I.M. Beck - quote unquote

I've not got much time for Mr Alfred Mifsud's style of writing, perhaps because he comes over a bit know-it-all like (yeah, OK, maybe I'm jealous) but from what I hear, he's got a bit of a brain and can run a business or two.

So when someone like that comes out and says that what Doctor Alfred Sant had done with his ludicrous CET experiment was not something that this country needs to repeat, making it a condition of his contesting the next elections in Labour's camp that guarantees are given in this sense, it behoves said Labour camp to sit up and take notice.

In less convoluted parlance, you guys over there listening to (Emanwel) Cuschieri, one of the brainier folk on your side of the fence, has just told your esteemed leader where to get off. Get it?

True to form, Doctor Alfred Sant came out of his corner with all guns blazing, laying it on the line that no one (except presumably him) is indispensable and that no one, not even Mr Mifsud, has the right to establish preconditions on his candidature. This prompted one Alfred to proclaim his undying fealty to the other, over which we shall draw the discreet veil of no comment.

Of course, Doctor Alfred Sant just had to go and shoot himself in the foot, a feat he achieves with such regularity that even a centipede might start to worry about where it was going to hang its socks. He wouldn't be Doctor Alfred Sant if he didn't, now would he? The dear fellow alleged, quite spuriously it now turns out, that the last person to have tried to impose a condition before accepting to contest for Labour was Dr George Bonello Du Puis, who immediately wrote in to say that Doctor Alfred Sant was talking out of the back of his neck. Were it not for the fact the Dr Bonello Du Puis is the perfect gentleman, he would have been slightly more graphic as to what Doctor Alfred Sant should do with his utterance of Parliamentary inexactitude.

But, just to be getting back to the main issue, as it were, how many people are going to have to tell the MLP, bless it, that its leader, Doctor Alfred Sant, was wrong about VAT? Mr Lino Spiteri (another know-it-all, though I'm sure he won't mind my saying it), after hearing about the Botswana Idea in a restaurant, stuck it out for a few months and bailed out. Countless other economists and ideas-men have told Doctor Alfred Sant that his tax policies were a crock that was not of gold.

Of course, the problem with admitting you were wrong, completely, utterly and all the way down to the wire, is that people start getting this sinking feeling that you are wrong about everything else, which is hardly the right sort of image to be sending out when you're trying to persuade the populace at large that you should be entrusted with the passwords to the national computer.

Freedom, my man

There, thanks to the political ineptitude of Doctor Alfred Sant and his Minister without Portfolio, Mr Joe Mizzi, go another few grand out of my taxes and yours, payable to the Nationalist Party because it had its freedom of expression, its freedom to enjoy its property and its freedom to be free in a democratic country, trampled on by the government, headed up by the afore-mentioned Dynamic Duo.

Just so you can remember what this was all about, when the political parties were given the right to have television, the MLP had jumped at the chance and - throwing fiscal caution to the winds - set up shop in the telly department.

They had got themselves space on the Gharghur Tower and started beaming, both from ear to ear and from coast to coast, which they had every right to do, and bully for them. Some time down the line, the dastardly Nationalists had cottoned to the fact that, notwithstanding the serious inroads making moving pictures come alive in your sitting-room makes into your bank account, it was high time that they got into the act.

Now, the only place in Malta, just about, from where you can do this efficiently is - surprise, surprise - the Gharghur Tower, which is why they put it there in the first place. Off trotted the Nasty Nats to fix their bits and bobs to said tower, only to be told where they could get off, which was right there, pronto, the tower was full and they could stick their panels somewhere else.

The MLP, which was in government at the time, squealed a bit to emphasise the point, one recalls, and their squealing, one must be forgiven for concluding, hit home, because the government (the MLP government) stamped its rather heavily-shod foot and sent the boys in blue (their own boys in blue, I mean, the cops) off into the night to enforce the law, jack-booting the horrible Nationalists out into the cold, preventing them, as a sort of side-bonus, as it were, from transmitting the death-throes of the MLP government, which death-throes were about to commence in full Technicolor.

I recall, not being quite a callow youth, that when the fiendish Nationalists had set up a rather modern (for its time) information system on their club in Valletta, to try and counteract the vile propaganda pouring out of the gullet of Xandir Malta, Mintoff's less than gentle regime had come down on the idea with the good grace and humour that characterised that government.

What is so different about Doctor Alfred Sant and Mr Joe Mizzi, so many years later? Not a heck of a lot, I have to say.

Excuse me

I quote, lifting straight and shamelessly from http:// w(ho)w(hich)w(here).maltastar.com, wherein one James Catania wrote:

"How can we as a society think of becoming part of something as big as the EU when our country can barley stand on its own two feet. I think you all agree that there is plenty of hard work to be done in our country that disapproves of the fact that we invest all our sacrifice and finance to please others while our economy dissolves away."

I ask, without the slightest illusion that I am going to get an answer that eschews the temptation to get personal and threaten me with penury, starvation and unemployment (in KullHadd, that is) what the production of "barley" has to do with our being able to stand on our own two feet?

I ask, again without illusions, what the second part of the paragraph I lifted means. What is supposed to be disapproving of what and why? Why should anything dissolve away, considering that dissolution is a process that describes itself and needs no direction towards which to dissolve?

The young gentleman who put fingers to keyboard to tap out the above gem is not to be blamed for his apparent confusion, of course. He was, as is the duty of all good party hacks, trying to reconcile Doctor Alfred Sant's dolce far niente grey matter expectoration with Doctor Alfred Sant's own - quite clearly contrary - view that Malta's interests will be best be served by negotiating a significantly different deal with the EU than the present lot are doing.

It's hardly surprising that this Herculean task was beyond young Catania, whose control over his words seems to have deserted him.

Calm down, Joe

Mr Joe Mifsud, whose writing is generally more in control, at least insofar as logic is concerned, seems to have had a bit of a lapse into mild paranoia of late.

According to this gentleman, the massed ranks of concerted columnists have been ganging up to dump all manner of effluence on him, presumably having their strings jerked in unison from Pietà or Castille or wherever it is that the Puppet-Master in Chief hangs out. In a piece about an interview that Ms Micallef Leyson, one of the puppets, was supposed to have done and eventually did, the Mifsud person managed to bring in strands of assumed anti-Labour prejudice and anti-Mifsud prejudice that were so slickly woven that they rivalled the Bayeux Tapestries.

The truth is that I don't have my chain jerked by anyone, even if Mr Mifsud thinks so, and I haven't, actually, dumped on him for some time now, so why he's feeling so got-at is beyond me. And about that interview: I am informed that it was the original interviewer who did the interview after all, so what it was that Mifsud got all scooped up about is a bit lost in the mists of his own illusion that he actually had a scoop.

The doctor again

In his weekly effort at convincing the English-reading world that he has cogent arguments to put across and that he has a viable alternative to this lot's ideas, Doctor Alfred Sant wrote that:

"However, it remains a mystery to [him] how anybody can justify the decision to give up, just like that, rights over Maltese waters."

I know that Doctor Alfred Sant's range of intellectual expertise does not extend to international law (well, I don't think it does, but then I didn't think he was Voltaire, either, so I might be wrong) so I can't really blame him, but I have to ask, succinctly, what rights, pray?

As things stand, Malta has rights, as does every other country, that extend out to sea. Having had my brain pummelled more years ago than is good for me as to what international law says about how many miles out a country is allowed to say "this is mine", I won't presume to tell you many miles that is, but I do know one thing for sure.

The right to say "this is mine" is only as strong as the navy that enforces it. Need I say more?

According to Doctor Alfred Sant, one has to assume, the security of being in a rather large unity that has agreed on the question of how far is far is not preferable to being an over-crowded little rock in the White Sea, prone to having its maritime exclusion zone, or whatever other buzz-word they use nowadays, de-excluded at the whim of some fundamentalist loony in a towel or wrapped in a Stars and Stripes.

What is this, some more grey matter spewing out or what?

Munch, munch

The weekend saw us, for reasons not unconnected with the fact that it is fun to park without hassles, sojourning in St Julian's and environs for sustenance.

Friday night took us to the Brazilian joint in Portomaso, where you get fed chunks of meat, delivered off the skewer by servitors wielding rather intimidating looking knives.

You are allowed to eat as much as you like of whatever you like and generally value for money is had. If I had to carp, which I will, some of the meat was a bit tepid by the time it came to our table, and some was a touch chewy, but overall, a good thing.

Much the same can be said of the café next door, where snacks of very good quality are dished up, if a touch slowly (the staff are rushed off their feet and the bottleneck seems to be in the kitchen). Might I humbly suggest that pies are not made to be micro-waved, they should be warmed in an oven, where the baking carries on?

Just a suggestion.

Of course, if it's real food, without nuking, that you want, you can always do worse than trip up the stairs to Peppino's.

Getting to these oases is always an adventure, since some genius re-did those traffic lights next to Wembley Garage. Sitting waiting for the red to go green, you have a good chance of shooting off before the appointed second, because across the road, there is a green light, quite clearly telling you that you can move on towards Pembroke and points North.

And while on the subject of lights, could I suggest that someone takes a screwdriver to the ones near the Taormina Kiosk? Set them to change with a minimum wait of less than three nano-seconds, so cars can flow a bit. And fix the problem of the right turn up Old College Street, while you're about it.

And a word of thanks, in conclusion, to the gentleman who e-mailed me those rather poignant snaps of signs detected in the Maltese countryside. They deserve reproduction not description, because I don't have the thousand words each that they need. Suffice it to say that the character of the country shines through.

I will bounce them on to anyone who e-mails a request over the weekend.