Hate to burst your bubble, Andrew, but… you are most certainly NOT Spartacus

Out of curiosity: can't I take even the briefest of holidays... and I really mean brief this time: six measly days, and not a minute more... without everyone going completely NUTS in my absence?

I mean honestly, folks. I can more or less understand how the entire fabric of Maltese society would inevitably fall apart at the seams, the moment it no longer benefited from a permanent focal point of sanity and rationality in which to anchor all its sense of identity, purpose and perspective.

But you can't keep relying on me forever, you know. For one thing, we all need to take a break and have a Kit Kat every now and again. And besides: there will eventually come a time when I am simply no longer around to keep the wolf of unbridled psychotic delusion at the door. (For yes, it's perfectly true: rumours of my immortality did turn out to be slightly exaggerated in the end). And what on earth will you all do then, huh? If, after only six days, you managed to so completely take leave of your collective senses that... um... OK, evidence of our national descent into mass delusion will be coming up right after the commercial break... what kind of unearthly trouble  would you all get yourselves into, if I suddenly decided to emigrate on a permanent basis? Or, more permanently still, if I were to swiftly and suddenly vanish away (like the man who met the Boojum, etc.)?

Honestly, I shudder to think...

***

But in any case. Yes, I did have a pleasant trip, thanks for asking. It's the homecoming I am slightly less enthusiastic about... you know, that inevitable realization that, well, perhaps 'six measly days' was altogether too short a space of time to spend as far away as possible from such excellent and admirable lunacy. That maybe I needed a slightly longer holiday while I was at it; to go off and see mountains again... mountains, damn it! And to find somewhere quiet where I can finally finish my book...

No such luck, of course. Instead I found myself back here on the rock, where I opened the papers (if you'll excuse the figurative, online sense of the words 'opened' and 'papers'), and of all the ridiculous headlines ever reproduced on all the newspaper websites across the entire network of the worldwide web... which one happens to come sauntering into my field of vision?

'I AM SPARTACUS'...

... written, in trademark capital letters, by a certain Andrew Borg Cardona.

Urr... right. Clearly something truly epic and colossal must have taken place while I was away. Something so mind-boggling unlikely and improbable, that it caused even an ordinary, mild-mannered and unassuming blogger such as the former Chamber of Advocates president to mistake himself for a former gladiator-turned-rebel-working-class-hero and champion of the oppressed. A man who overcame his humble origins to successfully lead a slaves' revolt against the Roman Republic some time in the first century BC... and who went on to levy and train an entire army of escaped slaves and mercenaries: terrorising the whole of the southern Italian peninsula for years, and bringing even the mighty Roman army to its knees on several occasions.... before eventually succumbing to defeat at the hands of Marcus Licinius Crassus in 71BC... whereupon all his followers were brutally put to death.

At which point, you might just be asking yourselves. Ye-e-e-s, and where exactly does Andrew Borg Cardona see himself fitting into all that? How serious a case of psychotic delusion are we talking about here, for a man of Bocca's build and demeanour to gaze at the reflection of his own navel in a looking-glass... and find himself looking instead into the impressive abdominal six-pack of Kirk Douglas when still only 44 years old?

Well, as it happens I have a small theory to account for this otherwise unfathomable psychological pathology. Perhaps our Andrew may have been a little tired while watching that particular movie (and who can possibly blame him? It's hard work finding reasons to publicly defend the Nationalists these days, you know: but to do it at all imaginable hours, every day of every week of every month of every year... why it must be goddamn exhausting). And so, in the utmost extremity of fatigue and somnolence, he must have got the separate roles of Spartacus (played by Kirk Douglas) and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (played by an unforgettable Charles Laughton) all mixed up.

Ah yes, that must be it. Borg Cardona must surely have identified with the role of the corpulent, slightly decadent and yet lovable old rogue of a jaded Roman senator, who constantly exploits the petty political rivalries of others in order to further his own, largely egotistical designs...

A couple of pictures somewhere on this page should illustrate why it is  an entirely plausible mistake, too. (Small hint: Spartacus is the Action Man look-alike with the very big... erm... dagger. It's the other fellow that a certain very big... erm... blogger might conceivably resemble, if he only wore a wig and wrapped himself up in a tablecloth every once in a while...)

Even here, however, something is evidently amiss. Gracchus may have been an epicure - in the Kubrik film, at any rate - and he was on the proper spherical side of things, too. But there the resemblance abruptly ends.

We are after all talking about Gracchus here: one of two brothers by that name, both of whom were leading politicians militating within the 'Popolares' party - i.e., the faction sympathetic to the plebs and lower classes, that also produced a certain Julius Caesar. Tiberius Gracchus in particular was also the sworn enemy of both Crassus (played in the film by Laurence Olivier - who incidentally has all the best lines), and Rome's entire elite ruling class of patricians.

So though he may have been himself a patrician by birth... Gracchus was no supporter of the establishment; still less, therefore, can he be compared to that class of political spin-doctor that distinguishes itself only by a profound contempt and undisguised hatred for all who dared oppose the government upon which these same spin doctors have come to depend.

Alternatively, of course, Andrew Borg Cardona may have been referring to another historical personality altogether: one who just happened to coincidentally also be named 'Spartacus'. (A common enough name 2,000 years ago, or so I am told).

Possibly a slightly less romantic, heroic and, well, chiselled 'Spartacus' than the rebel gladiator version immortalised by Kirk Douglas. Perhaps it was the lesser-known Spartacus who first pioneered the fine art of 'Lecca-culismus Romanis' - you know, writing scrolls upon scrolls under such titles as: IN DEFENCE OF CAIVS CALIGVLA, or WHY THE PROPER PLACE FOR ALL PLEBEIANS IS IN A LION'S BELLY or SOCIALISMVS DELENDVS EST! - while all along heaping insults and scorn on the detested lower classes that the other, better-known Spartacus would otherwise have championed.

Either way, we will probably never know for sure - because Borg Cardona himself didn't actually elaborate much on the vaguely homoerotic allusion he chose as his headline of the week.

But I happen to be something of a Kubrik fan myself (well, of his more accessible films, at any rate)... so I surmise that Bocca's real intention was to evoke that same spirit of heroic camaraderie and romantic self-sacrifice that marks the climax of Spartacus: the Kubrik version.

You might well remember the scene: it is after all probably the most iconic (and parodied) moments in classic movie history. But if not, I'm referring to when all the captured slaves, led by an astoundingly camp Tony Curtis (See? Told you I wasn't making the 'homoerotic' part up), all try to shield their beloved leader's identity by standing up, one by one, and proudly proclaiming themselves as 'Spartacus'.

For which effort they were all duly crucified, one by one, at intervals along the Via Appia, all the way to the gates of Rome.

Ah, yes. Crucifixion. The most feared of the lethal punishments inflicted by the Romans in those far-off days. And just the sort of fate you'd expect a man like Andrew Borg Cardona to jump at the opportunity of willingly subjecting himself to... especially in order to defend the rights and freedoms of someone who was ultimately the Roman-era equivalent of a 'Laburist hamallu'... a 'Chavus Plebeius Romanus', no less; who was not only himself a plebeian by birth... but who became first a slave, then a gladiator, and lastly committed the unpardonable crime of actually rising up in arms against the oppression of tyranny.... all in the name of 'freedom'.

This also makes of Spartacus the direct Roman correlative of today's bloggers would identify, to their own intense amusement, as... drums rolling... 'The Great Unwashed".

Well, fancy that. So at the end of the day, the man whose identity Andrew Borg Cardona so liberally borrowed for the occasion this week was - both in real life and in the Kubrik film - was not just any old chav, but what you might refer to as a 'Super-Hamallu': the 'chav from Hell', who not only walked, talked, dressed and acted like a chav within the context of his own era's social milieu... but who might suddenly also appear on your doorstep at the head of a veritable army of chavs: all armed to the teeth, trained to kill as violently as possible, and looking at you like your entrails might have been marinated in the three things they've always wanted but never had. Money, power and class.

And of course, Andrew Borg Cardona would have us believe that 'he is Spartacus', and 'Spartacus is he'. Vos oportet iocari, is all I can say to that...

Meanwhile, just to really hammer the point home - like nails through the wrists of all the same Spartacan slaves that certain bloggers  no doubt have jeered at as they died in agony on their crosses - 'I AM SPARTACUS' (in capital letters) has come down to us today as a political slogan, yes.... only it is a slogan you'd expect to hear from the LEFT, not the RIGHT, of the political spectrum.

The movie whence it originates is in fact a political statement in its own right - and hovering somewhere in the background is the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Communist purges of the 1950s. It is a great film in many respects, and I am the first to acknowledge this. But a film which shamelessly romanticizes and sanitizes one of the grittiest, bloodiest and most unthinkably violent of many conflicts from the late Roman Republican period... and even today, Kubrik's Spartacus still epitomises the eternal struggle between the proverbial '99 per cent' of people who feel (quite justifiably, in this case) that they are dispossessed, disenfranchised, despised and generally discriminated against... and on the other hand the remaining one per cent that simply owns everything and everyone.

Naturally I will leave you to wonder on which side of that gruesome divide the Andrew Borg Cardonas of this world... and yes, why not? Also the Daphne Caruana Galizias, in whose 'defence' he used that line... would have pitched their own tents, had they lived around 70BC instead of 2012AD. Would they have thrown in their lot with the stinking multitudes of slaves, plebeians and Roman hamalli: risking crucifixion in the fight for (irony of ironies) 'work, justice and liberty'? Or would they have simply joined forces with the richest, most powerful and most utterly elitist patrician that society had to offer at the time: Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Roman equivalent of Donald Trump, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet all rolled into one (with a healthy dash of Richard Cachia Caruana thrown in for good measure)?

My guess is that, being in Rome, they would have simply done what the Romans did... which is in any case history. Then, having gorged themselves on absolutely everyone and everything, and vomited all over their social inferiors for the umpteenth time... off they will all go to crucify themselves on the moral high ground of their own delusions.