Sunday, 11th October 2009
PECULIAR WEEK
It's been a funny old week, really. Both here and overseas, if there's any validity to that distinction, now that we all live in Had-Dinja.
First we had the Nobel Peace Prize given to President Barack Obama for his amazing feat in achieving world peace in a mere fortnight in office. This was a stupendous stunt that the dear chap pulled off, getting him the most highly prized of prizes in the political world.
Let's analyse this, for just a second, shall we? Mr Obama, already pulled off something of a neat trick by becoming the first black President of the jolly old US of A, much to the chagrin, no doubt, of the assorted racists and bigots that infest the States in the same volume as the rest of this world. Some of them, in fact, even cross-infest, contributing their revolting views even on the micro-level that is the comments section of this very blog. Not very recently, though, which leads me to wonder if they've been arrested or something.
Getting back to Mr Obama, though, he pulled off his first neat trick by perpetrating another one: he managed to get the Nobel Prize Committee, an august body of men and women, no doubt, to believe that he had done something that quite patently hadn't. How he managed this bit of prestidigitation is quite beyond me, given that Iraq is still a powder-keg, men and women are still dying in Afghanistan and generally speaking, world peace is as far away now as it was when the guy took office.
Of course, he said he would be doing amazing things when he was running for office, as do most people seeking to get the great unwashed to cast their vote in favour of them, but when he got the nod, and took the oath (twice, since he fluffed the first one) did he actually, and for real, manage to get peace given a chance?
Truth be told, Obama's successes in this regard were about as noteworthy as those of Miss World (or is that Ms World, in these politically correct times?) Virtually every candidate for the position of Babe-in-Chief says she wants world peace while being interviewed, though in this case, the coherence of the candidate seems to be in inverse proportion to the size of her attributes. Obama, on the other hand, didn't have to submit to a meat-market procedure - well, he did, but we pretend that political contests are slightly less demeaning than beauty pageants - but his results are as cogent.
And the funny thing is, Obama was judged on the basis of his first couple of weeks in office, as apparently, the nominations were made at about that time.
Perhaps the new American Ambassador would be so kind as to give us the official spin on this marvellous miracle pulled off by his boss: that's if His Excellency can tear himself away from checking out what Roamer has been saying about him.
Closer to home, the gentleman with the ego the size of St Peter's was going about how, good grief, he has been the most persecuted man in the entire history of the world. Not of Italy, or the Mediterranean area, or Europe or the Western World or the Northern Hemisphere but the whole wide world, all of it.
Not for Sig. Berlusconi any false modesty, folks: forget Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Solzhenitsyn or Aung Sang Suu Kyi (though the latter is a woman and Berlusconi did say man) Dismiss from your minds Nelson Mandela and the thousand upon thousand Jews slaughtered by Hitler. No, they are as nothing compared to Berlusconi, for whom the rule of law and any semblance of propriety is as elastic as chewing gum.
Even closer to home, the two main parties (actually, the only two parties, the others having gone into seemingly permanent hiatus) are having their own fun and games and trying to delude the rest of us that the world revolves the way they want it to.
To be fair, the Nationalists are enduring their own trials and tribulations in relative introspection, though the temptation to spread wild rumours about the imminent implosion of the other lot is one that is often succumbed to, if you'll permit me ending a sentence with a preposition.
T'other lot, on the other hand, are really risking being asked to can it with the "look, the PN are about to disintegrate" stories. Say what you like about the Nationalist Party, and many people do, but at least they haven't fired their Secretary General and had to endure the gent's firing back the way Jason Micallef did in the Sunday Times.
According to young Jason, he was not the only one to blame for the Labour Party's defeat in the General Elections not much more than a year ago, but it was he who got shafted. You can understand the poor lad's bitterness, especially when in the very same week he was unceremoniously dumped, someone in whose general direction he pointed a very spiky finger was put into his place.
And to make the insult even more keenly felt, Ms Marisa Micallef, for whom Jason probably has about as much love as he has for me in my Beck Hat, was appointed as an advisor to his boss.
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