Bottom of the Barrel

The customary tradition at this time of year is for people to promise giving up drink, after a whole festive season of over-indulging. If journalists and commentators have stopped drinking, however, they certainly haven’t given up writing about alcohol. When the year kicked off with the tragic news of the death of Jeanette Mifsud, The Times had the short-lived good taste not to pin it on her presumed drunkenness, limiting the account to details of how she “was celebrating the arrival of 2006 at the Mediterranean Conference Centre when she went out at 2 a.m. for a breath of fresh air after feeling sick”. Logically, one would have assumed the most reprehensible aspect of the affair, what most people would voice their objection to, would have echoed the sentiments of a letter to the Times from Charles Caruana Carabez:

“Jeannette should never have died that way. Someone must be responsible for not putting up discreet decorative railings over the bastions at obvious points. But nobody shall speak out. Panic did make someone put up a pathetic board next to the place where she fell reading "sheer drop", so that it would be seen on the news after the event. Apart from obvious prevention, it sounded like a shrieking disclaimer.”

But good taste, not to speak of common sense, is a limited currency in the Maltese islands, so it wasn’t before long that indictments of the youth drinking culture began to pour into the opinion columns. On the eve of what has been a heavy drinking season since time began, the usual warnings were issued about drink-driving, a habit that most teenagers could hardly be guilty of. As Josianne Azzopardi, Sedqa's Safe programme coordinator, warned before Christmas:

“One should remember that alcohol has two facets. On the positive side, it could help a person to socialise. On the other hand, it could be the cause of harm - such as in traffic accidents.”

But even with the best of advice from Sedqa, nothing is going to save you from a 50-foot drop. And how much the retrospective advice of, say, Evarist Bartolo is hardly likely to save anybody’s life. Not that stopped him from writing Friday’s article in l-orizzont, and offering another contribution to the Times, tastefully entitled “What a gr8 party!” He sanctimoniously piles irrelevance upon irrelevance; asking why people were drinking so much, why there were so many people, if any of the drinks were spiked, and so on. Such idiotic and pointless questions, in fact, that you wonder if Bartolo has ever been to a party, much less a New Year’s bash.

But Bartolo is not alone in missing the point. The Focus column helpfully admonishes the under-aged by telling us “that people under 16 should not be drinking in the first place,” pointedly ignoring the fact that Jeanette Mifsud was a 19-year-old University student.

Meanwhile, Remy Damato could not “let the end-of-year events and, in particular, the horrible death of a young 19-year-old, pass without making a few remarks,” which he did in a 700-word letter about alcohol.

And more Alfred Mifsud and l-avukat Reno Borg, who gracefully makes only a passing mention of drinking. You’d think that all these people lived in a Carthusian cloister, where thinking is not allowed. With social commentators this obtuse, thank God that Paceville isn’t build on the edge of a cliff.