I doubt whether there is a contemporary artist alive today whose style is as instantly recognisable as the Colombian Fernando Botero. His fat, no obese, personages busting out of a matador’s silk embroideries or priestly robes, his moon-faced ladies in mantillas are the hallmark of this imaginative artist who one could say has endorsed a ‘fat is beautiful’ concept, which causes dieticians to throw up their hands in horror.
Yet, it was not only the idyllic Hispanic world that Botero chose to depict but also the stark realities of the battle of the Coca Lords that has, for decades, torn his native Colombia apart. Death and destruction epitomised by street scenes depicting a mass funeral or a pusher caught in crossfire of bullets; a social comment that shocked the world because of the superficially innocent style in which the terrible truth was conveyed.
They say that money is the root of all evil and, yet, money is also unhappily a basic necessity. Despite Pope Francis being on the verge of divesting the Church of all its accumulated worldly goods, rather like what his namesake the Poverello did to his own father, I cannot imagine a world without money.
As it says in the immortal song from Cabaret, “money makes the world go around”. And, yet, we all know in our heart of hearts that we are born without money and we will die without money. Some are born with money, some achieve prosperity but I really don’t know or cannot think of anyone who ever had money thrust upon them; one simply has to scrimmage for it.
The creation of great riches, ill-gotten or no, is the ambition of most human beings. Great riches will buy one everything and anything except immortality.
There is a great deal of money to be made by drug dealing, which is why I suppose these people are called barons; not dukes, not princes, not earls but barons. I get the impression that the type of baron people mean are the medieval barons, the kind of swashbuckling, lascivious, primitive killing machine in armour that one finds in Zoe Oldenburg’s The World Is Not Enough, which I am just finishing.
Men who sent their minions to do their penances for them and who thought nothing about castrating one’s enemy and, yet, were walking contradictions who sold or mortgaged their entire property to ‘take the cross’ to save the Holy Land. They beggared their families and if not dying in battle developing dysentery or worse, serious venereal diseases through consorting with the camp-following prostitutes while, at the same time, they kissed the ground upon which Jesus walked!
Like everywhere else, Malta has its own drug barons and like those anywhere else there exists a savage if not deadly rivalry between them.
Giovanni Bonello, a former judge of the European Court of Human Rights, last week endorsed a stand taken by Alternattiva Demokratika to legalise drugs for personal use and regard the problems that may or may not emanate from drugs as a social problem and not a criminal one.
There is a ton-load of sense in what the learned former judge says and I would, like Ben Elton did in High Society, go one step further: legalise all drugs and make them as cheap and as available as aspirin!
Keep drugs illegal and the temptation for forbidden fruit will keep the illicit stock exchange of organised crime at top levels.
Legalise them and the stocks will plummet and although many people may act like zombies at the beginning the glamour of the clandestine and illicit will fizzle out.
I frankly cannot see this happening. There are too many fortunes at stake. Too many people with concatenated vested interests which ensure that deadly substances will remain available to those who are able to pay dearly for them or those who will be used as runners and pushers to fuel their addictions.
It is indeed a sad, dark and evil world we live in, a world of dog eats dog and some people cannot face it. While religion can offer some consolation, it is the instant anesthetising power of drugs that people tend to prefer as an option.
People who are drug dependent cannot face the realities and tragedies of life and need help. Once in the clutches of a pusher, this vulnerable and troubled spirit is doomed forever. Inexorably drawn into a bottomless chasm of despair, a victim of drug abuse is no criminal but an object of pity and the despair of everyone else around him whom s/he touches.
This is why treating them as criminals should cease. They are not criminals unless they are pushed to it by their addiction and then can we hold them responsible for their actions?
I wonder.
Kenneth Zammit Tabona is Artistic Director of the Valletta International Baroque Festival.