I say… did you see Lawrence Gonzi on New Year’s Day; yes him, the first prime minister in world history to lose an exchange against an ATM? It was the kind of scene I like seeing on Hallmark cards: “If you think you’re having a bad day”… But instead of having the Scottex puppy poking out of a straw basket, you get the picture of Gonzi sweating under pain of humiliation as an ATM denies him cash on such a momentous day.
All throughout the week, the streets were alive with the sound of schadenfraude. Sometimes, the sad tedium of our wage-slaving lives can only be rendered lighter by watching the powerful cringe and humiliate themselves. So (slow handclap)… well done, Prime Minister.
The PN media this week was told off by Labour for having had the gall to knock up a news item on leader Alfred Sant, who incidentally happened to have been discharged from hospital just two days before.
It was nothing but a neat copy-and-paste job. Sant’s regular piece had been published in The Times in the week he was recovering from his operation, and in it, he raised doubts over the timing of the introduction of the euro and the migration to Mater Dei. The PN media machine instantly picked it up and reported it for their viewers to murmur in disapproval at the kind of resolute politician Sant is, who, despite being recovered at a state-of-the-art hospital, still finds time to shoot a missive at the government.
Cue the Labour political machine, and a press statement was issued lambasting the Nationalists for being so barefaced as to even mention the name of Alfred Sant, portraying the news item as an “attack”, nothing but “lies”, and in general, a dramatic show of umbrage at a mere triviality of a news item.
As it happens, taking offence at such a lazy piece of political propaganda may end up hurting Labour’s own political trump card. By suddenly crying foul at the merest of provocations, the MLP seem too eager to exploit their leader’s frailty. It sends the wrong message for both leader and party. Suffice it to say that it’s fair game: if Alfred Sant consented to having his piece published in The Times, then he can surely entertain some minor backlash on such a prosy point. But surely, Labour were just waiting for the Nationalists to bite.
Taking offence tends to be a common trait for a humourless, sexless chunk of the Maltese. Actually offending people – an implied product of the sacrosanct freedom of expression – can be a tricky chore to administer.
Take for example the onslaught visited upon the letters pages of The Times by angry correspondents who took umbrage at I.M.Beck, who last week tore into the performance by La Barokka on New Year’s Day. It’s a pity we cannot gratuitously offend, at least in newspapers, certain people whose vanity or ignorance supersedes their own sense of self-declared importance. From authoritative professionals whose own life-giving power seems to be eternally spouting from their mouths, to the idiotic TV celebs who believe in their God-given mission to make people’s lives miserable, nobody else deserves to be offended, made fun of, and pestered endlessly than these people who believe their own existence should be a just cause for merriment.
As I marvelled at the sort of humourless bivalves coming to the defence of La Barokka, lo and behold I receive an email – along with many members of the press, I presume – from La Barokka herself, who told me: “If you happen to be in the media; either a writer, entertainer, editor, speaker, politician, journalist… your duty is to be truthful. Your responsibility is to build, carefully express your talent to give colour, beauty, truth and greatness. There are people from the list I mentioned, that are NASTY.”
And then she warned us that “being nasty serves for nothing” (sic), and that we’ll be “crushed” under our own “dirty kingdom”. She on the other hand, “suffers” for her dreams: “since my aim is sincerely to do GOOD, nobody will stop me from serving the right way. And I am going to succeed.” (To hear more of this squeamish goodness, check out the welcome message in youtube.com/BarokkaUnlimited; you’ll be wanting to eat glass shards instead.)
In my view, there is nothing as life affirming than to elect myself to the axis of nasty media persons, just to offend the whiny life-lovers who seriously believe they are special just because they are capable of stringing two words together in front of a TV camera.
The point? Explicitness. Satire, criticism, news reporting… all go hand in hand. There are no set rules how to arrive at the truth or inform. When party trombones raise hell to inflict press silence on items worthy of news reporting, they will denigrate journalists as vulgar, liars, or… nasty people. It’s the pretext used to safeguard the sacred.
But there is no sacred without the profane. Without the profane, the sacred becomes integralism – it defends the hierarchies, the establishment, and the powerful. Because criticism and satire are not in themselves offensive: they only offend people’s prejudices.
