With Saviour, it's either sex or a straitjacket

I’ve just read Saviour Balzan’s column in Malta Today.

It put me in mind of that day some years ago when a man in Zejtun lost his rag, rushed out into the street with a gun and began letting off volleys indiscriminately.

I concluded after reading it that the plans for his upcoming marriage to somebody he’s been with for just a few months are not going too well.

I didn’t expect that they would.

After all, until fairly recently he was madly in love with another woman and busy chasing her reluctant tail. It took him ages to get the message.

And it hasn’t been that long since he buried his wife of many years, either. That’s a whole load of emotional baggage (and competition) for some woman to take on.

And that’s a shame. Because when Saviour’s getting all the luuuuuurrrrrrrvvve that he needs, his newspaper stabilises into something sort of worthy of the name, and his patent misery dissipates.

Now all the boiling rage and frustration that so afflict him on a near permanent basis, and which lift all too briefly when he has a romantic liaison, are back with a vengeance.

It seems that with Saviour Balzan, it’s either sex or a straitjacket and nothing in between.

It’s interesting too, how Magistrate Herrera has now become ‘Consuelo’ to him and to most of Malta Today. Forsi jieklu l-kirxa flimkien?

Now Saviour wants the prime minister to condemn me publicly. He says in his mad rant that the prime minister doesn’t condemn me because he ‘protects me’.

This goes to show that when you’re raised in a household of Mintoffjani ppatentjati it tends to shape for life your view of democracy.

Saviour poses as a democrat, but when push comes to shove, his Mintoffjan upbringing comes boiling out. Prime ministers do not condemn journalists, still less blogs, in democratic societies, Saviour. These are not the Mintoff years.

I was publicly condemned by a deputy prime minister, once – in 1996. He was Guido de Marco and he called a press conference, filmed for state television (his boss, Eddie Fenech Adami, was away on holiday at the time, and he took advantage of the fact) to roundly condemn me, after which I was sacked as a columnist – surprise! – by The Sunday Times.

And why did he feel an over-riding urge to condemn me in public? Let’s see now. I had written an article called ‘This is not a normal democracy’. In it, I wrote about the negative public perception of a situation in which the deputy prime minister’s daughter had taken up the criminal defence of the man facing trial for planning the attempted murder of the prime minister’s personal assistant.

The deputy prime minister’s public condemnation of me on state television went down so badly, and shocked so many people, that I even had offers of shelter for the night because his virulence was palpable. It cannot have done anything to help the Nationalist Party’s chances in the general election a few weeks later.

When you’re accustomed to wheels turning within wheels, you reach the point where you just don’t see how bad things look to everyone else. Everything is justifiable as long as it is legal, and damn the undermining of trust and the breaking of faith.

Condemn me, please, Mr Prime Minister, forsi Saviour inehhi dik il-balla li ghandu fuq l-istonku.