So much fuss was made of a stormy session of Parliament the other week that one would think the future of the island was more threatened by it than the reported future sinking of Etna and the tsunamis it could cause. The truth is stormy parliamentary sessions are much more common than what the news reports, commentaries and television debates try to portray, and it happens everywhere with pretty much regularity.

Happily enough, we do not have the fracas that often characterises parliament in places like South Korea, Turkey, the Ukraine, and various South American countries. It has also happened and continues to happen in Spain and Italy though much less frequently. While it is fun to watch, particularly on slo-mo news clips, elected representatives wrestling and exchanging blows over tumbled desks as microphones fly, we are spared the spectacle. Most of our stormy sessions are restricted to adjectival missiles, the stamping of feet, the thumping of desks, and the odd unparliamentarily expletive that is often immediately followed by an order to leave the Chamber and possibly go to confession.

I remember only one really serious incident. That was in the late 1960s when Labour’s deputy leader Anton Buttigieg, who several years later became President of the Republic, was threatened with a car battery belt before fellow MPs from both sides of the House intervened to avoid the unnecessary sparks, if you don’t mind the pun.

Nor is the Mother of Parliaments clean from such impurities. Writing in 1973, Welsh MP Leo Abse had said: “Westminster is the powerhouse transmitting socially sanctioned aggression. It inevitably becomes the Mecca for all those who wish, even as they did in their nurseries, but now without fear of disapproval, to scream with anger, spit at their enemies, bitingly attack opponents, boldly hit out at wrongs, real and imagined. Like moths around a flame, the aggressive flutter around Westminster. Outside Dartmoor (prison) and the armed forces, there are no more aggressive men than those sitting in our Parliament.”

The recent parliamentary skirmish ended with characteristically quick apologies from Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and a Speaker-induced re-phrasing of things on the part of Simon Busuttil, ex-Leader of the Opposition, today a visibly frustrated backbencher. Even the greatest of parliamentary debaters acknowledge the inevitable flare-up, as was the case with the highly gifted Michael Foot who once said that all was fair in love, war and parliamentary procedure.

So what was all the fuss about? Parliaments are hotspots of debate. MPs enjoy the banter as much as the aides who serve them and one shouldn’t read more than that into it. Yes, like Etna, parliaments sometimes erupt, but hopefully they do not sink.

 

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LSD and a poem

The other day, a Radio Malta 2 presenter who had not been born at the time, the mid-70s, after the Hippies generation went home to roost, have babies and get involved in life’s more serious matters, helped raise the ghost of an obscure, little poem I once wrote. Entitled “Psychedelia”, it contained the line “Irridu l-LSD” (We want LSD) which had caused a mini furore in the strictly limited Maltese media world of 1967 when it was written.

It caused a flurry of mostly anti-poem protests in the “Letters to the Editor” columns of what were mere 16-to-24-page newspapers of the time. I had tried to explain, not with much success, alas, that the line was being hugely misinterpreted as what it really meant to portray was the young generation’s search for some sort of escapism from the social woes of the epoch, including, of course, the Vietnam War, the first real war featured in daily TV news, that had become a top issue for discussion everywhere in the world.

Of course, the LSD abbreviations takes one back to the Beatles’ magnificent song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, on their historic Sgt Pepper’s album, which had received similar treatment, albeit in global terms, if I can dare make the blasphemous comparison. A good friend of mine from our Kalkara days, Manuel Casha, today an established Maltese Għana authority living in Melbourne, once also belonged to a popular Aussie group known as Live Sound Dimension. That LSD again did not go unnoticed.

Now, 75 years on since the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman discovered LSD’S hallucinogenic properties, an event that is being marked by an exhibition at the Swiss National Library in Bern, its medical benefits are again being investigated. Hoffman went on to advocate the use of LSD to treat psychiatric disorders and to help humanity discover the secrets of its own consciousness.

Ten years since his demise, there is increasing support to use the drug in clinical settings to treat anxiety and depression. Like marijuana, most Western countries had declared it illegal, but more and more researchers today are beginning to investigate the clinical benefits of the drug which has been used, in limited trials, to treat patients suffering from cluster headaches.

Maybe the baby-boomers got it right, after all, in a very twisted and warped way.

 

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Syria and the Albert Hall

Oh, so the BBC not only knows how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall, to quote another melodic Beatles quip, but that precisely 106 chemical attacks have been carried out in Syria since 2013 when Syrian President Bashar al Assad signed the international armaments convention agreeing to eliminate the use of chemical weapons. They must have counted them all.

One hopes, however, they have not restricted their search for proof to one source only, as they did very recently about Malta on BBC2 in perhaps their worst example of a documentary based solely on the ejaculations of one political activist.

When you realise how unprofessional and stupidly biased they have been on an issue concerning events in an insignificant, little island nation, you can hardly resist being sceptical about their journalistic fare from the scorching war zones of the world, such as the on-going Syrian conflict, even when one is not exactly an admirer of the despot that is Assad.