“I see an ironic and sad resemblance between what happened last Saturday in Valletta and the events in Libya –Government bullies doing their utmost to shush a handful of peaceful anti-government demonstrators. These PN thugs, who – shockingly enough – also happen to call themselves liberals (yes, you read that right), probably are not aware of the universal right to free expression and assembly.

So, what’s the difference between the Bondi-DCG twosome and Gaddafi’s mercenaries? The latter use automatic weapons. The former, well, other kind of weapons.”

[Daphne – Yesterday I was a woolly sheep. Now I am a government thug and like a Gaddafi mercenary. I have attracted people with a stalker fixation all my life – I don’t know what it is about my behaviour that triggers off this level of obsession, which is now at last visible to others through the internet so that they no longer think I am exaggerating or imagining it. There was one person in that mix (and don’t assume it was a man) who wrote somewhere on the internet “I have vivid memories of her aged 19 sitting on her husband’s motorbike at Fortizza and I wasn’t impressed.” The vivid memories have lasted almost three decades but s/he wasn’t impressed. And almost three decades later, s/he went into an internet chat room to talk about it. It’s really extraordinary how these obsessed individuals always find some way of turning me into the story. Libya in crisis? Let’s talk about Daphne. Power cut all over the island? Let’s talk about Daphne. They’re sick and they don’t know it. They belong to the class of person who shoot their love-hate objects when their illness gets out of control. If there were only one of them I would find it menacing, but because there’s a whole gang of them, a sort of ‘Let’s love-to-obsess-about-Daphne’ club, instead I just find it desperately sad.]

Easy mistake to make – a bunch of attention seeking whingers, whom I’m sure I’ve seen in the Gay Parade, hence my confusion – apologies.

Now, let me remove my tongue from my cheek.

Subzero temperatures or not, there we were in our Che beret, drainpipe jeans, Doc Martens and facial hair, protesting against anything from US intervention in El Salvador or Grenada or Bata’s investment in South Africa. We loved it.

Being capitalism’s well-funded students we would then take a taxi to Hernando’s Mexican restaurant and spend the rest of the day talking about how we were changing the world over nachos and beer. But the hottest topic of conversation each and everytime was whether the CIA had taken pictures of us.

The political titillation of being in the CIA files was pure ecstasy. How embarassing it all sounds today. The only consolation is that I was just 21 then.

I am rather tolerant of Graffitti’s misjudgement. It comes from overzealousness, young age and a misguided passion for change. After all, I was Graffitti in Toronto three decades ago and on balance it did me a lot of good. What is much, much worse is for grown men and women with professional careers, families and money who, as Libya burns and 2000 bodies are already stacked up, remain driven by the pettiest local concerns.

The provincialism of these men and women knows no bounds, defeats any university education and climbs over any mountain of books read. And most of all, it is fully portable.

[Daphne – I take it that’s the ‘I hate the influence I think Daphne has but I wish I had it instead’ brigade whining on their Facebook wall. Pathetic. You’d never believe they’re all middle-aged people in their late 30s. They sound like a bunch of socially challenged 18-year-olds. David Friggieri appears to have decided I am an Enemy of the State. He’s been known to tell people that I must be stopped because it is dangerous for one person to have so much influence. Apparently, this one-woman-with-a-website setup is more dangerously influential than the Labour Party’s and Nationalist Party’s entire media empires, more dangerously influential even than The Sunday Times and Malta Today and The Malta Independent. F**king ridiculous, if you will excuse the language. Because I loom so large in the consciousness of these stalkers and fixated obsessives who are forever snapping at my heels and policing my every move, their sense of proportion has gone AWOL. David Friggieri himself described the reasons for the stalking obsession in one of his articles for Malta Today (what else?) last year: it’s because we have no rock stars. I look at them discussing me obsessively and sniping like jealous girls in the playground and they just look so …unbalanced. I mean really, how cracked do you have to be to develop an obsession with somebody who writes a newspaper column and this website? As for David’s references to ‘that generation’, perhaps he is trapped in the notion of perpetual youth. I am 10 years older than him and 10 years younger than Lou Bondi, which would make me either his generation or Lou’s, depending which way he wants to slice it. ]

[Daphne – Descriptions of Graffiti’s attire and hairstyles are not fatuous or irrelevant to ‘the matter at hand’ because they are an integral part of their message. The way they dress and do their hair is the international protestor uniform, a cartoon and a cliche.

http://www.google.com.mt/imgres?imgurl=http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2378/2402038364_c56acda976.jpg%3Fv%3D0&imgrefurl=http://flickr.com/photos/dgjones/2402038364/&usg=__MlVruRGhtesUL6JkCPDLpvBS3bs=&h=500&w=333&sz=113&hl=mt&start=99&zoom=1&tbnid=CESBsXoRcciDLM:&tbnh=129&tbnw=82&ei=AOVqTfO7IIbj4AaRs9DfCQ&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dprotestors%2Bin%2Bdreadlocks%26hl%3Dmt%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DG%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-GB:official%26biw%3D1440%26bih%3D707%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C1628&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=537&oei=0ORqTeG3CcSCOo6ygP4K&page=4&ndsp=33&ved=1t:429,r:10,s:99&tx=44&ty=68&biw=1440&bih=707 ]

‘My lot’ follow no party.

[Daphne – Il-lot tieghek mhux ta’ Ellul? Dawk tal-Labour minn sa guf ommhom, Kevin. Sorry if you had to find out through me.]

Ragun-Bazwi – I am not espousing either Huntington or Said – or Fukuyama, for that matter, since Huntington was reacting to Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ fallacy.

You should have read Antoine Vella’s Ragunament Kuntestwali before troubling us with your clown’s worth.

[Daphne – As if. Would they be dressed like that if they were? You’re thinking about Super One. Their dress sense is just as appalling (think Jason Micallef’s snazzy suits and Robert Francalanza’s frightening approach to hair) but at least they take a shower and have spared us the dreadlocks, which always look terrible on whiteys, especially whiteys with that tofu-eating pallor.]

Kev, read Edward Said on Huntingdon’s ‘clash of civilisations’.

Antoine Vella, read Samuel Huntington’s book ‘Clash of Civilisations’ (1996). Or better still, read an article in the 5 September 1993 edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday.