Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson is back in the news after his spoof Volkswagen Scirocco ad touched a raw nerve among the “politically correct” crowd. Ok. The ad DOES draw on WWII memories with German tanks overrunning Warsaw… but please… a joke’s a joke… some people really need to get a life!
“Gib li trid. Tridx iggib ir-ritratt fuq il-blogg? Tridx tikteb li trid?”
– R. Camenzuli LL.D. ( Rabid Lawyers Abroad)
Two op articles this weekend (Josanne Cassar and Mark Anthony Falzon) dealt with noise pollution in Malta and our inability to control any of it. One particular form of noise pollution is a direct result of neanderthals “pimping” their car in order to get a growl out of their silencer presumably to give the energumen driving the car the thrill and feel of driving a car that sounds like an F1 vehicle.
“Hamalli” might be an insufficient classification for this category of not so gentlemen since the thrill of a noisy, fast ride is not limited to that particular class of proto-individual. They are all over the place in Malta – creating the third lane on the coast road, “cruising” along promenades with the equivalent of a nightclub sound system in the place of their back seat and the inevitable paraphernalia of chains and tattoos hanging around or exhibited on a chest covered with a sleeveless shirt. They needn’t even be so osé in their get-up… what is important is that they believe they own the road (and most parking places).
I for one never understood the fixation for big and fast cars in Malta. Your average Peugeot 107 can get you anywhere in time without much problems. I often dream of a fascist, authoritarian law that does away with all cars on the island and allows onlz three models – Smart Size (the more common), Polo Size for small families, and mini vans for public transport. I guess I will only see that kind of thing again on my next visit to Capri but in the meantime, just like the Emissions business, something must be done to curb these bullies of the road.
There’s an email doing the rounds. It’s a pdf presentation about Antony Taliana – the accused in the hit and run case that took a cyclist’s life. Whoever wrote the pdf presentation must have had enough of seeing bullies on the road, must have collated some facebook pictures together and suddenly claims to “make an example” out of Taliana. There is an evident danger of mob vigilantism here that risks deviating our attention from the real danger. Once again it is important that we do not let events run away with us and let justice follow its due course.
If it turns out that our society requires stricter terms and more direct action on perpetrators of driving crimes then maybe we could consider changing the laws in this respect. We might take a lesson or two from US Penal Codes which have long dealt with similar crimes. Whatever the case we must not try to solve a social problem as are driving bullies by creating another one – that of expanding this cult of mob juries that judge and condemn outside the legal system.
Any normal person in his right mind feels angry at what happened to Cliff Micallef. If I had to follow my instincts the punishments for such crimes by the bullies of the road should be maximum (possibly including torture). I am a rational being however and I believe that a just society requires law and order. As I had occasion to state some weeks back: we are servants of the law so that we may be free.
I have decided to start writing this article midweek rather than my usual last minute rush. What prompted this midweek fervour was the blackout that part of the islands depending on Melita suffered for approximately six hours. I’ve already written about how strange it is to be able to observe the silence of an island that has been gagged with no access to the ether. The various newspapers were down and there were no comments to aggravate the development of stomach ulcers. It was so quiet that it was eerily disturbing. I had to call for reassurance and yet all lines seemed to be busy.
I felt like I had been thrown in some Stephen King novel. What if the island had suddenly been engulfed by a freak tsunami and was the 21st century version of Atlantis? What a pity that Piano had not finished his buildings yet… they would have been a nice background for some scuba diving. There was also the possibility of a terrorist sabotage – you know the kind, those who cut off the phone lines and other forms of communication before sweeping in for the kill. Was the island of Joseph and Lawrence suddenly in the hands of New Age Pirates who had had enough of boarding oil tankers and had set their eyes on a whole nation to hijack?
The dead tones of the phones and the constant “webpage does not exist” might mean that the island actually DID vanish and had magically reappeared somewhere else… maybe in the middle of the Caribbean, much to the chagrin of all the right wingers who would not have time to celebrate the ridding of the African immigrants before realising that they would face boatloads of Haitians or Cubans threatening their newly oriented shores.
What if Malta had never really existed? What if the whole business of constantly grumpy commentators and the whole menagerie of political circus freaks was just another mental joke conjured up by a tired mind after a days’ work? What if it had all been an illusion and the various projects like Piano’s Gate, Mepa reform, Electoral reform and Smartmalta had been some sick joke of the brain? Yeah… what if Smartmalta was all some kind of joke?
Hold on. Maybe it is.
It comes as a bit of a surprise that President Obama is currently suffering a downturn in the polls and is as popular as George Bush and Richard Nixon were in the same period in their presidency. This is the period of budgetary planning, health care announcements and more importantly a little bungled issue on police and racist handling but Obama is definitely not cruising along as well as he had been predicted to.
Today’s Times (print edition) will include the figures relating to the declarations made by the EP candidates to the Electoral Commission. The public (or “the people”, if you want to irritate certain other “people”) will finally get to see how many of the candidates are prepared to exploit the “loophole” (J’accuse disagrees with this loophole business but it seems to be the received opinion of many) that considers candidates as candidates only from the day of registration.
