Clean Water for Everyone

I got this video from a post by Luan Galani on the Thinkaboutit site. It is too good not to share. Sometimes (just sometimes) thinking differently helps. The figures are astounding.

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Open Document – the Divorce Arguments

Here is the blogging equivalent of linux. In order to contribute to the multilayered discussion (even if we think that there is nothing really to discuss at a principle level) we are providing a beta version chart of the arguments that will have to be dealt with and choices that have to be made in the Divorce Debate. Please note that this is a chart – some of the beliefs mentioned in the chart are our own, not all. Although we may seem schizophrenic at times and possessed of a multiple-personality we cannot possibly be held liable for all of them at once. Feel free to suggest changes.

The Arguments

1. Constitutional (the works)

  • Majority Rule: (the belief that) introducing divorce requires some form of approval that is based on the will of the majority of the country.
    • should this be an electoral mandate (party manifesto)?
    • should this be a consultative mandate (consultative referendum)?
    • should this be a propositive mandate (divorce by public referendum)?
      • Requires constitutional change, PLPN barrier
    • can it be subjected to confirmation (abrogative referendum)?
      • already exists, no PLPN barrier
  • Minority Right: (the belief that) introducing divorce is not a matter of majority decision. Divorce should be an accessible right to the persons who want to avail themselves of this right – the majority cannot impose its will on the minority.
    • should this be by an electoral mandate (party manifesto)?
      • Time-barred (at least 2013), PLPN barrier (none of the two seems prone to include a commitment to introduce divorce as a government bill), Private Members’ Bill would not work
    • should there be a consultative/propositive measure anyway?
      • no longer useful once you accept it is right for the minority you accept the argument that the majority/minority will need not be quantified
    • can it be subjected to confirmation (abrogative referendum)?
      • it already exists, no PLPN barrier
    • Is Private Members’ Bill feasible?
      • outside the issue of mandate but raises question of duty for other parliamentarians, still forces debate
    • a majority vote of current members of Parliament should suffice
      • MPs are representatives (not delegates) and are voted to represent (The country’s constitution does not recognise political parties. How much less, then, does it recognise the electoral programmes of those political parties. Party electoral programmes have no force of law. A political party need not have a manifesto at all. – (from the Runs)) see Spiteri – Wrong Reactions after divorce shell-shock

The Values (Morality, Religion and Tradition)

  • Divorce as a personal issue
    • the right to remarry/second chance argument (see Cassar – When the trust is gone)
    • the right to reset civil status and ancillary rights beyond patchwork measures (cohabitation)
    • the right to determine one’s own lifestyle choices
    • divorce as closure (Some people are interested in divorce because they do not want to be party to something that’s no more than a legal fiction).
  • Divorce as a social curse
    • the damaging effects of divorce (and consequences)
    • the potential increase in divorce (vs separation statistics)
    • the devaluation of the married unit
  • Divorce as religious anathema
  • Myths
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J'accuse: A nation divorced from reality

A few months ago I mentioned, in an interview on Dissett, that blogs were holding a mirror up to our society and that our society did not like what it saw. The process of reflection has been going on for some time now and whether it is the sudden urgency with which we are discussing Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s Bill or whether we are lost in the aftermath of the Stitching decision in court, we are constantly confronted with a picture of Maltese society – warts and all.

Much has been made of this idea that the battle between conservatives and progressives has reached its defining moment, but there is more to it than the centuries-old battle between preservation and change. While following debates on both divorce and censorship over the past week, I have noticed a trend in some of the arguments. Both subjects deal with specific values and bring to the discussion table a plethora of issues that have for a long time been dealt with quietly and away from the public eye. There lies an important point for this argument. I harbour a strong suspicion that one field in this debate – that of the conservative elements who are normally both anti-divorce and pro-censorship – is firmly rooted in denial.

This denial is built around a permanent incapacity to reconcile the facts thrown at them daily by the world around them with the principles and dogmas that they have been brought up to regurgitate. There is an innate inability to question and examine the unfamiliar allied with an ability to blot out huge portions of their own experience that would be incongruous with the very principles they would love to follow. It’s complicated. But you’ll soon see what I mean.

I can’t believe it’s not Shakespeare

Back in the time when I could play football for hours during break without fearing for life and limb, I used to return to my fourth form English literature lessons looking forward to the latest text on offer. I still vividly remember a particular play about a dysfunctional, murderous couple who were never up to any good. The woman (should I say woman?) in particular was quite a devil of a woman. To this day I am impressed by the passage of the play where she invokes the spirits to unsex her pronto and to transform her into the very embodiment of cruelty that is bereft of any remorse – a machine honed to commit any form of evil without any pangs of conscience.

That a woman would be prepared to relinquish her very own sex in order to become a perfect evil machine was surprising enough. There was more though. She then proceeds to invite murderers to come suckle from her breasts that, thanks to the aforementioned transformation, no longer provided maternal milk but had been transformed into a source of gall. Gall being of course the mediaeval word for wrath, anger, hatred… you get my drift.

Behind every great man lies a great woman. With this couple the woman is both schemer and mastermind, egging on a weak-willed husband to murder and remorseless backstabbing for the sake of power. When her husband’s will seems to wane and when he seems to be reneging on his conspiratorial promises, she once again provides him with an inspiring speech. Well, inspiring is one way of putting it. What she does tell her pussy-footing husband is that if it was her being held to her word, she would do so even if she had promised to bash the brains of her own infant. Her nonchalance is legendarily spine-chilling. She has “given suck” she says and “knows how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me”, but she would still “while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this”.

A charming Lady she must have been, no doubt, this Mrs Macbeth. For yes messieurs et mesdames, this devilish dysfunctional couple is none other than the ill-fated Thane of Cawdor, Glamis, etc and his belovèd wife, and the play in question was written by the much acclaimed Bard of Avon himself – one Mr Shakespeare William of Stratford-upon-Avon. Given that the shenanigans to which these two got up could easily fall within the parameters of dangerous sexual perversions, as well as the imagery of assault and murder of suckling babes, it is a wonder how our English teacher – good, old Ms T. Friggieri – managed to present this play to a class of young impressionable adolescents without too much trouble.

Censor this?

Even if Ms Friggieri had the text whipped from her hands by Malta’s punctilious Bord ta’ Klassifika ta’ Pellikoli u Palk (hard one that, given that she is also the chairperson of said board), we could always fall back on William Golding’s magnificent Lord of the Flies and the wonderful metaphor of collective sexual climax among shipwrecked pre-adolescent boys as they stab away at a pig while being carried away in an ecstasy of violent and murderous pleasures. Who ever said school literature was boring? I wonder what the kids at Saint Aloysius’ College are reading today in the post-Stitching world. And will the Jesuits take the pupils on a trip to the cinema over Easter to watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ replete with exaggerated scenes of violence and sadistic suffering far beyond anything found in the Scriptures?

Gibson, Golding and Shakespeare. All use their medium to deliver a message. The audience is not expected to sit back and literally consume all that is set out before it but is rather expected to question the content. The complex characters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth expose the dangers of a quest for power – Tolkien gives us the Ring, Shakespeare gives us an unsexed half-demonic woman prepared to bash the brains of her own suckling offspring. Golding examines humanity at its most crude and Gibson? Well, Gibson took the narrative of the suffering of the Son of God and exaggerated it beyond recognition. By the very standards imposed by the Stitching decision, Gibson’s film should never have made it to the silver screens in Malta (nor, should we really be punctilious, should most tracts of the Bible).

I could go on. The list is endless. As Rupert Cefai rightly pointed out, we might be the victims of our own hypocrisy. We would be prepared to censor the portrayal of a father lifting a dagger to the skies about to murder his own son as being “violent” and “offensive to sentiments”, but we might change tack if we called the dad Abraham and the son Isaac. Every narrative has its medium and, yes, some are quite shocking. But the mere fact that they are intended to provoke does not mean that they are “bad” or “censurable”. In the end we must ask the question: Are we protecting our values or are we cushioning ignorance? The debate (unfortunately) continues.

He ain’t heavy, he’s my Jeffrey

Michael Briguglio, AD’s chairman, penned a brilliant article last Friday called “Censoring (post)-Modernity” and you can find it on www.mikes-beat.blogspot.com. In the article, he argues that when referring to “Maltese civilisation” the Court that gave us the Stitching decision was actually referring to “the dominant interests of the dominant institutions in Malta”. It goes without saying that, having written of the dangers of the stranglehold of bipartisan politics in Malta for over five years, J’accuse is in full agreement with Mike. The mainstream of both political parties is unable to deal with substantial issues such as divorce or the latest questions of censorship.

The traditionalist stranglehold must not necessarily be seen with a chiaroscuro sense of “good or evil”. It does, however, threaten to choke the rights and expressions of a different (and growing) minority aspiring to a more liberal (or if you like a toned down term, a more personal) lifestyle. This is the unrepresented minority that is not content with having others think for itself. It’s the same unrepresented minority that would like to be provoked and challenged with new ideas and which believes that the building block of society deserves a shot at a second chance if it is broken, and irretrievably so. It believes in not imposing its values and thoughts on others but, ironically, it also still feels part of the social fabric that keeps us all together.

Which brings me to JPO (abbreviation for convenience) and his Bill. It’s clumsy and elegant at the same time. It’s oxymoronically magnificent and has shocked the lethargic dinosaurs plodding at the head of Mike’s “dominant institutions” into action. Shocked was GonziPN (the man, the label and the immediate entourage) by the sudden need to take a stand without faffing away or hiding in a bishop’s frock (plus the lurking danger of a new perceived fragmentation of the party). Shocked was Muscat’s Progressive Party by the sudden realisation that its bluff, with all its flaws and miscalculations, had been called and that the honeymoon with all things progressive would soon be over once the cover has been blown. The lone part-time farmer, journalist and dentist from Zebbug had struck again with a vengeance and hooray for that. Yes, we applaud JPO for this shock treatment. No wonder we chose him as our Personality of the Year in 2008.

The Bill itself has a long way to go and there are many tricks up the sleeves of the dominant institutions before we could actually see a proper divorce bill introduced (hopefully not this cut and paste Irish job). There’s free votes and qualms of conscience, there’s an uphill battle to educate about the tutelage of minority rights, there’s a possible refusal by a Catholic President to sign the bill (an excuse to get out of the way after the recent faux pas?), and then there is the mother of all threats: an abrogative referendum. For if fundamental fanatics like the GoL people can go to extremes to coerce parliamentarians into signing bits of nonsense, how can we not expect equivalent tactics to get a future divorce bill abrogated by busybodies who would tell you when and where to copulate, if they could.

The battle lines have been drawn. Right now we should focus on the debate rather than on the people jumping in and out of the limelight. I for one am grateful for the empowered journals with their mini-video vox pops that persist in their duty to lift the mirror straight into the face of Maltese society but please, please, someone get that Board of Censors to prohibit the use of the phrase “as such” in an interview. This practical debate (fortunately) has begun.

Encyclopaedic

This article threatens to reach the encyclopaedic levels of old and that is because of the two subjects that provoke endless discussion. Do pop over to J’accuse the blog because we have been having quite a few interesting exchanges over the last few weeks. We’ll be writing and blogging from home base (Malta) next week and you’ll be able to hear about the latest ECHR case obliging a state to provide a proper set-up for its residents abroad to be able to vote (cheers to the Runs for the flagging). I pick up my rental car on Thursday morning and I hope that the roads will be a little calmer than has been reported over the last few days. Easy on the gas pedal, guys.

Finally, the World Cup will be one match short of being over by the time you finish reading this article. We will either have Spanish or Dutch celebrations – either way it’s a European victory, which is small consolation for those of us whose hopes lay elsewhere in the beginning. Unlike the eight-limbed cephalopod of note, my predictions for this world cup have been absolutely atrocious but I am still convinced that we have seen some good football. Speaking of the World Cup and Octopi, I leave you with a quote I pulled from Facebook. It’s by a colleague and fellow Juventino Damien Degiorgio:

“I’ve got nothing against Paul but World Cups used to be remembered for a Paul Gascoigne, a Paolo Rossi or Paolo Roberto Falcao, not for Paul the octopus” – brilliant.

(Errata Corrige: Chief Justice Roberts is NOT resigning as erroneously asserted in last week’s J’accuse. Chief Justice is there for life (a bit like a pet) – it is Justice John Stevens who has retired and will be replaced by Elena Kagan. Thanks to Indy readers the Jacobin and John Lane for the quick corrections.)

www.akkuza.com – uncensored, uncut, and unmarried. “Two-thirds of the country is divorced from reality. The rest would vote for divorce.” – from this week’s J’accuse.

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The Penalty (a suggestion)

The rules of Association Football are over a hundred years old but rarely need a revamp. Of course recent improvements in technology have meant an increase in calls for fairer methods to ensure that the original rules are applied more thoroughly. Some may beg to differ since the original rules envisaged a fallible human as referee and not a robot or techno eye in the sky. Having said that you do often get a hunch that the rules of the game could do with a bit of polishing up – which is why the busybodies behind J’accuse (that’s the Royal We) have come up with an alternative use for penalties within the 90 minutes of the game (and possibly also within the 30 minutes of extra time).

The inspiration behind this audacious suggestion is the hunch that all too often penalties seem too harsh a meter with which to mete out punishment to the team having (a) fouled an opponent; (b) handballed  or (c) committed whatever other outrageous crime within the deisgnated area. We also considered the problem of the “penalty seekers” – those strikers or midfielders who float into the penalty box with the deliberate intent to obtain a penalty in their favour by hook or, as is more often the case, by crook.

As with all suggestions to change a century old way of thinking and applying the rules the J’accuse Penalty Rule will of course be as controversial a suggestion as any other but we urge you to look at this option as objectively as you can. Here goes.

Essentially the rule is as follows. Excepting for penalties in a penalty shoot out, any other penalty awarded in the course of a game and successfully converted does not automatically amount to a score goal. The team having converted a penalty will be awarded the goal if, and only if, the opposing team scores a subsequent goal.

Imagine Red United playing Blue City. The score is 0-0 when at the 15th minute, Oscar, the United attacker is brought to the ground by Hatchet, the City defender and the referee points to the spot. Puntov duly converts the penalty. At that point the score remains 0-0 and United are awarded a ghost goal that will only figure on the score sheet should City score a goal in the next seventy-five minutes of play.

So if for example City did score in the sixtieth minute then the score would automatically be 1-1. Even if the Reds had scored more goals in the meantime, let’s say two goals after the converted penalty and City score when Reds are 2-0 up then the score is transformed to 3-1.

This rule would transform the penalty into a defensive rather than attacking bonus in the sense that the team converting the first penalty has not automatically won the match with the penalty but obliges the other team to attack and cancel out the potential conversion.

In order to avoid the abuse of this rule by defences (fouling to keep the match at 0-0) then we could add that two converted penalties would amount to a score independently of whether the other team manages to score a goal in the interim. I.E. two ghost goals = one normal goal.

I know it sounds complicated but for starters it is far simpler than the offside rule and given the low-scoring nature of todays’ game it has an added incentive:

1) Penalties risk being less decisive on the end result – favouring in game goals.

2) The team conceding a penalty is statistically often the more defensive of the two. The rule obliges it to take on a more attacking mentality and avoid the consequences of the penalty.

What do you think?

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Divorce – the Viral

There is of course the adage about lies, damned lies and statistics but it is inevitable that in a discussion on divorce the dreaded ‘s’ word will surface time and again to prove the point of one side or another. Now J’accuse has long declared that its vote in the divorce issue is a thundering “about effin’ time” so our bias in the matter is clear. Having said that it does not mean that we will not fulfill our journalistic duty of presenting you with subjects that might serve to feed the debate further. So here goes one of those instances:

Yesterday’s L’Essentiel (a luxo metro-style journal) carried two articles related to marriage. The first was a reproduction of various articles that have been appearing in the syndicated press about a recent study at a US university concerning the links between divorce and social networking (SN) (geek warning: this is classic social networking not SN of the facebook type – the latter would fall within a smaller circle of our imaginary venn diagram). It would result, from a scientifically conducted experiment, that divorce can be “contagious” along the lines of social networks. Enter the short catchy statements destined to become modern day old wives’ tales as they result from the study:

  1. Divorce tends to spread among the networks of people having already divorced. (Basically divorcing becomes less difficult if everybody else around you is doing it too). Luxembourg seems to follow this rule since the number of divorcees has increased to 45% nowadays from 9.6% in 1970.
  2. Now for the SN effect. Friends of divorcees see the chances of themselves getting divorced within the next 2 years (from their friends divorce) increase to 147%.
  3. If it is your brother or sister who isdivorcing that increases the chances of your own divorce by 22%.
  4. Married parents with children are less influenced by divorces within their social network than childless couples, and the more children the couple has, the less the influence. “Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced,” the report says.
A segment of a social network
Image via Wikipedia

Interesting no? Here is (Yale associate fellow) Rita Watson blogging about the results of the study:

But is the contagion factor the only reason for divorce in later years? Edward O. Laumann suggested that it may also have to do with our age, health and longer life span. A sociology professor at the University of Chicago, he is the analyst for the Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behavior, a survey of 27,500 men and women 40 to 80 years old in 29 countries.

Dr. Laumann explained to me that “in the early 20s those who marry exhibit a two-year age difference. If you plot a graph, you begin to see differences as time passes. Between ages 18 and 45 the gap widens between women and men with regard to age difference in marriage. “At age 44 it becomes interesting, the lines cross at 44 which is when women become less likely to be in a sexual partnership. By age 70 we find that a full 70 percent of women will not have a partner. But if you take a look at the men at age 70, just 35 percent will be without a partner.” He added that “men trade up for younger women. And the more sexually active will die in the arms of a woman, whereas older women often die alone in nursing homes.”

If divorce is looking too good to men, what is wrong with marriage? A theory making headlines these past few weeks is that we simply do not know how to be married. Therefore, the federal government and the military are funding marriage-education programs that are being called successful. A strong dissenting voice sounded in Psychology Today from Bella DePaulo, a social scientist and visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of “Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After.”

When I spoke with Dr. DePaulo, she expressed some frustration with media misinterpretation of studies, in particular the Building Strong Families (BSF) program. “BSF studies were conducted in eight different locations, and the participants were unmarried couples who were expecting a baby or just had one. What was the bottom line from scholars who summarized the results from the more than 5,000 couples? Fifteen months after entering the program, the relationship outcomes of BSF couples were, on average, almost identical to those of couples in the control group.”

She added, “In one of the studies, people were more likely to have broken up and less likely to be living together and not married.” As for the contagious-divorce theory, Dr. DePaulo thinks that “the idea of social norms is potentially important. What people around you do does influence behavior.” If divorce is contagious and marriage programs are failing, here’s hoping that newly divorced and divorcing women are not suddenly looked upon as today’s Typhoid Mary — infecting men with their single status.

The tiny country of Luxembourg might have been tempting for a comparative idea of what would happen in Malta. It is not the case though since attitudes to divorce and marriage here are extremely different to the situation in Malta. Even insofar as entitlement of couples to certain rights – such as tax benefits for the purchase of a house – all that is needed is an official declaration that two people live under the same roof or consider themselves a unit. Cohabitation? C’est quoi? As for the PACS – a social contract for couples that is not marriage, the news yesterday is that the Luxembourg PACS has just been strengthened legally with more rights:

Les couples pacsés auront désormais davantage de droits. Les députés ont voté, jeudi, une loi qui attribue certains droits d’un couple marié aux partenaires.

Ainsi, ils pourront bénéficier de congés pour la mort d’un membre de la famille du partenaire ou prendre un congé sans solde après la naissance d’un enfant. Une Union civile, contractée à l’étranger, sera reconnue au Grand-Duché. Pour les socialistes et les Verts, les changements ne sont pourtant pas suffisants car des inégalités par rapport aux couples mariés subsistes.

Telle la succession qui doit être réglée par un testament entre les partenaires. Depuis l’introduction de l’Union civile en 2004, 92% des couples pacsés sont hétérosexuels. Un projet de loi pour rendre le mariage civil accessible aux couples homosexuels sera déposé la semaine prochaine.

In short the new rights include: bereavement leave upon death of partner, unpaid leave in case of birth of child, civil unions contracted abroad will be recognised in the duchy. Changes still remain to be made such as in the field of inheritance. Since the introduction of the PACS (Civil Union that is not marriage) in 2004, 92% of the couples that have benefited from the union are heterosexual.

You have just been exposed to a flood of statistics. The debate continues….

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Stitching (An Illustrated Conversation)

The debate rages on. Yesterday’s lunchtime discussion veered onto the issue of censorship and the recent Stitching decision. After the break two persons, who I shall call Caius and Titus not to deviate from the subject, resumed the discussion with an exchange of emails. I found the discussion very interesting (and only intervened once between a meeting and another) and would like to share it with the J’accuse readers. You should note that the email exchange kicked off with a reference to a blog post by lawyer Kevin Aquilina that was heavily critical of the play. You can read the post by clicking here before returning to this discussion.

CAIUS: Artikolu tajjeb dwar id-dramm Stitching mill-aspett legali (provides link).

TITUS: L-artiklu (Kevin Aquilina ex chairman tal-awtorità tax-xandir), qrajtu (mhux fid-dettall). Ma impressjonani xejn anzi pjuttost kellu l-effett kuntrarju fuqi. Huwa jsostni li ġej:

1. Uncivilized Use of Language: Rude and vulgar, obscene and blasphemous language is used throughout the play.

2. Glorification of perversion: The play glorifies perversion, depicting it as being the acceptable norm in a civilised society rather than the exception (stitching a woman’s vagina as an act of sexual pleasure; bestiality – having sex with animals; a woman eating another woman’s shit; seeking pleasure in (a) child rape; (b) child murder; (c) having sex with the mothers of the raped and killed children, etc.

3. Disparaging the Right to Life: … the ‘discussion’ in the play on abortion is so valueless and baseless that there can be said to be no recognition of human dignity of the person including the unborn child, bearing also in mind that abortion in Malta is a criminal offence.

4. Sensationalising Perversity and Inhumanity: Both characters (Stu and Abby) are perverse and inhumane: they do not show a single shred of remorse on the killing of Daniel (their first child); they do not appear to be willing to carry out their parental responsibilities as part of their right for respect of family life in order to save the second child from abortion… burning children alive and then killing them and seeing the mothers of the murdered children seduced, fucked, fingered in their arseholes and putting the whole films portraying these heinous criminal acts on the web …

6. Advocating Degradation, Mutilation and Humiliation of Humanity: Abby is continuously degraded and humiliated by Stu in so far as his sexual demands go and in the way how he speaks to her and treats her (he repeatedly calls her a ‘whore’, he requests her to submit her person to various perverse and degrading sexual acts from her and addresses her with no sense of respect or décor);

7. Uncivilized Behaviour: uncivilized behaviour is considered to be normal and acceptable… Some of these conducts constitute criminal offences not only under the Laws of Malta but in other Council of Europe Member States, in Council of Europe Conventions and international criminal law ????????????????????

Re il-vittmi tal-olokawst, is-soltu vera nkun kontra ideat bħal meta bniedem jinnega l-olokawst eċċ, iżda sempliċement il-fatt li l-karattru jammetti li kien iġerrieh għan-nisa sejrin jinqatlu ma hijiex espressjoni ta’ opinjoni. Huwa sempliċement mezz (forsi “in bad taste”) biex juri l-perversità tal-bniedem.

Kollox ma kollox naħseb qrajt u ġejt espost għal dan kollu !!!!

CAIUS: Għaldaqstant huwa ċar li d-dramm juri l-bniedem fl-agħar tiegħu u għalhekk fih hemm kull forma ta’ aġir immorali u illegali, liema aġir huwa kkundannati f’ħafna soċjetajiet. Fil-fehma tiegħu l-arti għandha teżalta u mhux tbaxxi lill-bniedem u turi l-agħar perversitajiet tiegħu.

J’ACCUSE: Quote “Fil-fehma tiegħu l-arti għandha teżalta u mhux tbaxxi lill-bniedem u turi l-agħar perversitajiet tiegħu” Unquote i.e. fil-fehma tieghu l-arti ghandha tigdeb. Nahseb kien imur tajjeb ma mussolini u shabu.

CAIUS: Le mhux tigdeb imma turi l-verita’ fuq il-valur tal-bniedem. Dan il-valur ma jinsabx fl-istinti annimaleski li jbaxxuh.

TITUS: Li tiekol il-ħara għal gost sesswali ma huwiex istint annimalesk. Ma nafx b’annimal li jagħmel hekk … Dak huwa l-bniedem fil-kumplessità tiegħu …

CAIUS: Fil-fatt forsi huwa agħar minn annimalesk, huwa anki kontra n-natura. Għalhekk dak li jiddeskrivi d-dramm ma fihx valur pożittiv.

TITUS: Ok… Mela allura min jimxi kontra n-natura għandu jiġi ċċensurat … L-istess bħal ma niċċensuraw il-perverżjonijiet tagħna … Ninsewhom u ngħixu l-illużjoni li l-bniedem huwa safi minn kull dnub.

Mela r-ritratt tat-tifla taħrab għarwiena minn bomba tan-napalm fil-Vjetnam għandu jiġi ċċensurat għax huwa att agħar minn annimalesk kontra n-natura … (Premju pulitzer 1972).

Pulitzer Prize Winner - 1972

Glorification of perversion

Disparaging the Right to Life:

Advocating Degradation, Mutilation and Humiliation of Humanity:

Uncivilized Behaviour

Iżda xorta jibqa’ l-fatt li għandu valur, mhux biss bħala dokument storiku iżda wkoll minħabba proprju dawn l-affarijiet hawn fuq imsemmija li skont Kevin Aquilina (u int) għandhom iservu bħala bażi għal ċensura …

CAIUS: Fil-fatt hemm liġijiet kontra tali atti.

TITUS: Iva hemm u tajjeb li hemm… imma ma jfissirx li ma tistax tagħmel rappreżentanzi tagħhom jew turi xbihat tagħhom lil pubbliku adult …

***

I end this post with a quote from an essay by Umberto Eco (more next Sunday in the Indy)  called “Hands off My Son”. It is about people who “were unable to distinguish between the Christ of the Gospels and the one of the film (ed. Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ)”:

“To see a representation as the Thing Itself is one of the modern forms of idolatry.” – Eco.

WARNING: The following video clip contains scenes of extreme violence, perversion and inhumanity that may be considered disturbing by certain audiences (the movie did qualify for viewing in Maltese cinemas though so I guess it’s ok).

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