As Shallow as a rainwater puddle

Malta Independent Thursday, 14 January 2010, 00:00 Last update: about 13 years ago

If Labour means what it says about censorship, it should start by issuing instructions to its politicians not to request the police to prosecute those who criticise and mock them. Until then, all of Labour’s limited and late talk about censorship issues is just so much... gingerbread.

Weeks after a university newspaper was banned and its editor reported by the university authorities to the police for publishing material described as obscene, the Progressive Mexxej of the Moviment Gdid took a break from artfully rearranging the tufts on his ras ta’ zaghzugh and moved himself to speak.

Shame that his commitment to hair gel and to eating Michelle’s gingerbread Christmas trees with Michel the Make-Up Artist (see my column last Sunday) and his ‘partner’ the Sorbonne Lecturer – token gays wheeled out to impress his interviewer (“Wow, sir, you have gay friends!”) – left him no time to work out what in God’s name he was talking about.

When Muscat spoke last Sunday, after a hiatus in which everyone had given their two cents’ worth except for the leader of the so-called progressives, I believe he hadn’t read the banned piece, he didn’t know the editor’s name, and he was clueless as to the ramifications of the issue. He didn’t even know that it’s all about a short story which some think is obscene. He thinks it is about an opinion column, banned because the opinion was ‘wrong’.

On Sunday morning he sat with Miriam Dalli in the Super One radio studio and yielded to her probing questions: Labour Party hack interviews former Labour Party hack and current Labour Party leader, for Labour Party propaganda show on the Labour Party’s radio station (“So tell me, Miss Flowers, what was it that attracted you to your new fiancé, wheelchair-bound octogenarian billionaire Anthony Black?” “It was his personality and sense of humour.”).

“I’m bringing this up now because we have been told there is the intention of taking this person to court and possibly, God forbid, putting him in prison,” Muscat said. Oh, so he wasn’t bringing it up on Sunday morning several weeks after the event because Michelle had just read my column, in between baking gingerbread trees for the token gays and practising her fluent French on her teddy-bear collection (which also starred in that interview; the teddies don’t eat gingerbread, but you never know, they might be gay) and told her husband: “This woman says here that you claim to be progressive but you’re the only one who’s said nothing about that university ban business. Show her, Joseph, because if you don’t rub that woman’s face in it once and for all, I’m going to deploy another one of those empty brown envelopes bl-arma tal-gvern from the large stash I have hidden inside Pinkie Bear.”

Muscat heads for the living-room and gives the towering pile of teddy-bears a good kick, wondering why it never occurs to his wife that a man might feel a bit emasculated by being forced to live in Goldilocks’s cottage but with no sign of Goldilocks to rev things up a little – unless she was heavily disguised as Michel the Make-Up Artist. He’s in a bit of a fix because he doesn’t know what his wife was on about back there in the kitchen among the gingerbread trees. What university business? What was banned?

There’s nobody to ask and he’s too embarrassed to show his wife he’s not up to speed with current progressive events. He’s got no secretary-general and his deputy leaders are merely there for decorative purposes – so he thinks that maybe he should start seeing some return on his investment and he makes a call. “Oh,” he is told, “a student is going to be sent to prison for publishing an opinion in a university newsletter.”

Muscat works himself up into high dudgeon. This is a free country! You can’t send people to prison for their opinions! This is 2010! He is progressive! The others are conservative! Maybe he should say something! When did this happen?

He goes on Miriam Dalli’s show and rants about how you can’t have students being sent to prison for their opinions. He bangs on progressively, hoping that somebody will slip him a note with the editor’s name on it, but nobody does because this is the Labour Party. When he walks out of the recording studio, a young man in a very tight T-shirt and low-slung jeans turns briefly away from his computer screen and says: “Actually, it wasn’t an opinion piece, Dr Muscat. It was a short story. He’s not being prosecuted for his opinion, but for publishing obscene material. I thought you should know. And by the way, his name is Mark Camilleri and the newspaper he edits is called Ir-Realta. It’s a left-wing paper – you know, progressive.”

Muscat smiles his thanks, tries to give him a high five, realises he looks like a prat, thinks better of it, and moves outside. “Who is he?” he says with barely contained aggression to a couple of hangers on. “Get rid of him. He’s a smart-ass. And if I’m going to sell myself as young, I can’t have 20-year-olds hanging around this place.”

“But mexxej,” they say. “We’re about to abolish the post of secretary-general. We can’t abolish the post of IT administrator too. Maltastar is bad enough as it is.”

Let’s leave that bunch of ferrets snapping at each other in their sack and put Labour’s tosh about censorship and the police into perspective. The day before yesterday I spent the greater part of the morning in a magistrate’s court packed with newspaper editors and writers. It was a criminal libel session: in criminal libel, as opposed to a civil suit, you don’t sue the person who you believe has libelled you. You file a request with the police, and then the police prosecute.

With just two exceptions, all of us – journalists, editors and even one cabinet minister – were there because Labour politicians had asked the police to prosecute us for the things we’d said or written about them. In my case, the Labour politicians are Anglu Farrugia and Dom Mintoff. Anglu Farrugia asked the police to prosecute me because I wrote an article listing the reasons why he should never be made Labour Party leader, at the time he stood for election for that post. Dom Mintoff set the police on me because I raised questions about how and why he got almost half a million liri in compensation for having a power station built next to his decrepit weekend retreat.

So much for the Labour party and censorship, and we’re talking about opinions here, not obscene material. They’d be well at home in China, where now even Google is pulling out because it’s had enough.

If you’re wondering why Joseph Muscat never spoke against the ban on the performance of Stitching, and why it was weeks before he said something (wrong) about Mark Camilleri and that short story, wonder no more. The Labour Party wants to be seen as progressive, but it has had a long love affair with oppression and continues to see its value as a tool with which to silence opposition and condition actual or potential critics.

If people like me are forced to spend whole mornings in court undergoing criminal prosecution for saying what we think and know to be true about Labour politicians, some of us might just stop telling it like it is. After all, whether the case goes in our favour or not, we’ve still been forced to waste a lot of time and money.

It won’t put me off – it will, in fact, have precisely the opposite effect. Toni Abela, for example, is suing me for calling him a clown, which makes calling him a clown and drawing attention to his escapades even more fun than it was before. But some writers will think twice and that’s exactly what Labour wants.