Beneath an on-line news report of the concert to be given by Joseph Calleja and Michael Bolton there is a stream of sneering, negative comments. Most of them are of the iss hej variety: iss hej the most expensive tickets are e200; iss hej for the e35 tickets you only get to stand (and do you get a free pair of binoculars to see the stage?); iss hej in other countries you can go to this kind of concert for free; iss hej might as well go to Glastonbury at those prices; iss hej the organisers are going to make a profit (and heaven forbid that should be allowed); iss hej...you get the drift.
It made me want to yell: for heaven’s sake, nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to go. Stay home. And then somebody else did just that: pointing out in capital letters that those who don’t like it can lump it. AND DON’T INTERFERE IN WHAT OTHERS CHOOSE TO DO.
I found the exchange interesting, in that it reveals the scant understanding many people in Malta have of how business works, of the finance required for initiatives of this nature, and of how nothing can possibly be free except the elements. The naivety is astonishing. One man actually demanded that this concert be free because “similar” open-air concerts in Rome are free. Clearly, he doesn’t understand the mechanisms at work here. Free mega-concerts are rare events and they are always driven by a purpose, either publicity for someone or something, or a major celebration. The state does not embroil itself in the organisation and vast expense of staging free concerts for the alienation (not a translation of the Maltese aljenazzjoni) and amusement of the populace, a sort of panem et circenses for the 21st century.
Free concerts may be free to the people who attend, but they are not free in any other respect. Everyone has to be paid. There are mammoth costs in terms of equipment, lighting, sound, the stage, hundreds of people involved in the organisation and, of course, the fees and expenses of the performers themselves. In the case of “free” concerts, this money comes from international conglomerates which sponsor the event in return for some serious publicity and branding. But finding the money is not enough. There must also be motivation. If there is no particular purpose for a free concert, like a major celebration by the state, a prominent anniversary, or some such, then why on earth would anyone bother to organise it, even if the sponsorship money were forthcoming? Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, hey, I think I’ll organise a free concert, bust a gut and give myself a stroke, take on a huge amount of risk, eat up all my time, kill myself trying to sell the idea to sponsors, and not make a cent out of it. I’ll do it just for fun, just so that the sort of people who whine beneath the news reports on-line don’t have to pay e35 for a ticket and can spend the money on cigarettes and scratch cards or a pizza for the family instead.
Without the profit motive, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen. Why would the organisers bother? The people spewing out their negative comments don’t seem to understand this basic principle. They imagine that somewhere in the troglodytic terrain beneath Rabat there’s a grotto stuffed full of Fr Christmas’s little helpers, ready and willing to provide things for free to Mr Whine and Miss Whinge.
Something else the moaners don’t understand is that businesses exist to maximise profits. So if the organisers can sell tickets at e200, not only are they entitled to do so, but they should do so in the interest of the company they are running and its shareholders. They must not sell tickets in the privileged circle for e100 if they can sell them for e200. They are under no obligation whatsoever to offer cheap tickets at e35 – and yes, that’s damned cheap by any standards for a concert by Joseph Calleja and Michael Bolton - but if they have worked out the numbers and believe that by doing so they will increase their profit without causing problems, then it’s what they should do, and they’ve done it.
Fascinatingly, some of those who are demanding that this concert be free are the very same ones who are sarcastically dismissing the idea of buying a e35 ticket (free binoculars, anyone?) because it means they’ll be standing at the back of a crowd of “one thousand”. You can spot the gap in their reasoning: with a free concert, they’re going to be standing in a crowd of 30,000. It doesn’t take much grey matter to work out that it’s a whole lot better to be in a crowd of a thousand for e35 than in a crowd the size of the last mass meeting before polling-day for free. But the people who appear most eager to bless us with their wisdom beneath on-line news reports are short of that stuff.
***
Thinking isn’t taught at school, though it should be, and it shows. I am beginning to realise that the swarm of people who comment on the internet about irregular migrants – the black variety, not Marlinda from Ukraine – genuinely do not understand the issues, principles and laws involved. All of that is beyond them. They jump to conclusions. They extrapolate from permissible behaviour at the level of the household to permissible behaviour at the level of the state. Their declarations, invariably misspelled, ill-constructed and liberally peppered with multiple interrogation and exclamation marks, are complete non sequiturs. One of the most popular is the statement that if a pregnant woman is “so irresponsible” as to get into a rickety boat somewhere on the southern shore of the Mediterranean littoral and try to make it to Italy in January, then the consequences are her problem and not ours and we are not obliged to rescue her from certain death even if she is in Maltese waters.
The same non-argument would apply to men who go snorkelling in stormy weather round our coast, to people who hang-glide or abseil, and even to those who, as in a notorious recent case, go out fishing miles away from Malta with a child on board and no safety or emergency equipment, resulting in four deaths, including that of the child.
But of course, that non-argument doesn’t hold water to begin with. The state’s obligation to rescue people in distress at sea, or on land for that matter, does not derive from whether the individuals in question have behaved responsibly. Nobody in his right mind would insist on leaving an inept climber stranded halfway up a cliff-face to die, on the grounds that it was his decision to try scaling the cliff in the first place. Yet the people insisting on just this kind of reaction to those in peril on the sea appear to be in their right mind. I can conclude only that it is because they do not understand the magnitude of what they are saying that they go ahead and say it: “Abandon them to their fate because they brought it on themselves.” Besides, dangerous sports are hobbies, done just for fun, while nobody crosses the Sahara and gets into an open boat to cross the Mediterranean in January just for adrenalin rush like in those old Pepsi Max ads, but because the alternative is so much worse.
I was particularly appalled by the comments posted beneath an on-line report of how a pregnant woman was airlifted from a tanker by helicopter in darkness, when her health deteriorated and the rescue couldn’t wait until the weather was calmer. The wind and the sea were wild that night. The woman had to be winched up and the report described the operation as risky and dangerous. Immediately, the comments flew in. Does she have medical insurance? Iss hej, she’s going to be treated at Mater Dei off our backs? This is why we have to wait so long in queues at the hospital (that’s right, because of all the pregnant Africans who have been winched off tankers in storms in the middle of the night). She should have been left to her fate. Who told her to get into that boat? She should have stayed where she was. Send her back. The authorities should have put food in that boat and turned it back towards Libya.
An Englishman put in with a comment, and for once he wasn’t a supporter of the National Front or somebody telling us why we should not allow “your island” to be over-run by the politically correct equivalent of Pakis, wogs, wops and dagoes (oh, sorry – that’s us). “What alternative do you propose for this woman?” he wrote. “A manger in a stable? I see that nothing much has changed in 2009 years.” It sailed right over their heads. They just didn’t get it.