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It’s amazing what time can do but it’s just great sitting back and watching the ripple effect of Labour’s latest appointment. J’accuse would like to point its readers to Marie Benoit’s hilarious article penned in the aftermath of the 2004 Labour “electoral” victory. The article is called “the unbearable heaviness of being Marisa” (22nd June 2004) and Benoit, who makes no attempt to hide her labourite leanings takes pleasure at driving huge digs in the direction of Marisa and her (at the time) Monday column on the Independent.

Marisa was then still working as Chairman of the Housing Authority. Click on READ MORE  and you will find a few juicy clips from Benoit’s tirades (my subtitles).

While David Casa was busy crafting mysterious articles about the European Union’s answers to the financial crisis, the big news in Malta was that ex-PN darling and ex-Housing Authority Chairman Marisa Micallef (ex-Leyson) had been appointed consultant/press-officer to Joseph “Decision-maker” Muscat to the tune of €40,000 euros. The news spread like wildfire after it broke and the first reaction we got from the PN sympathetic crowd had to come from a DCG back from her Chinese break. Daphne replied to a comment on her blog (Something else to bicker about) thusly:

Hi Daphne

What about marisa micallef leyson? What is your thought about the latest news?

[Daphne – I think that when a twice-divorced woman has a daughter to raise, she is sometimes forced to make uncomfortable decisions to pay the bills, decisions that she may not have made otherwise. Mrs Micallef Leyson asked the government to create certain jobs for her, after her search for permanent employment in Britain did not work out, but was told that this was not possible. She may have believed that she was owed allegiance in return for her own allegiance; she may have been wrong or right in this – I don’t know. It’s not how I see things, so I can’t understand that way of thinking. But I can see the reasoning behind it in a way. She may have found herself in a difficult position financially. Knowing what it’s like to pay the considerable bills that come with running a household and raising children, I must say I find it difficult to pass judgment. Thousands of otherwise decent women the world over resort to being paid for sexual services to pay the bills when they’re really on their uppers and have children to raise, and even then I find it hard to judge. EUR40,000 a year is a lot of money for a single mother to turn up her nose at, and we’re not all lucky enough to be able to earn our living using our own initiative.

To begin with it is hard to ignore the “I find it difficult to pass judgement” bit but, if you do, then you will find that in this quick riposte to the provocation by “no comment” (another cheap anonymous commentator), the not so subtle undertones are there: Marisa needed the cash so she rushed to whoever could cough it up. As if the implication of mercenary was not enough (in the week Mandelson was interviewed stating he would work for the Tories if need be), we have the second bait thrown speculatively: some women end up prostituting themselves in order to pay the bills. There you have it: financially despondent Marisa (who to boot does not fit into the “Happy Family” model) is a mercenary who responds to the same instincts as a woman driven to prostitution in dire circumstances.

Be honest. How many of you have googled David Casa’s article in today’s Independent? At the risk of becoming a right royal pain in the arse… we did. Interesting results really. Before we tell you what we found out it is important to remind readers why we are kicking up such a fuss. It’s not just the cut & paste business and lack of attribution of sources that are irritating.

There is of course a major problem in this business of unattributed snippeting but beyond that there lies the most major of issues: what do politicians like Casa think they are doing with this type of column. Regurgitating other people’s work is lame – but it also, as we have pointed out, smacks of lack of respect toward the reader. The authors of such articles are just sending in strings of words amounting to columns simply to occupy space on a paper as some form of unpaid advertisement. The effort to prepare the content is minimal – in all probability Casa does not even write his articles himself but asks some lackey within his entourage to do so. Said lackey is lazy. Very lazy.

There’s an appalling letter in today’s Times of Malta signed off “Marisa Micallef – London, UK”. I am not sure if this is not the same Marisa Micallef who is currently the toast of opinion columnists and journalists alike (along with Jason Micallef and, to a lesser extent Claudio Grech) for having created newsworthy material there where there was none.

I am only thankful that my breakfast consisted in a skimpy gluten free waffle with lemon curd and PG tea beacuse whoever this particular Marisa Micallef is she sure made the paltry contents of my stomach make a run for the first exit. The letter is one big overused and exhausted metaphor about the tribes of the blues and the reds (seen as the “blurreds” – Even Jesus Wept – by the outsiders) and about how King Blue was much nicer as the Prince who took care of the poor than as an absolute ruler (albeit democratically elected). It is also about the half-blood prince (or as she sees it – the son of a mixed blue and red family) who is now challenging the greedy establishment.

The whole plethora of deities in Olympus, Valhalla and Paradise wept after this letter was penned and sent to the Times. That people in this day and age cannot call a spade and spade but prefer to speak in “in-your-face” metaphors about “they who cannot be named” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) is baffling. There is an embarassing moment of conniving conspirancy that the writer wants to create with the reader – you know who I am talking about (wink, wink) but I am not going to call them by name (nudge, nudge). Little does the writer know that the absolute lack of effort to decipher the maskèd personalities in her parable can only mean one of two things: either she thinks her readers are stupid, or she she is simple.

Now. Having said that, I am sincerely hoping upon hoping that the parable writer in question is not the person who has just been engaged by Malta’s new Labour because of her “blur-eyed” vision (as the metaphor writer would have it). This would not just be a faux pas, it would be an end before the beginning. It would be a bit like Sol Campbell’s fleeting adventure with Notts County – 90 minutes of third tier football before realising that the team he joined was not exactly up to scratch. [click on Read More for the letter in full]

David Casa’s favourite journalist at the Guardian describes Angela Merkel as “Non-ideological, centrist, eschewing confrontation” and “non-partisan” to boot. Ian Traynor’s analysis on Merkel’s electoral victory last night (Merkel persuades Germans she is people’s chancellor, but result leaves her vulnerable) concludes that the second weakest result for the CDU menas that Angela Merkel is now exposed to possible backstabbing from within her own party.

Have we not seen that happen elsewhere before? The watered-down, appease-everybody politics of the noughties risk giving us a plethora of weak and unstable options. Seen in this light, Obama’s trail-blazing campaign in the US might only just have stuck out because the man tried hard to give a sense of purpose – as politicians of the past always strove to do – to his politics, beyond the marketed words of appeasement.

This article and accompanying Bertoon (click image to enlarge) appear in today’s edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday.

This week we start with the plaudits. Antoine Cassar, former blogger and current poet has won the Grand Prize in the United Planet Writing Contest 2009. It’s a great achievement for the man who I got to know through his blog during the first phases of the Maltese blogosphere. Antoine’s blog posts on “il-Maqluba” (a nod to his origins in Qrendi and thereabouts) were always a breath of alternative fresh air at the time when blogging was still an adventure, comments were spontaneous respectful exchanges and we could still talk of a blogging community.

Antoine specializes in what he called “muzajks” – multilingual poems that manage to fuse together many tongues into one single expression. His work is the work of a son of the earth that knows no boundaries and who is constantly trying to feel the pulse of the lands he explores by harnessing the word. His exploration involves identifying the common expression, understanding the power of the word that has always thrilled generation upon generation ever since homo sapiens harnessed it in writing. And it works.

Antoine experimented with his novel form of poetry by alternating lines of Maltese, English, Italian, French and Spanish on us, the pioneers of exchanges in the form of posts. We liked what we saw and since then Antoine has all but abandoned the claustrophobic blogging world and dedicated most of his time to the publication and development of his preferred medium – inspired verse. To Cassar, Babel is not a curse but a challenge and a thrilling continuous experiment… and even the most detached listener or reader will find that sharing this thrill provided by an endekasyllabic verse, even for a fleeting moment, is pure entertainment.