Damned Times, these are dastardly times of the world. We age, we move on, our hair-line recedes into infinity and we get horrendous photos of bikini-clad women on the front page of our leading, daily newspaper. Scandal!
And all this on a Saturday to make it scandalously worse—Saturday is the day when schools are out, so presumably more young, impressionable persons are on the prowl in Maltese households and can view the new look Hugh Hefnerish-style Times. What is next in these nefarious times?
This I am sure will open the floodgates and soon we will have the rector magnificus issuing some ribald magazine to distribute to all his blessed thousands of students. Soon some usually meek local magazine will turn sleek and full of sleaze—maybe Familja Kana giving us the telephone numbers, and best bargains, of all the gentlemen's clubs? Are we losing our plots, going scandalously insane?
I know I look old and decrepit but these degenerate things shock me more than reasonably possible. The old mores of old—of keeping all wrong and wrong-doing nicely packed up under our masking carpet—are going downstream and our morals are being elongated to limits unknown to our very Christian forefathers.
A bikini on the front page of the Times is just the peak of what we can nowadays peek into when we look around us. Back then when I was young and Malta super-holy and wonderfully wholly Catholic, the Times hardly ever featured a woman with more than her face showing. Her visage was enough for us the most impressionable people—there were no busts for us to ogle at. All this was done to save us from filth and to save us from seeing wrong and tempting material and bursting some of our blood vessels.
Even tiny drawings in minute adverts were vetted and if they showed any lasciviousness they were unceremoniously deleted and dumped. When I worked in the advertising world, around thirty years ago, one of our designers had dared draw a tiny woman who was looking out at sea. But he forgot to draw her with a bikini line on her back therefore some hawk-like censor ordered us to draw one on her back as maybe, just maybe, readers could interpret her to be—horror of horrors—topless. Those really were good defenders of all that is right and proper. Back then moralists used to worry even about those imaginary people in a drawing who could have been attracted by the topless woman and tumbled directly from drawing to hell.
Bring back those times immediately or we too will go straight to hell.
Those, as they say, were the days. But they are no more. In fact, besides the Times, even the Vatican seems to have joined the fray of loose ways and letting loose super-disgusting stuff to damn us all.
After my fit on seeing (and staring at, to be able to comment properly in this blog) the bikini on the front page I opened the centrespread of the same paper. Lo and behold I had to hold on to a table to stop me from falling with heart now really failing. There in what was called a peep at the Vatican was a statue of a man with his privates all displayed in unbelievable gory detail. Statue or no statue I think the world—including the Times and the Vatican—is losing its balance.
In the same centrespread there is a picture of the Sistine chapel which, if my memory about such righteousness serves me right, was painted by some dauber called Michelangelo. This corrupter of innocent eyes dared paint a number of women and men with their privates showing. But again if my memory is right some standard-bearer, a great moral-uplifter of a human had some of these figures clothed and superbly veiled.
Michelangelo had given to the world a crass show of nudity and perverse stuff. Thank God for the upright one who painted it over. If only we could haul this great man—or woman—to these shores and get them to cover up the Times' moral decrepitude and all the horrendous bikinis and privates on show.
Save our souls, save our shores from such sickening, sinful stuff.