to start with the weird plastic foetuses again, as the campaign to entrench the unborn child’s right to life in the Constitution is re-starting.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I am not in favour of abortion but these people are going to drive me that way at this rate. Can’t they get the message once and for all? Anti-abortion laws are fine the way they are, there’s no need to mess around with the Constitution, especially with what might very well turn out to be quite woolly thinking.

Time for another poke at another sacred idol: the Lil’Elves have been oh-so-pleased with themselves since Joe Muscat took over from Alfred Sant. You’d think that his triumphal entry into the Glass House up Mile End way had been akin to being carried shoulder high into Castille, instead of being a completely internal event for the Labour Party.

It will become a national event when he takes on the role of Leader of the Opposition, but in the meantime, he’s of interest as LoP in waiting, as it were, but for all intents and purposes, he’s a bit of a lame duck. He’s been making a lot of noise, as behoves someone who will be Constitutionally bound to make it, but has it been a bit like a faulty air-conditioner, one has to ask one’s self? Noise producing nothing of great value, I mean?

For instance, he’s kick-started, so his fans tell us, the debate on whether we should have divorce in Malta. The thing is, the mere fact that he’s said that there has to be a debate is evidence of failure to appreciate that there’s no real reason for a debate to be had: divorce should have been introduced long ago and it’s only slavish adherence to the antiquated notion that organised religion is allowed to have a say in secular policies that makes a “debate” apparently necessary.

The Nationalist Party is as guilty of kow-towing to the Church Organised as the MLP, I make no bones about saying, and both of them do this because they’re soiling their pants at the thought that votes might be lost, horror of horrors.

So there you have it: Mintoffians, hunters, racists, nimbyists, tree-huggers, Right-to-Lifers, Labourites, the Curia and the Nationalists, all offended in less than 1200 words. You must admit, I’m good. Go on, admit it, you know you want to.