The dilemma which the Evil Twins face (so much for the Evil Click...) is that they know they are in the process of being hoist by their own petard, and yet they seem unable to stop themselves from doing it. Whatever it is that has taken hold of them is clearly bigger than they are.
The future both face is dire and depressing by their own standards, for they love power, a sense of importance, and the limelight. With Franco Debono, it is a future of petty crooks and bird-feed. With Jeffrey Pullicino, a life as the village Botoxer and tooth-puller, punctuated by sad parties in which people who get older as their clothes get tighter, socialise at the cheaper end of the demi-monde. Pullicino might get lucky. Being married to a Labour activist and having voted with Labour against the PN whip, Prime Minister Muscat might keep him on as chairman of the Malta Council of Science and Technology. But beyond that, it’s a desert.
One is pushing 40, the other pushing 50, and for them, it’s all over already in politics, in one case even as it has barely begun. And it may be the newspaper photography that’s putting them in a bad light, but I don’t really think so: Both of them are beginning to show serious signs of existential despair, that feeling people of a certain age are afflicted with when it dawns on them that they might have royally effed up somewhere down the line and are doing so still but can’t get off the muck-up bus because they took a wrong turn and now it’s too late.
The Evil Twins claim to despise each other and their body language, when they are forced into close proximity, gives this off in waves. But they have goals in common, and Pullicino seems to think that he is being as cunning as a fox in using Debono’s behaviour as the means to their shared end, while smarming about like a pretend gentleman with his cups of tea and his Very Serious Voice. Who is he kidding? We all know that he wants what Debono does: As much trouble as possible for this government.
The difference between the Evil Twins is that Debono, God bless his little cotton socks, makes no pretence of his feelings and his aims anymore. He’s emerged from the closet, so to speak, on his widely read blog, as somebody with a desire for vengeance – or shall we put it more nicely, redress – because his good ideas were stolen from him and Gonzi ran him over with a steam-roller (romblu).
Pullicino, on the other hand, keeps right on pretending to himself and to others, including the media, that he is on some dignified mission of honouring his commitment to his electors, and that the concerns of his electors are his. As one of those electors, I can tell him from this platform, once more, that I would much rather he packed his bags and took a long trip out of parliament, never to return. His other electors – those with whom I have spoken, at least – feel much the same way or even more strongly. But he continues to delude himself about the existence of some mythical electors of his who actually enjoy what he is doing. I imagine that self-delusion is the safer bet because if he were to confront the full magnitude of the disaster he has wrought for himself, and the difficulties he has caused to many of those around him, to the party on whose ticket he was elected, to the government he was elected to support, and by default, to the country in general, which has been in suspended animation watching his and his Evil Twin’s cabaret act, he would be spectacularly overwhelmed.
Jeffrey Pullicino and Franco Debono are not so much tragic as piteous.
Try-hard sexy is the new Labour feminism
After watching Bondi+ last Thursday, I channel-hopped until something on Super One TV caught my attention. It was a talk-show called Ilsien In-Nisa, in which four very well preserved, middle-aged women perch on cocktail stools at a high table which displays their toned legs, all eight of which were crossed in the time-honoured signal of sexual attraction.
To make the sight even more laughable, those eight identical legs, crossed identically, terminated in eight identical black hooker shoes (except for the fact that four were for the right and four for the left), with the kind of heels I last saw on a 6’4” tranny standing outside the Admiral Duncan on Soho’s Old Compton Street, and which I am told are also popular at certain sorts of Maltese weddings, the kind where women wear black and where some even wear sequins in the sunlight.
My goodness, I said to the other person in the room. Is this the Most Feminist Government in Maltese History? Then I realised what they were talking about: Sex in relationships. Oooh, how naughty: Ladies in eff-me shoes, talking dirty on the government-in-waiting’s television station. So Joy of Sex (publication date: 1972).
Matters took a turn for the worse when one of the well preserved ladies stiffened her spine, gave her tall shoe a good twitch and opened her mouth to say (in Maltese): “And what about masturbation and sex toys?” I must confess, dear readers, that at this point, I laughed myself sick. Maltese television is sometimes unintentionally satirical, and that makes it even funnier.
To make matters more entertaining, some kind of sexologist, a man, was sitting there with two pairs of identical legs in identical shoes on either side of him, looking like all his Christmases had come at once.
Roll on the Malta Labour Party’s very peculiar notion of feminism. I love it.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com