You can figure out that someone grew up in the 1980s in Malta if they bought their cassettes from the monti, remember Eileen Montesin and her puppet Pitsu as a permanent fixture on TVM and as a Labour icon, and were au courant with Italian politicians.

There are a number of reasons for 1980s kids being able to recognise politicos from Flaminio Piccoli to Francesco Cossiga in the pre-Silvio Berlusconi era, when it would become the norm for a politician to own TV channels and hog them.

Mostly there was the fact that TV viewing was restricted to Maltese and Italian channels and the TG1 made a change to the aħbarijiet. Granted, it was only slightly different switching from watching grainy footage of local politicians wearing awfully wide ties and horrendously coloured suits to watching their Italian counterparts wearing equally wide ties and marginally less awful suits, but it was always something.

One of the mainstays of the Italian political scene for aeons was Giovanni Spadolini. A jowly bespectacled Republican – it seemed that he was always occupying some post or another in the musical chairs scenario that is politics.

Maybe it was his seeming permanence in this context that made him a favourite with cartoonists. One of them took to depicting him as a suber-chubby Michelin man-figure in his birthday suit. Every sketch of Spadolini had him cavorting around in the nude without even a painted fig leaf to protect his modesty. It made for a number of amusing cartoons, seeing as he was the last person you would visualise naked.

On one occasion, when Spadolini was minister of defence, he appeared on a talk show to explain why he had sent Italian nationals on a peace-keeping trip to Lebanon. The cartoonist who loved to lampoon him was present on set. At one point, Spadolini was asked if he ever got annoyed at being portrayed as a permanently nude fatty. He answered with a wry smile: “Not at all. Everybody is free to draw me as he deems fit. And then it helps me as people find me to be less fat in reality than the way I am depicted.”

As for barbs about appearance or demeanour, laughing them off is the right way to go

I thought of Spadolini’s elegant reaction when I read that the chief executive of the hunting lobby Lino Farrugia had filed a libel suit against Malta Today over a cartoon he had been featured in. For those of you who missed it, the cartoon shows Farrugia clad in only a T-shirt as he wees in the bushes, while a drone flies overhead. We get a peek at Farrugia’s cartoon bottom, but no more. The cartoon is mildly funny but that’s it. It would hardly change anyone’s opinion of Farrugia. His reputation is what it is – totally woven into his hunting persona.

I would assume that your average reader would have formed an impression of Farrugia by reading his statements and watching his performance on television programmes. Any impression formed on the basis would hardly be swayed because of a glimpse of Farrugia’s cartoon bottom. Yes, he’s relieving himself but that’s not a hanging offence. Farrugia is a big boy, hardly some delicate flower – it’s a bit difficult to imagine him sobbing over his carnet de chasse booklet because of the way his bottom was depicted in print.

Anybody with media nous will realise that Farrugia’s libel suit will attract more attention to the cartoon, and elicit much ribbing. The right way to brush off blatant untruths (which is not the case here) is to ignore them and not to give them too much importance.

As for barbs about appearance or demeanour, laughing them off is the right way to go. Had Farrugia reacted in the same way as Spadolini, the public may have come away with the impression that he had a sense of humour buried somewhere under the camouflage gear.

As it is, readers may feel that there is something more to this libel suit than Farrugia resorting to the courts because he felt he was ridiculed or his reputation tarnished. It smacks of a legal stratagem to prevent further critical articles or cartoons about Farrugia and the hunters, which is precisely the kind of impression that the hunting lobby should be trying to avoid.

The events of previous weeks have led the public image of hunters to be associated with lawlessness and intimidatory tactics. You would think that a chief exponent of the lobby wouldn’t take action to crystalise that impression. And yet here comes this lawsuit doing just that. Rather than shoring up Farrugia’s reputation, this is one libel suit which will boomerang back.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt

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