Clash of the pachyderms

You must have felt it, too. A change in the air. A vaguely imperceptible – yet palpable – disturbance in the Force, that has put the entire Twittersphere’s knickers in a tweet… 

Yes, that’s right! Glenn Bedingfield has started a blog. And my, oh my, did we all sit up and pay attention. It’s almost as though the old prophecy had at last been fulfilled, and a New Hope had stepped forth to finally restore balance to the political blogosphere…

Well, that was (sort of) the idea, anyway. Whatever the case: even if you’ve never actually encountered any of Glenn’s blogposts yourself, you will have surely heard the howls of protestation from each of his targets in turn – all Nationalist, of course – as they were individually singled out for exactly the same the sort of treatment other bloggers mete out to Labour targets on a daily basis. Oh, the fuss they made! Some of their reactions reached level nine on the Richter Scale… 

So whatever you make of Glenn Bedingfield’s actual blogging skills, you cannot deny he has had an impact. Granted, it is the same sort of impact projectile vomit would have on anything that happens to lie in its path… but hey, if the intention is to balance out the flow of vomit so that absolutely everyone gets splattered by it sooner or later… what can I say? Great job, Glenn! You might not have kept your own head above the cesspit, but at least you saw to it that we all got equally immersed in the same filth.

All the same, there is still plenty of room for improvement. For let’s be honest: Labour have come into this game rather late in the day. Their poison-pen bloggers have a lot of catching up to do, if they are ever going to remotely approximate the scatological standards set by the blogger they are all so desperately trying to emulate. 

Let’s start with the obvious: the choice of name. Daphne can get away with naming her blog after herself, because – no offence or anything – she is better known as a public personality than Glenn Bedingfield. Also, she doesn’t have a name that most search engines would assume is a bootleg brand of Scotch Whisky…

So a small word of advice: change the name to something more imaginative. Give us all something to really howl about for a change. How about… ‘In Bed with Glenn Bedingfield?’ Yep, that’d work. If the intention is to give Daphne the creeps, I can think of few things that would do the job better….

Erm… hang on, wait. Do we really want those two reproducing? Can you imagine what their offspring would be like? What was I even thinking…?

No, no, much better to stick with ‘Glennbedingfield.com’. It’s simple, and spells out what we all already know… which is exactly what the blog sets out to do anyway.

Another consideration involves the choice of subject matter here and there. Now: I won’t begrudge Glenn the habit of targeting the most petty and innocuous victims, over the most personal and distasteful issues imaginable – that is, after all, precisely the sort of thing he is trying to counterbalance here – BUT… it sort of helps not to lose sight of who you actually are (and who you’re shooting at) before switching your weapons to ‘stun’.

This week, for instance, one particular Glenn Bedingfield blog post swam into my line of vision, having been splashed about all over Facebook. The accompanying image was a scan of a ‘Nazzjon’ article by PN activist Angelo Farrugia, under the headline: “The Elephant In the Room.” 

If you have no idea who Angelo Farrugia is, you might be forgiven for failing to understand why Glenn was so tickled by that headline. Let’s just say that Angelo and I have the clean opposite problem when it comes to weighing scales, and leave it at that.

Glenn, however, did not leave it at that. “He couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate headline”, he chortled exultantly… while posting various unflattering images of Angelo (at his most elephantine) which he plundered from the hapless pachyderm’s Facebook page. 

All without even the remotest trace of self-deprecation, anywhere to be seen…

Hmm… We are, of course, talking about the same Glenn Bedingfield who is widely known to model for ‘Slimcea’ ads in his spare time: having the sort of physique you might easily mistake for a toothpick at a cocktail party. And he’s modest about his (dashing) physical appearance, too. Unlike Angelo Farrugia, Glenn Bedingfield posts no pictures of himself on his blog… no doubt to keep his lady readers from swooning at the sight of his undulating abdominal six-pack, glistening with bodybuilder oil…

I mean, honestly, Glenn. Not to be unkind or anything, but… do you ever pause to contemplate the meaning of the word ‘irony’ before posting personal attacks like that? If not, don’t listen to Alanis Morisette. It will only confuse you. Instead, just think what waist-size trousers Angelo Farrugia probably wears, and ask yourself whether you’d fit into them comfortably yourself.   

Anyway. That was just one example. In a more recent blogpost, Glenn also informed us that Beppe Fenech Adami had departed Malta for London… at a time when the deputy Nationalist leader was facing accusations of ‘scandal’ over the size of his swimming pool in Gharghur. 

Exactly why Glenn saw fit to give us a detailed travelogue of Beppe Fenech Adami’s UK sojourn is, of course, unclear. Perhaps he expected Beppe to apply for political asylum while in the British capital… that he had fled there to escape the long arm of local justice, in the wake of his heinous crimes against the Planning Directorate…

But Glenn, dearest… if you follow the media, you will know that Beppe has been to-ing and fro-ing from London for a couple of years now: seeking medical treatment for cancer. With those kind of health problems (which, incidentally, Beppe himself made public in response to Glenn’s blog… otherwise, I wouldn’t mention them at all)… do you seriously think the size of his swimming pool would be uppermost on his mind during his latest check-up?

At the same time, however... it must be said that Glenn Bedingfield’s blog also does a great service to the nation. For let’s face it: there was nothing we needed quite more desperately, than yet another source of endless political slime to add to all the others. And the deeper you immerse yourself in this slime, the more appropriate Glenn’s blog starts to appear. 

I won’t even bother pointing out the obvious hypocrisy in the responses to such blogposts. Some people clearly need reminding of the time when Alfred Sant’s cancer was the topic of malicious blogs and comments… or of the exultation expressed (among other things) at the death of Mintoff, deliberately aimed to provoke as intense a reaction of hatred and anger as possible. 

But this merely illustrates how far Labour’s bloggers still have to go, to really bring some semblance of balance to the flow of filth. No, what strikes me more is the unfortunate headline so gleefully lampooned by Glenn: ‘The Elephant in the Room’. 

Indeed, it couldn’t be more appropriate. Nothing quite sums up the ridiculous state of Maltese politics at the moment, than the mental image conjured up by Glenn Bedingfield’s unfortunate choice of target in that blogpost. A veritable ‘Clash of the Pachyderms’: two impossibly bloated and obese elephants, each pointing its trunk at the other, and guffawing loud and long at its rival’s weight problems.

Who needs any pots and kettles, anyway? Elephants are more fun. Given also that the expression ‘elephant in the room’ actually means a reality that everyone studiously avoids publicly acknowledging… well, what better visual correlation could you possibly want, for two parties which can’t seem to realise how much they actually resemble each other… and which constantly hurl abuse at each other, regardless of the fact that their insults apply just as much to themselves?

But Glenn’s blog encapsulates that image in other ways, too. As I remarked earlier… you can’t exactly begrudge Glenn his gleeful malice, while also tolerating the same sort of behaviour (and much worse) coming from the other side. Glenn himself argues as much whenever responding to criticism: quite understandably, he points towards all the times when Labour people were similarly targeted over personal issues... arguing that what is sewage for the goose, must be sewage for the gander.

This is paralleled to precision by the behaviour of the party in government, which Glenn’s blog exists to defend and uphold. Whenever faced with criticism over corruption and maladministration, what does it do? Exactly what Glenn does, of course. It points its trunk at the Nationalists, and gleefully reminds them of all the times they, too, had behaved like the proverbial ‘elephant in a china shop’. Then it’s ‘crash, bang, tinkle’: they go back to simply wrecking the place, snug in the knowledge that the other elephant would do exactly the same thing given half the chance.

What does all this leave us with, exactly? Well… as far as I can see, it leaves us with two equally clumsy and uncontrollable elephants in the same china shop: so utterly absorbed by their ongoing stampede, that they don’t even pause to consider how much damage they might be causing to everyone else. A never-ending clash of two thick-skinned pachyderms, who just can’t seem to understand how equally deformed and ugly they have both come to look… at least, in the eyes of anyone who is not part of their herd.

And this, too, is entirely appropriate. People ‘outside the herd’ of no consequence whatever: they can be trampled upon at will. The only thing that ultimately matters is that the two ‘elephants in the room’ continue to wallow in each other’s dung. 

That is the glorious political vision that will elevate Malta out of mediocrity; that is what will one day turn this country into a ‘centre of excrement’.