J'accuse: What Lies Beneath

Prestidigitation
You’ve seen that trick before. The one where the guy holds three cards in his hands and turns them face down, shuffles them expertly before asking a goggle-eyed crowd to take their pick and find the Queen that’s hidden among the Jacks. Most times there is money involved and, more often than not, the card-shuffler has a fellow pundit who has mingled with the crowd and regularly bets on the cards inevitably winning a good bounty and thus proving how nice and easy a way it is to make a quick buck.

It’s all about guessing what lies beneath and following the quick light handed moves of the card shuffler isn’t it? Or maybe it’s in following the eyes of his faithful companion and placing your bets when he does. The English language inherited the word “legerdemain” from Middle French – it literally means “light of hand” or “sleight of hand”, involving adroitness in deception. It’s a skill and dexterity in conjuring up tricks. Tricks, deception, slight of hand. It’s all there and it’s part of another world of magic or quasi-magic where people are led to believe that what they are seeing is true no matter how unbelievable.

Most times there is no magic but simply a way of fooling the audience. As Cutter, Michael Caine’s stupendous character in “The Prestige”, explains: “The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.” And there it is in all its wonder… for the trick to really work you have to lend your belief to the world of magic. Suspension of belief works in the wider world of theatre too (when it’s not being banned) and the same principle of connivance applies between actor and audience as does between magician and magicked.

The Hand inside the Puppet
Technically you could try to shift the principle of suspension of belief from theatre to politics. It could kinda work. If you completely and utterly disregard the basic principle of trust on which the concept of representation in politics is built that is. In a world of marketing controlled politics and statistics run policies we are ominously close to a situation where vague political concepts are sold to the people while real representation and policy commitment are sacrificed on the high altar of power politics.

Last March we had an instance of attempted suspension of belief. There was a bad magician. A very incompetent magician I must say… who had all the tricks up his sleeve and could have unravelled a beautiful trick that would have been baffling in all its simplicity. Instead he held the cards too close to his chest and let a more wily magician perform a couple of tricks of his own. You know what I am talking about and you are all familiar with the story of how the PN conjured up a victim of a Labour conspiracy out of its hat and for a few weeks running up to the election led the people to hang on to the belief that one of its prime candidates was the subject of an evil plan. The martyrdom of JPO had its desired effect and before you know it JPO got into parliament and the PN got a contribution of 5,000 first count votes that contributed to no end to the relative majority that allowed it to govern.

So long as the magic trick held up the people would have been convincingly (and willingly) fooled. So long as the principal magicians kept their tricks to themselves and more importantly so long as the victim kept mum and stayed quiet. The trouble began when JPO was left out of cabinet and no longer was willing to play along. The magic trick became a tightrope act and the further away from elections we moved the more disposable did JPO become. No longer did the blue pundits publish passionate pleas from his daughter on their blog in JPO’s defence. The only pleas remaining on their blogs are to JPO to stop screwing up.

“It’s horrible when you see somebody who is not essentially a bad person rushing right down a road with a large brick wall at the end of it.” That’s Daphne on JPO this week. The condescending words come, let’s see, twelve months too late. Nobody was stopping JPO from going off on a self-destruct path twelve months ago. They were busy issuing him with journalist tags and telling anyone who criticised him that they were setting themselves up as objects of hate by helping to elect the Devil’s Brother. It was marketing that won the day… but marketing has a short life span and thank god for that Marley song: you can fool some of the people some of the time… but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Maybe.

Pandora’s Box
Underneath the City of Gentlemen lies a network of tunnels. This week’s news of the findings underneath Saint George’s Square in Valletta comes hot on the heels of the news of the abandoning of another project involving excavation a couple of hundred metres away. This meant that the saga of Astrid Vella and the people has to go on. I say “has” very wearily since I am tired of reading of knee-jerk reactions, motives and cross motives and the lack of a coherent plan that could solve the problem once and for all. I’ve been accused this week of being a person who has very few opinions but I am glad to say that on this particular issue I’d rather be a neutral than a blind basher on one side or the other.

I mean it is bad enough already that NIMBY-ism in this country means that everybody has an opinion about everything since everybody’s back yard is everybody else’s back yard if you get my drift. Let’s face it we are the most densely populated country in the world (I don’t count Singapore – it’s a City-State) and that means that every time one of us farts most of us are bound to get a whiff of the smell. If you had to ask me I would be against any kind of digging in Valletta and for the preservation of the myriad tunnels running through Monte Sceberras. That would be as uninformed a position as you could get based solely on romantic imaginations of hobbit like beings tunneling beneath the constructions to have yet another defensive weapon in the times of medieval warfare. Why we should sacrifice such tunnels for added parking space instead of really drilling the park and ride concept into our globigerina limestone brains is beyond ignorant me.

I wish I could say I trust our politicians to find some genius to come up with a good, coherent plan that would make Valletta the splendid subject of envy the world over. I wish. But I cannot. I can’t suspend my belief this time round. So I am resigned to following the debacle while sitting on the fence in the distance. Who knows… with luck we may just about get it right… though god only knows what “right” is in this context. As I type Resources Minister Pullicino has just announced that the passages that have just been discovered will be studied in great detail. Guess we’ll be pulling out the “esperti fil-hofor” all over again (sorry could not resist that one).

X marks the Spot
Or in the case of European Election ballots it marks your candidates of preference. Immigration remains the number one issue for next EP elections. Of course you do get the rare pot calling the kettle black like the candidate with a long long surname appealing for non-confrontational politics in an article worded completely in confrontational phraseology. “The people do not want us, as their MEPs, to take petty partisan and personal issues to Brussels.” – claims Metsola Tedesco Triccas. Funny. Last I heard most PN candidats speaking of the advantages of voting them in its because of their big big formation in the EP.

The policy example RMTT uses in her scathing article directed at Labour candidate Marlene Mizzi is… surprise, surprise… immigration. “Tapping in to the collective sense of worry about this situation, and promising action and solutions that are just hot air, is beyond irresponsible; it is outright dangerous. It is in this area, over any other, that decency, temperance and honesty would be most valuable and worthy.” Who knows maybe that is an attempt to pull the carpet from under Simon (Busuttil)’s feet. You know – one of the current PN MEP’s who “fathered” the Draft Directive on persons employing illegal immigrants. But that is another story.

So while Vince Farrugia and Alan Deidun join the PN kaleidoscope of candidates (prestidigiwhat?) JPO has been busy explaining HIS point of view on immigrants and immigration. Suddenly you just cannot get enough of PN. They are all over the place. Here’s Vince Farrugia explaining to dive.com why he chose to run for PN: “If you want to go to Brussels you have to decide whether to charter an aircraft and get there on your own, or to take a scheduled aircraft. There are 2 ‘scheduled’ operators in Malta, the Nationalists and the Labour Party. It would have been worse for me had I suddently decided to be part of the Opposition bandwagon.” His words not mine.

Then there is environmental activist Alan Deidun who might have decided to play the “if you can’t beat them join them” card. He does add green to the multicolour nationalist palette and judging by his previous work he seems like the kind of candidate some people could warm to. Of course he has decided to throw his lot with one party so returning to the fold of NGOs will be difficult should his quest to get elected fail. He might want to take a leaf or two out of JPO’s book under the chapter “Candidate’s Disposability”… then again he might just make it and will only have to face Hamletic decisions like whether or not to back the PN position on hunting (pace Borg Olivier) later in the day. Interesting times lies ahead it seems… magical I would say.

Unearthing the News
And now for the usual round up of other topics. I am still curious to find out how much is going to be made of the Insiter survey results on stipends. As far as I know there was always a part of the Uni student population who were not in favour of stipends. What makes this 1 in 10 sample special is beyond me. It remains a wrong point of departure for a reform of the stipend issue. Speaking of education aids, Obamas stimulus plan involves a reform of student loans. Rather than remove them altogether they are being taken away from private companies (like the bankrupt Fannie Mae) and returned to the fed-propped loaning system. Obamas stimulus plan passed today but it was not a bipartisan vote that he had wished for. Change will have to wait while the plan described as “a bridge over troubled waters” by Clinton remains to be tested.

Chefs around the world are on tenterhooks as the final announcements of this years Michelin guide are made. Those valuable stars are the ratio vivendi of many a cook around the world, I hope the ones in and around to Luxembourg hang on to a few… can’t wait for Foie Gras season. It’s not really the time for fat geese and some companies are thinking up weird ways of making profits. Magic Company Ryanair of the deceptively named “Low Fare” flights have declared that they will try to outprice luggage and baggage. Passengers with suitcases and hand luggage are a nuisance. So is anything that involves more staff and more cost. The latest joke is that they want to charge people to pee on flights. If only Gonzi’s government could be so creative.

Before I forget. When it comes to magic tricks during election time we had plenty politicians who ventured into the blog-marketing world. You know the sort of – kuntatt mal-poplu type. Our first man and lady both had their blogs trumpeted and paraded about (J’accuse even got Lawrence to change his blog masthead pic). A year on and both “lawrencegonzi.blogspot.com” and “catherinegonzi.blogspot.com” sport one year old messages as their latest blog posts. I hate to burst the magic bubble but we did warn you to take politicians’ blogs at face value.

Finally a sad bit of news for newspaper lovers like myself. The newsprint industry in the States is on its knees. One newspaper after another is folding and with them one of the most effective methods of checks and balance on local politicians. Hopefully this disease will not spread to our continent and the synergy between print and web will continue for some time yet. I mean, without printed paper where would you find the intelligent mental lozenges from J’accuse?

Jacques has recovered from Limburg’s delights and is back with his cutting edge keyboard skills on http://www.akkuza.com. Tune in and discover the magic.

This article and accompanying Bertoon appeared in The Malta Independent on Sunday on 1.03.09.