The man known as Is-Sej has testified in court and silenced, at last, all those who have insisted over the past four years on giving former judges Noel Arrigo and Patrick Vella the benefit of the doubt. He told how Patrick Vella asked for a bribe of Lm10,000, and then got half that amount, as did Noel Arrigo. He explained how he himself received Lm2000 for acting as the go-between, for he was not the actual briber; that person was a drug trafficker who wanted to have his sentence chopped on appeal. The irony is that Is-Sej said in court: “I know I made a big mistake... Nowadays, I am ashamed to show my face in public and I spent a long time not going out.” Meanwhile, the former judges are everywhere to be seen on the party circuit. Though their shame is far greater than his, apparently they do not feel it. But of course, shame depends on how you are treated by others, and if Maltese society allows them to think that they are still socially acceptable (which they are not), then so be it. Perhaps we confuse our cowardice in being unable to cut people loose, which is as much as they deserve, with forgiveness and Christianity. I rather think that it’s nothing more or less than a feeble spine, and the desire to get on the wrong side of no one, including a couple of disgraced judges.
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The Cabinet has approved a new regulation that will make it illegal for children under 16 to drink alcohol, and making those caught doing so liable to be fined. Up to now, it has been illegal for people to sell alcohol to those under 16, but not illegal for them to drink it. Call me a fool, but that’s the way I think it should have stayed, and I know a fair bit about the subject.
In exposing children to fines and widening the scope of offences for which they can be dragged to court (for drinking a beer, for heaven’s sake!), the government has done once more what it is invariably so good at: picking on the weak because it has failed to control the abuses of the strong. It has simply given up all attempt at slamming down on the Paceville bars and the seedy, sleazy ‘bottle shops’ which sell whole bottles of vodka to kids to drink at the Spinola garden, and transferred the blame to the kids. Yes, those who sell the alcohol are still liable to fines – at least on paper – but we know who is going to get picked up under this new regulation. It’s the children, while those who sold them the drinks go smirking all the way to the bank.
Let me describe the experience of somebody I know very well, whose 14-year-old son was visibly drunk when his parents collected him from a summer night out in St Julian’s at 11pm. (Those who think that 14-year-olds should not be allowed out till that time in August should come down to reality off their little cloud.) He vomited out of the car window, and refused to tell them what he had drunk or where he had bought it. The parents turned the car around and drove straight to the police station at Spinola. They told the boy that if he wouldn’t tell them who had sold him such a large quantity of drink, they would take him inside and he would have to give the police that information himself. The boy named the bar. The parents went inside, with the boy, to file a report. Immediately, they wished they hadn’t, because it only served to undermine their attempt at conveying to the son the full seriousness of the wrong-doing of a barman who sells generous amounts of spirits to children, and also, respect for the authority of the police. The policeman was eating a hobza at his desk, and didn’t bother to stop eating it when he addressed the parents, spewing bits of onion into the air. He then took a swig straight from a plastic bottle of water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The parents could see what their son was thinking: "These are the police?! These are the people whose authority I am supposed to respect?!” The parents filed their report. The policeman looked very annoyed that his sandwich break had been disturbed for a matter which he seemed to consider so very trivial. He scrawled something on a torn piece of paper and then shouted the name of the bar to his side-kick, indicating that several reports had come in about the same place (“Ergajna ghandna rapport dwar dak...”) telling her to go straight up there and check him out. The parents got the feeling that it was done only to shut them up and keep them happy, and that nothing at all would be done about it. In fact, nothing was. They were never called up to give evidence, and neither was their son. They went home with their purpose defeated. Their son had received further proof – and from the police, what’s more – that his parents were clueless idiots who were good only at making a lot of fuss about nothing. And he had received all the reassurance he needed that the authorities turned a blind eye to this kind of thing, even if know-nothing parents did not.
How much easier it is to pick up a 14-year-old with a beer in his hand than to arrest the bar-owners who do nothing about the fact that, on their premises, triple vodkas are sold to school-kids.
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So the image of Christ is going to be stamped on our euro coins. What a surprise. We hope that it will announce to the world that we are Christian. It doesn’t, of course. It merely shows that we are still protesting too much, 1000 years after we ceased to be Muslim. No other country in Europe feels this pressing need to display its Christianity, probably because its Christianity was never in doubt. Yet we, with our mixed Muslim/Christian heritage, our Arabic language, the doubt that hangs over how we became Christian in the first place (probably through conversion from Islam in the Middle Ages), carry this whole thing like an albatross round our necks. We feel the need to repeatedly tell everyone that we’re Christian, just in case they might have any doubt about the fact, and while doing so, we also reassure ourselves. The big fuss about conversion by St Paul conveniently helps us overlook the fact that, if we speak a form of Arabic, then we were probably Muslim to start with. Rather than seeing this as something which makes us more interesting, with a vivid heritage, we think of it as something to be ashamed of. So we broadcast our Christianity and our conversion by St Paul and won’t shut up about it. Yes, we do protest too much. Really, what we wish to tell the world is not so much that we are Christian (in name if not in practice), but that we are not Muslim. And you know what? No one gives a damn whether we’re Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Rosicrucian. Small creatures who are constantly clamouring for attention are very annoying, whether they’re toddlers, dogs, or islands.
Our inability to see ourselves through the eyes of others is really quite profound. We think that by putting Christ on our coins we look like Christians. But we don’t. In the eyes of the democratic world, we look like bigots. My attitude towards a State that puts Christ on its coins is no different than that towards another State that might choose to decorate its money with quotes from the Koran or the name of Mohammed. Religious symbols have no place on the coinage of a country. Or has God suddenly become Caesar, and Caesar, God?
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That said, the conjunction of God with Mammon is curiously Maltese. Our morality has invariably been subject to the pragmatism of survival. And there, perhaps, we have a clue as to how we came to be Arabic-speaking Christians in the first place.
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As somebody who is much concerned with design and aesthetics, I have to let you into a little secret. What really disturbs me about the chosen image is that stylistically, it won’t work on a coin. Giuseppe Mazzuoli’s (yes, the sculptor was Italian, not Maltese) statue of Christ being baptized was conceived and executed as a large image in the round. Now tell me, how is anybody going to render that as one-dimensional engraving on a circular surface one and a half centimetres in diameter? I await the results with trepidation and, I have to confess, a certain amount of glee.