Marco Cremona’s been to Botox Jeff’s School for Jerks
Left click to read this: Marco Cremona's admiring comment on timesofmalta.com
You can tell that Botox Jeff and Marco Cremona are best friends. They’ve both gone down the same bore-hole (emphasis on the first word).
These two environmentalist heroes – the first climbed Mount Everest and the other sank at Mistra Bay – are the worst kind of try-hard: try-hard to be cool (and fail miserably).
People like Marco admire Dom Mintoff because they think he was cool, and that it’s cool to do so. There was nothing even remotely cool about Dom Mintoff. He was a short, ugly, dirty miser who wore terrible clothes, got off on violence, aggression and bullying, and who surrounded himself with handsome young men far more often than he did with handsome young women, but masked that by playing the macho game.
People wouldn’t be hanging Che Guevara’s face on their walls for 40 years if he had been a short, ugly, dirty miser, now, would they? Everything about Mintoff is the opposite of cool, starting with the stinginess and squalor.
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Calling the Helsinki incident infamous isn’t very complimentary, so it’s strange that Cremona uses it to show us how “formidable” Mintoff was.
Cremona is about as knowledgeable about the Mintoff years as Mrs Bland is.
Cremona just couldn’t make up his mind about that epitome of Mintoff’s stupidity which set Malta reeling for years after – he must really think it was cool.
Same indecision on whether to recycle water or climb mountains.
To think that this jerk got public funding for his mountaineering stunt.
To think he’s all worked up about boreholes.
I stopped reading at “as is generally the norm.” What norm? Lino Spiteri generally writes meandering revisionist tripe.
Marco Cremona should know that Mintoff did not oust Boffa in the late 1950s but in the late 1940s, and keeping the world leaders hostage in Helsinki was really an infamous episode which continued to sink our already bad international reputation even deeper.
‘ ..surrounded himself with handsome young men…”
Does this sound like some innsinuations?
I wonder.
[Daphne – It’s an old, old story, Silvio.]
Let’s hear it.
I was wondering how Labour’s current programmer put on the Ambre Solaire.
“…surrounded himself with handsome young men…”.
Now that you mention it, I must tell this story. Some 25 years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I was with a (blond) male English friend, swimming at Peter’s Pool in Delimara.
As we were leaving, Mintoff arrived and immediately stopped to speak to us, in particular to my friend, as though he was some buddy of his.
As we moved on, my friend remarked on the strangeness of that encounter, and asked me whether this old man was some gay voyeur.
I laughed and told him he was none other than Dom Mintoff, Malta’s notorious ex prime minister. I never gave the encounter a second thought.
Daphne, what do you know that we dont know?
[Daphne – Oh, I thought the rumours of his bisexuality and that he actually preferred young men and tended to use macho displays and ‘girlfriends’ as a blind were common knowledge of sorts. I always took that for granted somehow. Despite all the talk about his flings and his being one for the ladies, he always struck me as somebody who didn’t actually like the ladies or go in for them very much. I can’t really explain how women read the signals – it must be subconscious or something – but lots of women can work out whether a man isn’t really interested in women despite the shows. I know though that I get similar signals off Muscat – not really into women at all, and it’s not because he’s a married man. Nothing at all macho there, though. History’s super-macho leaders tended to be gay or bisexual and to need to cover it up with big shows. Hitler’s and Mussolini’s sexuality is still up for discussion, and we all remember how the truth about this particular macho bully took Europe by surprise http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/haiders-deputy-reveals-gay-affair-969492.html . I think this particular photograph says rather a lot http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2012/04/laugh-of-the-day/ but then too many people tend to take things at face value. Strange, isn’t it, how there were no gay or bisexual Maltese men who would today be in their 90s. Just as there were no lesbians among our contemporaries, until suddenly there were quite a few when that particular taboo was broken. I think some people just had to take a decision about what they wanted to be, and stuck to it. Things are different now.]
And so the last bubble bursts with a deafening bang.
Gaddafi was quite a looker at the time. Is that what made us, mere mortals, brothers?
[Daphne – Gaddafi was another one who preferred the company of young men. One of his catamites was interviewed by a British broadsheet during the Libyan war last year. He was taken on while still a teenager (and not gay, incidentally) and the gist of his story was how his life was ruined. What were those fetish uniforms and fancy outfits all about, do you think? The painter Francis Bacon, who doubtless could see it, was famously quoted as having said in an interview that he would like “to f**k the pants off Colonel Gaddafi”. That took people by surprise at the time, though not now. Now we look back and think that it was so bloody obvious that we must have been blind or really naive not to interpret things correctly. I mean, Gaddafi was so very camp.]
Then there’s the young Kim Jong il, cinema buff with a fetish for medals and Wella hair colour. He was a ‘mature’ student in Malta at the time.
Maybe they’ll stop gloating how Mintoff decriminalised homosexuality when all he did was to rescind sodomy laws.
Well, with regards to Mintoff ousting Boffa, it is a known fact that Mintoff had accused Boffa of incest.
Yes Marco let’s talk about how Mintoff ousted Boffa. It makes interesting reading. From the way he sabotaged the Labour government of the day using his parliamentary seat to the obscene insinuations he made in public about his personal life.
Interesting how the man ended his career the way he started it. He brought down the Labour government no less than 3 times and one of those times had the effect of handing us back to British rule (for all the claims that he freed us from them)
We did not need another eulogy on Mintoff. There have been enough of those already. You claim the end leaves the unbiased viewer with a bad taste. Your very suggestion as to what should have been edited out and what should have been put in, shows how biased you actually are.
The truth is that it left you with a bad taste because it does not show Mintoff for the hero that you think he was. There are two sides to every coin, and this shows just that. Perhaps not in all the detail one would want (to both sides of the coin) That would need a TV series not a one hour documentary.
Even the conclusion attempts to show both sides of the coin. You cannot just pick out what you like and disregard the rest as it does not fit in with what you wanted to see.
To do so would be economical with the truth and would disregard the pain that a good part of the population still feels.
This film goes that one big step further and acknowledges that pain. It may not have gone into all the detail one would like to see. That would be beyond its scope.
The controversy is due to the fact that the fundamentalist faction in the Labour camp will rubbish and vilify anyone that dares step out of line and point out anything negative in respect to their sacred cow.
The young lot who have no experience of Mintoff but from their parents and saw in him some sort of revolutionary are also disappointed. No sexy Che Guevara here. Chances are even those who despise Mintoff will be disappointed.
As for Lino Spiteri – yes he writes well but the politician in him got the better of him. What person who is a main interviewee for a film takes so long to go and see the film in which he “stars”. He obviously was waiting to see what the reaction would be beyond the real film reviewers (which generally all gave it a thumbs up by the way – even the Labour newspapers).
His is a dishonest reaction. It is not true that the film just shows the warts of Mintoff. Yana herself liked the first half. He mentions for example the interdict as if it is not covered in the film. It is and he had enough screen time to say what he wanted to.
As for the National Bank story he makes it sound that he alone knows the truth and that only his version counts. The truth is he is an interested party and his own actions could be in the spotlight here.
Lino’s writings over the past years have made him come across as being moderate. However, with an election approaching and the indications being that the new government will be a Labour one, his tune has recently changed.
This was just another of those articles. To quote one of the commentators on the Times – was Lino scared of retribution or was he protecting his own legacy?
What you say about Lino Spiteri is true.
” He was domineering, and under his watch bad things happened….”
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/…/Dear-Dom-dear-dear-dear-.41469...
Who else would describe what happend in the seventies and eighties as ‘bad things’? They were crimes not just bad.
“
He must be fond of those times as well.