It is anecdotal at best but a short (you can’t take more than a little) listen to any vox pop, be it on radio, on telly or on Xarabank (that’s not telly, it’s something else entirely) will probably suffice to convince you that hardly anyone bothers to think before saying anything. Even if they do, it usually comes out with such a plethora of “hux” and “emm” that you might lose the will to live.
My favourite vacuum-filler is “opinjoni, hux?” (“it’s an opinion, innit?”), an expression that proves that the speaker is: a) unaware that, like a certain part of the anatomy, everyone has one, and b) the right to have an opinion does not include the right to have it respected, especially if it is manifestly stupid.
The failure to think, and when thought is given, the failure to rise above the level of wooly thinking, is not confined to those of us who militate in the ranks of the great unwashed. The great and the good, of ministerial rank and such, are susceptible to this too.
It came to pass that Minister Manwel Mallia became engaged in a Q&A session with Jason Azzopardi who, it was reported, “asked why the police failed to deny [a] story published on the Nationalist Party’s newspaper, In-Nazzjon, ‘upon which’... Dr Mallia said that he was not there to answer for the police...”
The Labour Party is not the be-all and end-all of this country and criticising the government is not high treason. Photo: Jason Borg
Excuse me, my dear fellow, but when you are on your hind legs in the House that is precisely what you are there to do, answer questions about the bits andbobs that fall within your ministerial portfolio. Or is that you’ve been given to understand that you will no longer be responsible for the cops, when your boss wields his prerogative?
Mallia’s Cabinet colleague, Chris Cardona, also let his mouth rush ahead of his thought processes while ruminating aloud on the reason why Arrow Pharmaceuticals had decided to downsize some 100 of its employees into unemployment. According to Cardona, this decision is the fault of the Nationalist government.
How, precisely, a government that was booted out almost a year ago can, by any stretch of the imagination, be held responsible for redundancies that are happening now is lost in the fog of Cardona’s zeal to toe his party line and blame everything bad on the Nationalists, even when it is absolutely ridiculous to do so.
Of course, by pointing the finger at the PN and repeating the mantra that they left the country in a mess and there’s no money, weep sob sob, the governmentis preparing the ground for the raft of other excuses that will come raining down on us every time something bad happens or, more accurately, every time one of Muscat’s pre-election promises comes home to roost.
When one says ‘roost’ one means perch on his head and do what pigeons do when they see my bike parked within bombing distance, if that isn’t too graphic an image to accompany your morning cereal.
What Muscat and his band of brothers don’t seem to realise is that this transparent ploy started wearing thin about two months into their government: by now it’s faded into total ‘insubstance’, which doesn’t seem to be a word but I’m leaving it in.
Moving a tiny step down the ladder, we have Parliamentary Secretary Owen Bonnici who has made a pretty good fist of things, up to now. Perhaps it was the looming presence of Minister Konrad Mizzi next to him during the press conference but Bonnici seems not to notice the failure to compute inherent in his mild threat to prosecute the people who don’t come forward and tell him all about their corrupting Enemalta officials to mess with their meter, when laid alongside his point about it being useless prosecuting the little guys, when it’s the big fishy spider they’re after, and “... anyway, the AG said we can’t prosecute, probably”.
Come on, make up your mind, either you can and will prosecute unless people come forward or you don’t intend to prosecute, you can’t have it both ways. Well, you can, if you belong to the school of thought that holds that you can say what you like depending on the circumstances and how you think it will sound to your audience.
The same school of thought assumes greater perceived validity, at least within the ranks of those whose critical faculties have been numbed by their fondness for all things Joseph, when the flag is chosen as a wrapper.
Ignoring the fact that it is the Labour Party in government that has turned us into a country that will drop its knickers at the flash of some cash, rendering us a laughing stock among thinking men everywhere, Labour’s apologists, not least its MEP hopefuls, have taken to berating those who have dared, horror of horrors, voice their disgust at Muscat’s little scheme.
Read my lips, guys: the Labour Party is not the be-all and end-all of this country and criticising the government is not high treason, however much the proto-Mintoffians among you wish it was. And carry on reading: I give not two hoots that you hoodwinked the European Commission into believing that your tawdry scheme is anything other than tawdry.
Quite apart from anything else, the damage has been done and we’re the ones who are going to have to live with it.
Failure to think isn’t confined to minister-ial and political ‘other ranks’ and a look at the comments boards will confirm the impression you’d have already gained from the vox pops. I’m not talking about Labour’s little weasels, they’re beyond redemption, really, and anyway, to an extent they wear their agenda on their sleeves, which gives them a degree of consistency, if not validity.
Nor am I referring to the revolting rabid racists who pollute the bottom end of any story where immigration is mentioned, even if only peripherally. These people - who look upon themselves as civilised defenders of Christianity and righteousness, God help us - managed to equate the Spanish police’s barbarism in Morocco with some warped perception of the Crusades and the Great Siege, though don’t ask me how they managed to weave these together. They’re also way beyond redemption.
Consider, though, stories without political or racist overtones.
The best recent example of failure to think things through came in the wake of the story about how some old bloke was prosecuted for killing his own dog.
From what I could make out, the prosecution seems to have been concerned with the manner in which a firearm was used, though I wouldn’t exclude some officious rozzer taking it upon himself to prosecute someone for killing his own dog, humanely and without breaking any sanitary or other regulations, simply because some people think it’s not nice to kill cute and cuddly pooches.
Don’t get me wrong, I go ‘aaaw’ as much as the next man at the sight of an adorable mutt or fluffy moggy but these creatures simply do not have the same rights under the law as human beings, for all that many people would like this to be the case. If so, they can agitate for a change in the law, no problem (do it close to an election and Muscat will promise you the death penalty for kicking the cat) but then we’ll have to make eating any form of formerly-living flesh illegal.
Nor do I advocate wanton cruelty or anything of the sort, although when the comments start coming in, that is precisely what I will be smeared with.
All I’m saying is, think things through before shooting your mouth off, why don’t you?
imbocca@gmail.com
www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20