As I. M. Beck would have said, what a peculiar way to run a country. I wrote it in my blog, which you can see if you fork out a few euros to get behind the paywall (nothing is free in the real world, folks and it’s more fun than paying taxes) and I’ll write it here again, Gaia Cauchi did a great job, she looks like a really nice kid and I hope she has the brightest of bright futures in the entertainment biz.
But, please, did the Prime Minister have to be so transparently obvious in his slavering eagerness to latch onto her coat-tails and bask in her success? I used to poke fun at Joseph Muscat, when he was still wannabe-PM, because of the way he was fairly gasping for the chance to trip daintily up the steps to Castille and it seems that this component of his make-up hasn’t diminished with age and progress in the political field.
With sublime, if entirely unconscious, irony, on the very evening when his Junior Minister, Owen Bonnici, was blowing his nose in the Monty Pythonesque manner in the general direction of the Opposition because they were raising a bit of a stink about the way the government is proposing to dole out gongs with a largesse bordering on the overgenerous, along comes the Prime Minister to prove that he intends to do just that little thing.
By declaring that the Cabinet had, or will have had by the time it is required to, determined that Gaia and her team should be enrolled in the annals of Gieħ ir-Repubblika, the Prime Minister has created something of case for the very position the Nationalists were taking: that the nation’s honours should not be handed out like sweeties.
Leave aside the fact that it seems that Muscat is not entirely sure which honour is which (to be fair, I’m not au fait myself, but then it’s not my job to be) but concentrate on one question.
By decreeing that Cauchi and her team would get a gong, was the Prime Minister saying that they would get one gong, sliced up like a pizza, or are they to be given a job-lot, on the lines of a paper bag of warm golden pastizzi?
It was an interesting twist of fate, wasn’t it, that the Junior Eurovision (not, for the benefit of the bewildered, the actual one) was held in the Ukraine? Just at about the same time when the government of that country has started lurching towards Russia and away from the EU.
Will Gaia Cauchi and her team get one gong, sliced up like a pizza, or a job-lot, like a paper-bag of pastizzi?
Not being right up to speed on the internal politics of the Ukraine, I have no idea if the government was elected on a platform that included as one of its planks adopting an Alfred Sant style of dealing with the EU, that is to say making like a maiden faced with unwelcome advances.
Whether or not this was the case, quite a few Ukrainians seem to have taken it into their heads that they should protest publicly against their government’s eastward slide. The reaction of the people who run things in that former component of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or should that be Socialist Soviet, I can never remember) showed that these particular apples don’t seem to have fallen too far from the tree.
In other words, they were ever so slightly vigorous in putting down dissent, to the extent that it may have become incumbent on men of goodwill to let the Ukrainian President know that, here in the West, where we have this strange thing called democracy and freedom of expression, we don’t much take to people being dictatorial.
I’m not suggesting a protest march or anything like that, though if anyone wishes to hoist a few placards and march, hey, who am I to interfere? Our politicians, on the other hand, have a platform that might be put to good use, if they wanted to, and forgoing a State banquet or so might be such a bad idea.
This is not an original idea of mine, I hasten to add, because it’s being doing the rounds of Facebook that the Leader of the Opposition should boycott the Ukrainian President when he fetches up on our shores. Labour’s little weasels in response naturally spewed out Muscat’s mantra about what did you do when you were in government you horrid nasty Nats but, frankly, it’s wearing a bit thin, now, don’t you think?
Moving on, as one must, I really have to wonder what many arty-types are thinking just at the minute. Many of them were at the forefront of the “Maaa, how arrogant the Nationalists have become, it’s really time for a change, jaħasra” movement that contributed to Muscat’s stonking win at the polls last March and I would so love to be a fly on the wall of their salons when they sit around and contemplate their navels, preferably after reading that interview last Wednesday with the chairman of the V18 committee.
A true representative of current culture, our Jason Micallef, isn’t he? He’s reading a weighty tome, Sir Alex Ferguson’s biography, right up there with V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie in the intellectual firmament and – so crowded are the synapses with weighty thoughts – he can’t remember the name of the last theatrical representation he attended but it was in a village hall, he thinks in Mosta.
I suppose that you don’t have to have had a baby yourself in order to be a gynaecologist and designing Concorde wasn’t a prerequisite to flying it but surely someone who is the public face of the effort to make Valletta Europe’s cultural capital should have the nous to know that when you’re asked those sort of questions, unless you have good answers, you don’t respond.
And one shouldn’t really single out Micallef, I suppose, others in the Establishment have managed to cook up quite enough dogs’ dinners all on their own in the culture and the arts sphere. What else would you call the removal of Davinia Galea from her post if not a dinner that a peckish canine would hoover down with great gusto?
The parliamentary secretary responsible made it known that he had acted within the government’s rights at law because Galea’s definite time contract had come to an end. I have no idea if the letter of the law upholds his thesis but, quite clearly, he hasn’t a clue because this was not the point. Removing Galea was the menu for the dog’s supper, not doing it legally or not.
Dinner, while on the subject, was had at Garam Masala near Msida church on Tuesday and it was an excellent meal, from all aspects. When young Alex, one of the politest waiters I’ve come across in years, asks you “how hot, on a scale of one to seven?” consider your answer carefully: seven is pretty darn hot. A bottle of Cobra beer is a good extinguisher, though.
I owe Frank a clarification. His current claim to fame is not called Shisha, that was his previous place in Marsascala, it’s Sharma, in Mdina, about which I’ve had occasion to be complimentary before.
It’s nice when you revisit somewhere you haven’t been for some time and find that it’s still good, even if they’ve moved from Xlendi Road to the outskirts of Victoria, just as you start the main drag heading into town. Ping’s is run by Mrs Ping and serves Chinese and Indian, cooked by gentlemen who hail from those parts, and you can be pretty certain of getting a good meal.
Note: The article was written before it was announced that the Ukrainian President postponed his visit to Malta.
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www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20