In an exclusive for J’accuse, an unidentified source has provided us with a massive leak of the “Gonzo Papers”. Here we reveal extracts from a document that first appeared in the New York Times on January 1, 1974 under the title “Fear and Loathing in the Bunker”. Given that the main protagonist in the document subsequently benefited from a presidential pardon the document has been redacted and real names replaced with fictitious references. Any similarity or resemblance to other real persons is purely coincidental.
[…]
It was almost too good to be true. Josephus Inhobbkom Muskat, the main villain of my political consciousness for as long as I can remember, was finally biting that bullet he’s been talking about all those years. The man that not even Cameron or Obama could tolerate had finally gone too far – and now he was walking the plank, on national T.V., six hours a day – with the whole world watching, as it were.
The phrase is permanently etched in some gray rim on the back of my brain. Nobody who was at the counting hall in Naxxar on that night in 2013 will ever forget it. Josephus Muskat is living in Castella today because of what happened that night in Naxxar. Louis Gonzo lost that election by a landslide of votes – mine among them – and if I had to do it again I would still vote for Arnie Kassel.
If nothing else, I take a certain pride in knowing that I helped spare the nation five more years of Gonzo – an administration that would have probably been equally corrupt and wrongheaded as Josephus Muskat’s, far more devious, and probably just competent enough to keep the ship from sinking until 2018. Then with the boiler about to explode from eight years of blather and neglect, Gonzo’s conservatives could have fled down the ratlines and left the disaster to whoever inherited it.
Muskat, at least was blessed with a mixture of arrogance and stupidity that caused him to blow the boilers almost immediately after taking command. By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers, and fascists to run the government he was able to cranks almost every problem he touched into a mind-bending crisis. About the only disaster he hasn’t brought upon us yet is an environmental meltdown or selling the nation’s sovereignty and assets on the cheap … but he still has time and the odds on his actually doing it are not all that long.
For now, we should make every effort to look at the bright side of the Muskat administration. It has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashionable, or even safe, among thousands of people who only three years ago thought that anybody who disagreed openly with “the government” was either paranoid or subversive. Political candidates in 2018, at least, are going to have to deal with an angry, disillusioned electorate that is not likely to settle for flag-waving and pompous bullshit. The Panamagate spectacle was a shock, but the fact of a well-to-do Prime Minister’s aide and Minister paying less income tax than most construction workers while gasoline costs spiralled from Mellieha to Marsaxlokk and the spin of mass employment tends to personalise Muskat’s failures in a very visceral way. Even MPs have been shaken out of their slothful ruts, and the possibility of impeachment is beginning to look very real.
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When he cold eye of history looks back on Josephus Muskat’s years of unrestrained power in Castella […] looking back at the nineties and noughties, the facts of Muskat and everything that happened to him – and to us – seem so queerly fated and inevitable that it is hard to reflect on those years and see them unfolding in another way.
[…]
One of the strangest things about these three downhill years of the Muskat premiership is that despite all the savage excesses committed by the people chosen to run the country, no real opposition or realistic alternative to Muskat’s cheap and mean-hearted view of the Maltese Dream has ever developed. It is almost as if that sour 2008 election rang down the curtain on career politicians.
This is the horror of Maltese politics today – not that Muskat and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted, disgraced and even jailed – but that the only available alternatives are not much better; the same dim collection of burned-out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last twenty years,
How long, O Lord, how long? How much longer will we have to wait before some high powered-shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face to face with the ugly question that is already close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it.
Is the democracy worth all the risks and problems that necessarily go with it? Or would we all be happier admitting that the whole thing was a lark from the start and now that it hasn’t worked to hell with it.
[…]
A few months ago I was getting a daily rush out of watching the nightmare unfold. There was a warm sense of poetic justice in seeing “fate” drive these money-changers out of the temple they had worked so hard to steal from its rightful owners. The word “paranoia” was no longer mentioned, except as a joke or by yahoos, in serious conversations about national politics. The truth was turning out to be much worse than my most “paranoid ravings” during that painful 2013 election.
But that high is beginning to fade, tailing down to a vague sense of angst. Whatever happens to Josephus Muskat when the wolves finally trip down his door seems almost beyond the point now. He has been down in his bunker for so long that even his friends will feel nervous if he tries to reemerge. All we can really ask of him is a semblance of self-restraint until some way can be found to get rid of him gracefully.
This is not a cheerful prospect, for Mr. Muskat or anyone else – but it would be a hell of a lot easier to cope with if we could pick up a glimmer of light at the end of this foul tunnel of a year that only mad dogs and milkmen can claim to have survived without serious brain damage.
Or maybe it’s just me. […]
[Hunter S. Thompson, 1 January, 1974]
The full unredacted text of the document can be found here.
