Fake, fake, fake – fake all the way through

Yesterday’s ‘let’s turn off the Marsa Power Station’ party was yet another exercise in Taghna Lkoll fakery. That power station was shut down a month ago, at the beginning of February.

And what’s more, the Marsa power station hasn’t even been decommissioned, and isn’t going to be. It’s going to be kept fully operational, just not in use, in case their remaining power stations blow up before Electrogas and the dictators in Baku get their act together and build and commission that other one which is nowhere to be seen.

But the timing for a big-splash, expensive party wasn’t right back then. The timing is right for Taghna Lkoll now – to distract people from the fact that the date was meant to celebrate something else entirely: the opening of the gas-fired power station which was their main electoral platform.

But where is that power station? Nowhere. It was meant to open today and they haven’t even started work on it. The consortium meant to be working on it is in itself a tangle, knocking on doors to raise money and still working out who is going to do what, how and when.

So we had a party. Juvenal’s panem et circenses – the Taghna Lkoll style of government, not liberal and contemporary at all but straight out of the remote past.

…the people have abdicated their duties; for the people who once gave out military command, high civil office, legions, everything, now restrain themselves and yearn anxiously for just two things: bread and circuses.

– Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81