Boxing Day blues

As a sporadic bridge player of long-standing I am fully aware of the fact that there is nothing worse than making an incorrect bid and then trying to justify it. The best thing to do under the circumstances is to cut your losses by refusing to bid further and reach an incorrect low contract rather than mislead your partner by being inventive in the hope that you may strike gold; it never happens. One simply achieves disaster.

The invasion of Iraq was an incorrect bid made by the Bush and Blair partnership, the dire consequences of which we are now all feeling. The initial bid was not even an incorrect one but was the worst type of psychic bid any bridge player could make and was based on pure invention spurred on by sheer greed.

We have now reached yet another stage in the game wherein Saddam Hussein, formerly the world's bogeyman, is claiming to have been tortured by his American captors. The funny thing is that he actually looks much healthier and far more dignified than he did when he lived in the lap of luxury. There are no apparent signs on him that he has undergone any sort of torture at all apart from the fact that he looks slimmer which goes a long way in making him more attractive as he seems to have lost his former look of satiated depravity.

Every time the trial resumes he ends it by hurling diatribes against America and its Allies and the Iraqi collaborators. While the rest of us in the west may not be taken in by all the tomfoolery, meditation, Koran-reading and archaic rhetoric there are many in the near east for whom Saddam Hussein is a martyr. By simply mentioning the mythical weapons of mass destruction, the entire edifice that the western allies are trying to force on the region falls like a house of cards. There is no way that this man can ever be brought to book for the horrendous crimes against humanity that he had perpetrated. Should the Iraqi court sentence him to death, which is what seems to be the object of the exercise, they will, mark my words, unleash a whirlwind that will engulf and destroy us all. This is why Saddam Hussein should be in The Hague along with the rest of the world's criminal ex-leaders, where he can disappear in the trashcans of history as if he never was.

It is no easy matter to serve proper justice on a former political leader in the modern world. Just look at Pinochet who, because of his advanced age and state of health, has been successfully dodging justice for so many years that it has become a joke. Explain that to the families of the thousands of desparecidos!

What about the ex-Yugoslavs? The world has forgotten about them as they wallow happily in gilded cages in The Hague. It is only the families and the loved ones of the thousands of victims of ethnic-cleansing that could now give a damn either way. It is because the world is so full of woe, both private and institutionalised, that there is a limit to how long world attention can be held. After so many years have passed and the original atrocities have become old hat, one finds that life is indeed too short to peel mushrooms and the struggle to survive can ill-afford sentiment that has long fallen by the wayside and faded in common memory.

Speaking of old hats, I was astonished, to say the least, if not bemused by Pope Benedict's latest choice of headgear. The red bonnet trimmed with white fur that Pontiffs wore before Vatican II made Papa Ratzi look like a beardless Father Christmas. While I could understand the Pope's predilection for Prada footwear and Gucci eyewear, which, like his fondness for cats and Mozart, rather endeared him to me, I felt that the red bonnet, which like the Sedia Gestatoria, The Black Nobility and the Triple Tiara, had disappeared in the enlightened papacy of Paul VI, was a symbol that the Church will now be back-pedalling furiously and consequently seriously challenge its universal appeal. It will soon be more difficult to be a good Catholic than being a rich man and going to Heaven!

It is sad that we live in a world wherein the greatest moral power in existence seems indifferent to the suffering and injustice and whose greatest achievement to date is to wage a bigoted crusade to rid the world of homosexuals, which out of all groups and types that make up the world, are by and large the most harmless, the most peace-loving, the most cultured and the most in synch with all the bonnet wearing and incense waving that goes on within the Church's own ranks.

Instead of addressing problems like lack of vocations, social injustice and the rule of terror that gathers momentum each day, some Church leaders have regressed into dotage and are merely attacking the most defenceless in a totally unjust and cynical way because of another unrelated pretext, paedophilia, just as Messrs Bush and Blair decided to attack Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction. It must be fashionable.

It was said of the previous Pope that while he managed to get young people into the squares he failed to get them into church. Papa Ratzi has not even managed to fill squares yet, let alone the churches. If the best he can do is pretend to be Santa Claus at a time when he should be rallying and exhorting world leaders towards a lasting peace I tremble for us all.

By the time this article appears, we will all know how generous and selfless we Maltese are. The L-Istrina marathon will be yesterday's news. We will also know who has won a new household appliance or a PlayStation or will be going out to dinner for free as it logically attracts a huge amount of advertising by way of sponsorship and, though nobody likes to admit it, there is a substantial amount of gambling that goes on throughout the day. I believe that the end does justify the means and those slots showing the less fortunate are necessary to shake us out of our apathy.

Many of us go through life without knowing anything about deprivation, mental and physical illness, drug addiction, child abuse and a host of other social ills that infest us just because we are human beings and fall under Adam's curse.

I am not aware as yet of whom the beneficiaries of L-Istrina will be but I do sincerely hope that at least three would be Dar tal-Providenza, Razzett tal-Hbiberija and the victims of the Pakistani/Kashmiri earthquake. One's heart goes out to the latter in a very particular way as precisely a year before on Boxing Day the news was just starting to trickle in that a tsunami had hit Thailand and Indonesia. When the enormity of it had hit us along with the rest of a stunned world, Malta held a special edition of L-Istrina with spectacular results.

What happened in 2005 was that so many terrible things and natural disasters happened that we seemed to have hardened our hearts and that outpouring of generosity simply did not happen. Taken up as we are in defending our own backyard from what has been likened to an invasion of illegal immigrants and making a mountain out of a molehill about what is a perfectly natural phenomenon, we forget how vulnerable we are ourselves and how much we owe for the gift of life itself.

kzt@onvol.net