Wash your hands

It's fascinating how some people seem to have memories that have an affinity with the attention span of a teenager. Back in the day when Mintoffian Socialism ruled the land and when good men and true waited by their (black-and-white) tellies to find out what the dear fellow had in store for them, it was highly advantageous to be a supporter of the powers that were and of certain elements of said powers that were in particular.

Consequentially on this perception, all manner of goodies flowed from the table of plenty, as if by magic, and to hell and back in a hand-basket if anyone else's rights were trampled on. If there was a house you fancied, you made obeisance to whichever minister it was who held sway over the disposal by requisition of the housing stock and, as if by magic, you were able to move in, held aloft as if by angels.

If you wanted a colour telly, the likes of which were supposed only to have been imported over Dom Mintoff's dead body - and this was not the only reason people wanted one - a whisper in the appropriate ministerial shell-like and, lo and behold, as by magic, your set soon found its way to your door.

And so on, and so forth, magic tricks being performed as if they were going out of fashion, all for those whose love for the powerful was undying.

So it's really awfully comic to see such people, who continue to infest society with their insidious ways of doing things, having a jolly good whine because they're no longer - and about time too - going to be allowed to carry on enjoying the fruits of the conjuring their magician patrons had produced for them.

Changing tack abruptly, did you notice some of the comments which followed the online report last Wednesday on the vandalism in the Kirkop cemetery? Not the ones lamenting the ever-increasing tendency of some miscreants or other to vandalise what isn't theirs, or the ones making the relatively obscure point that all this is a result of the increase of materiality over spirituality, these were fair enough points.

No, the comments that caught my eye were the ones that hinted that these brutish acts were somehow anti-Christian, coupling them with the spate of thefts of those hideous plastic crib things that have blighted roundabouts and whatever in a number of places.

What utter rubbish. There was even one commenter who made what must have seemed to him to have been the telling point that this was all a result of political correctness gone mad, echoing the xenophobic idiocies the English tabloids regurgitate every so often, generally around this time of the year, about Christmas being banned because it offends Muslims or Jews or Sikhs or Rastafarians or Jedi Knights.

Sometimes you wonder whether, if Jesus were to have landed up in Malta in 2008, somewhere in Marsa, we wouldn't have been on the side of the ones screeching "crucify him, crucify him" in about 33 years' time.

Is it time for a spot of gun control, or what? Leaving aside my distaste for hunting, which is well documented enough, has this recent spate of - sometimes fatal - shootings been the result of there being so many shotguns all over the place? My initial thoughts on this were that it is but, on reflection, and on being informed that, in fact, most of the weapons used were not, in fact, registered, it would seem that there's more to this than I first thought.

It's not exactly a great thing to have guns lying around within easy reach of anyone, of course; it's not as if we're at the outer reaches of civilisation where you need to shoot your dinner or the beast that's trying to make you its dinner but, equally, it's not as if all the shootings we've had recently were carried out by people using their own guns.

Perhaps an idea might be for a serious amnesty to be put in place, encouraging people to hand in their illegal weapons (and to snitch on anyone they suspect of having one) following which a central depository system could be devised, making it a bit less easy for anyone with violent intent to get his (almost always his) hands on a killing machine.

Have a good start to the New Year - and keep safe.

imbocca@gmail.com, www.timesofmalta.com/blogs