Shakespeare and Mozart are back!

As our black-clad Prime Minister, his unbending white collar painfully stopping body blood-flow at neck level and separating his "Frankenstein" face from his funereal wear, walked up the aisle to his seat in the House last November an outburst of for-long-expired Nationalist audacity triggered the necessary energy wherefrom a Mozart's unfinished requiem was sung.

In the same fashion that the Christmas altar boy delivered his sermon on Christmas Eve, the apprenticed PM communicated the budget for 2005. The audience, albeit numerous, with preconceived ideas and pat answer all up its sleeve, half-defended, half-objected to the ceremony, as the story goes, while the PM, eyes glued to the numbers on the paper in front of him - all different from each other for audience's confusion's sake - went through the reading levelling his voice as best as he could.

The front-liner made it a point to pay more attention to pronunciation rather than content - having to go through the recital fully ignoring any unwarranted sounds coming from across the court. After all, the half-baked announcement of the financial affairs of the country, just within two months, has already been proved a half-truth or at least half-left-unsaid.

Heading a government which has been at the end of one's rope for quite some time already is no easy task. Neither does having to face a rip-snorting line of workers' unions help. A sitting pretty opposition waiting with a vindictive half-smile on its face in a let George do it attitude (or maybe I'd rather say "let Tony do it" attitude) proves even more that indifference is much worse than a negative reaction. Trying to forget that the last copies of the bestseller A Hundred Ways Of Justifying Decisions Made By The Government You Voted For are running out of stock due to a long queue of unwavering hardcore life-long Nationalist enthusiasts trying to prove to themselves (and to the world) that their government is not the direct cause of the country's situation is but a big feat!

The country's economy has become a Joe job (or rather a no man's land) for all concerned (or that should be concerned). And poor Lawrence has to handle a chore nobody else wants to do.

Four former Prime Ministers that handed the ball down to him are certainly not being of help. Their passivity all but underlines the hardships for decisions to be made. Dom Mintoff snores in his mansion opposite a power station. Eddie Fenech Adami rests in some 18th century castle. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici still preaches independence and Alfred Sant looks piercingly from across the room to assist personally to the Shakespearian tragedy as a publicly-known theatre-creator and lover. These are but a few of the prescribed methods of torture.

All is but a process to go through. An act and a difficult one at that. It does take a lawyer to live up to all this. Nationalist delegates did make their right calculations last year. We all have to struggle through. News bulletins have become too predictable these last few days. Industrial action 1, industrial action 2, industrial action 3. Opposition symbolic gesture 1, opposition symbolic gesture 2.

Suddenly all flowers have become roses. No good news is unconditional. Benefits seem to be inclined towards minorities while taxes (another word for "easy money-collecting sources") tend to come down hard on majorities.

It would take much more than an Einstein to memorise all the bad news. Who would dare to remember Lm1.75c, 17 per cent, 5c on transport and tobacco, three per cent on mobile telephony, 34c4 a litre, which means a 17c5 increase...! At least numbers 1 and 7 feature a few times! Wonder why! One must of course keep in mind the fact that a troubled mind of a bread-winning husband has less space for details. All it can grasp are vanishing cents.

A monster bureaucracy purposely formulated to be confusing is all it takes to blur the picture. Citizens do know they are worse off. The task is to know how much worse off you are. This is quite difficult though, the vision being impaired by over-fanaticism and mental restrictions with which nature freely endows a few.

The government's role is to sell and justify its stand as much as it can, the least benefit being an exercise in distractive techniques. The electorate has but to act the sitting duck, swallow and chew, gulp and guzzle the indigestive, stale stuff that works in the same chemical ways as the condemnable strong-tasting soup that hid the poison that changed Viktor Yushchenko's facial features overnight and played around with his life making him a happy man just to be alive.

Only one thing makes us all still able to smile; what I call the cloak of ignorance and non-realisation and the innate instinctive urge towards oblivion and negation of the truth!