Gladiators are not things of the past, and nor is the public’s thrilled enjoyment of their performances, which carry the ever-present risk of death. Their forms of combat have become infinitely more sophisticated than in the days when men tore each other to pieces or fought hungry lions in the arena of amphitheatres across the Roman Empire.
Yet they are gladiators still, and the sentiments of those who watch them are not much more refined than those of the baying Roman hordes who needed their circuses to keep them from getting restless. Getting pleasure from watching people risk their lives is as ugly now as it was then, and no more of a spectacle for civilised people, though the machines they use can only be the result of a highly sophisticated civilisation.
Today’s gladiators perform of their own free will, and are not forced into risking their lives for the entertainment of the masses. There will be, always, individuals who are hooked on adrenalin, just as there are those who are addicted to the endorphin rush that comes from punishing the body with hard exercise, the thrill that comes from various forms of illicit or illegal sex, or the chemical mood changes generated by banned drugs and legal alcohol. I don’t think they should be encouraged.
When I hear of individuals who scale the exterior of the world’s tallest buildings, walk a tightrope between two skyscrapers, or jump from great heights tied to a rubber rope, my first thought is not of admiration but rather the opposite. Millions of people in the developing world are struggling desperately to hold on to their lives. Risk is something they live with 24 hours a day. When every morning brings high odds that you might die by nightfall, you don’t play dangerous games to give yourself a rush.
It is difficult to feel positively about the grown-up spoiled “children” of developed economies, who choose to make their life more exciting by putting it at risk. Those who are driven all their lives to be wild or dramatic, and to live on the edge, are in the end more boring than those who sit on sofas and watch television. They are essentially selfish and one-dimensional – and I won’t even get into the subject of what I think about those who climb the Everest when they have a spouse and small children back home.
Two 21st-century gladiators collided in mid-air some days ago over Malta, and one of them died. The other was plucked from the water by the rescue services and brought to shore on a dinghy, waving at on-lookers.
I cannot speak for others, but I imagine I was supposed to react to this man’s blessed survival and rescue in much the same way as to that of an 18-year-old crewman with hypothermia, found by chance in the Atlantic Ocean after his ship had been torpedoed by the enemy. I didn’t. I won’t tell you what my reaction was, but it was roughly akin to the one I had on finding out that my then young sons had been taking their home-made go-kart downhill round a blind corner into oncoming traffic for a thrill.
On seeing the pictures of that pilot waving in the dinghy, I thought what a shame it is that middle-aged men can’t have their bottoms smacked hard and their PlayStation consoles confiscated by their irate mothers. The world would be a better place for it. Going down as a fighter pilot is one thing; going down because you’re seeking a thrill is another thing altogether.
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This kind of excitement is inevitably attractive though admittedly, I can’t see the attraction. Boys are certainly more prone to it than girls, and some boys just never grow up. Girls are programmed to look and then leap. Boys just leap. Driving towards a by-pass tunnel some weeks ago, I saw a teenage boy jump from the top straight into the traffic. It was obvious that he’d done it to avoid the bother of reaching the other side by normal means. My first thought was that a girl would never do something like that, but a lot of boys wouldn’t even think twice. We were such frequent visitors to the local polyclinic and the accident and emergency room at St Luke’s Hospital that, nowadays, I would have been reported under suspicions of child abuse. It was the same when we were kids. The boys in our street-gang were invariably covered in scratches and grazes, with blood gushing out of a head-wound and limbs in plaster or in a sling.
Look at the news reports of children who are blown up by old bombs or burnt by old fireworks found while playing, and they are almost always boys. A boy’s first instinct on coming across something like this is to pick it up and find out what it is. A girl’s instinct is to back off and be suspicious until she knows what it is.
We don’t see this difference between the genders in childhood so much anymore because all children are over-protected and ferried between one safe and supervised activity and another, when they are not at home. Recently I met a set of parents who insist that their five-year-old daughter wears a helmet and protective pads for her elbows, knees and shins when she roller-skates up and down the short corridors of her own home, and who send her to the bathroom to wash her hands with soap each time she touches the family dog.
Men kill themselves while racing power-boats and Formula One cars – the modern-day equivalent of the dangerous chariot races round the Circus Maximus in Rome, depicted so vividly in the old film Ben Hur. They battle like gladiators in their stunt-planes, and die or are maimed. No government can risk stopping it, no more than the Roman rulers could risk stopping the games and fights that alienated the masses from the harshness of their lives.
So modern governments clamp down on the everyday lives of the general public instead, which is why we are obliged by law, under penalty of a fine, to wear a seatbelt while crawling 100 metres down a busy main road to the supermarket, in a car that is built like an armed vehicle.
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My household help arrived the other day incensed because of an even more absurd disparity between the uncontrolled excesses of the few and the petty control of the many. One Saturday morning she answered a knock at her door to find a local warden outside. Stray cats in the street were being fed – there was evidence in the form of three empty margarine tubs under a car nearby – and he demanded to know whether she was the guilty party.
When she confessed, he instructed her to remove the tubs at once. She asked him whether she was to leave the feral cats to starve, or throw their food directly onto the pavement, which still left her with the problem of what to put their water in. “I don’t care,” he replied, “as long as I don’t see those margarine tubs there any longer.”
If you are a warden, I suppose it is easier to spend your working hours checking under parked cars for dangerous margarine tubs placed there by subversive cat-feeders, rather than chasing smoke-billowing trucks and buses driven by aggressive men who are larger than you are, or harassing those who think it’s all right to cover an entire neighbourhood in dust when they demolish their buildings.
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Now I see from the newspaper that a woman who was rinsing her car in the driveway of her home also got a knock on the door. This time, it was two men from the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, who told her that she would be fined Lm25 for sullying the street with her water. As I am writing this, it is pouring with rain and I am wondering whether Mepa has all its officials out en masse, fining people for the water that’s running off their roofs or out of their drives and into the streets of Malta. They might be thinking about it, given that they can’t very well fine the heavens.
It reminds me of the day I was apprehended for having stopped my car by a pile of rubbish bags and placed my own rubbish bag on it. The warden stood in front of my car door to prevent my escape, brandished his ticketing machine and demanded to know my name and my identity card number. I told him that he had no right to ask for my personal information or to prevent me from getting back into my car, because I hadn’t committed a crime and he wasn’t a police officer, and would he please stand aside, failing which I would have to push him away from the door or call the police.
As I drove off, I could see him punching in my car number to obtain my personal information (and even that is a horrendous invasion of privacy).
At the tribunal hearing, the warden stood up and accused me of soiling a public road by dumping rubbish, resisting his attempts to wrest information from me, and disobeying orders. He made it sound as though I had driven into the middle of Blata l-Bajda with a truck full of building debris, tipped the contents onto the roundabout in broad daylight, and then assaulted him with a crowbar.
The man hearing the case looked at me with a raised eyebrow, but when I explained what had happened, I could tell he was trying hard not to laugh. “Let me get this straight,” he told the warden, “you apprehended her and are insisting that she should be fined because she placed a neatly-tied-up rubbish bag, containing her household waste, on a pile of other rubbish-bags that had been grouped together for collection?” “Yes, but she was disposing of her rubbish in a public place. That’s what the rules say.” The head of the tribunal shook his head in despair and called the next case.