What a f-arse…!

Question: What do you get when you cross your face with your arse?

Answer: A farce, of course. What else?

And let's farce it (ahem)... we've had a lot of that going on recently. Face- and arse- swapping, I mean. In fact it has happened so often that - much like the pigs from the final chapter of George Orwell's Animal Farm (a book about politics and bestiality, if you haven't already read it for yourselves) - you can look from face to arse, and back from arse to face and... well, I'll be buggered if I can see any difference between the two at all.

Allow me to illustrate. The more observant among you may well have cottoned onto the fact that there's an election campaign going on at the moment. OK, I know it hasn't exactly been obvious. After all, there are only around half a million billboards stuck up at every conceivable street corner of every town and village.... so it is perfectly possible that you may have somehow missed them all.

Besides, politics only takes up a measly 99% of all news on all media these days. So if you've limited your newspaper consumption only to the crossword page, well, you might have missed a couple of clues...

I can assure you, however, that the two parties are indeed engaged in campaigning - three parties, if you also count AD - and it's at time like these, my droogs, that you have to be especially on your guard. That thing on that billboard, up there by the Regional Road tunnel? Well, it might look just like an ordinary human face to the uninitiated... but be warned! For all we know, it just as easily be an oversized gluteus maximus, staring down at us all through its beady little anus, just waiting for the right moment to disgorge its contents as we blissfully drive below...

For this reason alone, it is rather important to be able to distinguish these two, often remarkably similar features of the human anatomy. Let me give you a small hint. The part where all the crap comes out? In all but the most exceptional circumstances, that would be your ass. Your face, on the other hand, is that part where all the same crap originally went in... though naturally it didn't look or smell like crap at the time (but then again, looks and smells can be deceiving. I mean, that's the whole point I am trying to make here...)

In any case, as a general rule of thumb it's fairly easy to tell your own face from your ass. And a good thing that is too: otherwise, God help you when it comes to discharging your daily bodily functions. The difficulty arises chiefly when it comes to telling other people's faces from their arses. And when these other people also happen to be politicians, then... personally I wouldn't bet my own ass on it, and I strongly recommend you don't bet yours, either. (Otherwise, God would really have to help out with those bodily functions..)

Onto the actual examples now. Perhaps you are familiar (but who knows? Maybe you actually possess this thing called "a life"...) with the ongoing pseudo-controversy regarding the 'minimum wage', and all that nonsense. You may even have driven past the billboard showing Joseph Muscat's face - well, to be on the safe side, let's just say a pair of large and particularly shiny cheeks, with some other minor features sort of squashed somewhere in between - holding up an ice cube with the words: 'I WILL FREEZE THE MINIMUM WAGE'.

At a stretch you may even be aware that Muscat's reaction to this (let's farce it) rather silly little barb, was to sue the Nationalist Party over what he claims to be a "lie"... for all the word as if "lying" and "libel" had anything even remotely to do with one another. 

Well, this marks the beginning of a wholesale descent into a national 'face-arse exchange programme' - FARCE, for short - in which all our political representatives seem to have launched themselves with the usual brainless abandon. 

***

OK, I have chosen to be unkind just this once: so I will start with Labour's little doodie. Sorry, Joseph, but suing over a political billboard is the type of thing only a complete and utter buttock-brain would even consider doing. In fact, about the only lower form of hyper-sensitivity I can think up offhand would be to sue over a political cartoon... and the last person I know who did that was your predecessor, Alfred Sant.

Only in his case, the cartoon portrayed him in a brown Nazi uniform with an Adolf moustache and a red Swastika arm-band... so I think it's only fair to make a small exception in this particular case (any more libellous than that, and the cartoonist might have faced extradition to Germany over crimes against humanity).

But that 'ice' billboard? Libellous? Come on. Libel is one thing. Expressing a political opinion (however erroneous) that you might, as newly elected Prime Minister, live up to a promise you never made, and freeze the minimum wage... sorry, but that's something else altogether. Or maybe it's nothing at all. Nothing except a spot of bullshit, that is... and last I looked, 'bullshit' is not exactly a crime (otherwise, I'd be writing this to you from the comfort of my private cell, right next door to yours, somewhere in Kordin prison).

Besides: excuse me for asking, but: hasn't your party slapped up a few billboards of its own, making all sorts of unlikely claims about the PN... and especially about its dear leader, Lawrence Gonzi? If I'm not mistaken I drove past one just this morning, and... oh look: there were a bunch of faces (or were they 'faeces'?), including Gonzi's, but also those of RCC, DCG, ABC, and a few other ASSs of that sort... all under the slogan, 'Mychoice... of friends'.

I stand to be corrected, but I somehow doubt Gonzi consented to pose for a photograph with all of the above, in order to give Labour a little campaign headstart. Just as I imagine he didn't exactly pose for your cameraman with his eyes shut and his hands clamped firmly onto his ears, as you portrayed him on another billboard.

Personally, I had a little chuckle at both those images, if you really want to know. Just as I also had a little chuckle at the PN's own wage freeze billboard. So... why should you be so mortally offended at the PN's disingenuous little portrayal of yourself (or your ass, or whatever) in that particular image... and yet expect Gonzi to not likewise object to your own little fanciful misreprentations of his political platform?

Some people would define that as a classic case of FARCE, you know. Luckily for you, I'm not one of them. I just think it's stupid, that's all.

***

Now, if you want a really good example of FARCE ... well, you need look no further than the PN's reaction to the Labour's reaction to the PN's wage freeze billboard (which, now that I think about it, was itself nothing more than a reaction to Muscat's earlier statement. Talk about reactionary politics...)

Responding to the libel suit brought forward by Labour, Frank Psaila, information secretary to the Nationalist Party, issued a press statement claiming... wait for it... that Joseph Muscat was "trying to censor the PN".

You got that? Trying to censor the PN... through a libel suit. Because of course, the PN itself has never, ever, EVER tried to censor anybody else in exactly the same way. And anything you've ever heard to the contrary can only be a truckload of arse.

Except maybe that little incident way back in August 2004: you know, when the entire executive of the Nationalist Party (around 18 people in total) collectively sued this newspaper for libel, over an editorial which claimed that not everybody in the PN was necessarily sorry to see the back of John Dalli, following his resignation the previous month.

By my count that's 18 libel suits filed against a single newspaper by the same institution on the same day: quite possibly a world record. But of course it wasn't an attempt to 'silence' or 'gag' the newspaper. Oh no. It was just... erm... I don't know: Frank, can you give us a hand here? Can you explain why one measly libel suit filed against your party constitutes a shocking breach of the fundamental human right to freedom of expression... but when your own party decides to bludgeon a newspaper into silence with no fewer than 18 libel suits, all filed on the same day - that's something else altogether?

Nor do you have to go back nine whole years to find similar cases, you know. How about just a few weeks back, when the same Lawrence Gonzi who now cries foul over attempts to 'gag' his party, teamed up with his rural affairs minister George Pullicino to file a libel suit against the editor of the 'New Europe' - a Brussels-based newspaper, which dared to raise questions about Malta's monumentally fishy tuna trade?

What is that, I wonder, if not a direct attempt to gag a section of the free press... carried out by the same people who squeal in dismay when someone else does exactly the same thing to them?

That is certainly how the NE editor interpreted it: and in a painfully embarrassing letter to EU Vice Commissioner Viviane Reding, he described Gonzi's lawsuit as a clear attempt to "intimidate the free press and hinder the institution of free speech, which serves to protect the citizenry and demand an accountable society."

He also added that "it is obvious that in this way, the applicants' intention is to deprive European citizens from independent information by terrifying the publishers and the journalists of the newspaper while severely damaging NE, a newspaper with esteemed reputation for its independent coverage, with over 20 years of uninterrupted worldwide circulation."

I don't know about you, but I for one am just dying to hear Frank Psaila's explanation for this incredible example of face-arse switching hypocrisy. Just give me a moment to find a nose-peg, that's all...