Grumpy Old Men

There was a grimly humorous video that I once on the Internet of two pensioners socking it to each other over some trivial dispute. That’s what always comes to mind when Kenneth Wain throws himself into an unseemly scrap with another similarly senile old codger. The only unfortunate difference being that these encounters are far from funny, though attentive reading does reveal a veneer of cruelty and pettiness that rightly belongs in the playgrounds of infant schools, though the Times of Malta is probably an adequate surrogate.

The latest extended slinging match is between the self-appointed Renaissance man Kenneth Wain in the red corner and haughty sot Jojo Mifsud Bonnici in the blue corner. The dispute has gone back further than the Times archives serve one to link, but suffice it to say the unprompted exchange on constitutional reform has had nobody on the edge of their seat. What is interesting is the childish in which neither party is prepared to let the whole thing go. Today, Wain denounces Mifsud Bonnici’s own reply to an earlier letter by Wain, and so on. With the presumptuousness of a megalomaniac convinced of his own importance, Wain begins not by setting the context, but by launching a thinly and badly veiled attack on Mifsud Bonnici:

I regret that Giuseppe Mifsud Bonnici was offended that I described him as a "dyed-in-the wool conservative". "Dyed-in-the-wool" simply means confirmed and unchangeable and that is what I meant.

As is fitting with these sub-academic squabbles, he proceeds by clarifying a semantic issue raised in an article he wrote as little as two months ago. After clumsily bumbling through cack-handed elucidation with his trademark leaden wit, Wain finally arrives at the fruit of his month-long labour; a cursory root around the Internet that almost certainly consisted of writing the word “constitution” in Wikipedia and Google:

Not being a constitutional expert I went to my on-line encyclopaedia to take his challenge up. It told me that constitutional amendments are made in different ways but "In jurisdictions with 'rigid' or 'entrenched' constitutions amendments require a special procedure different from that used for enacting ordinary laws".

If it were anybody else, complete ignorance on the subject under debate might defer the correspondent from venturing into a handbagging fit, but such modesty is ever the stranger to Professor Wain. The truth, of course, is that expertise comes a distant second in Wain’s priorities to the exigencies of flinging some abuse at someone. And why not? He excels even himself, however, when implying that Mifsud Bonnici is a closet Nazi sympathizer. His objection to Mifsud Bonnici’s affinity for the notion of natural law circuitously leads to the conclusion that such people’s “political descendants (Nazis, white supremacists etc.) have held similar assumptions in more contemporary times with tragic consequences.” Stuff like that must be dynamite for Mifsud Bonnici’s legal brain, which has all the processing abilities of a ZX Spectrum.

The letter that inspired this nonsense in the first place was no less picky and tedious, however, a fact happily signaled by the opening sentence, which almost invites the readers to mind their own business:

Looking at Kenneth Wain's article (November 1) in reply to what I had written (September 13), I have the following remarks to make.

I did say it is incorrect to call the derivation of "ought" from "is" the "naturalistic fallacy". I did so as I follow what Prof. Finnis says on this misnomer.

Where Wain gave page references to Kant’s 1992 edition of “an essay on Enlightenment” (ironically enough, not a very enlightening reference), Mifsud Bonnici directs us to Professor Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights. At this point, you begin to sympathize for the two academic dames, as they have obviously not had the privilege of ever making the acquaintance of an editor worthy of that title. An editor, for anybody who doesn’t yet know, is that man or woman whose job it is to read the articles and cut, reject, re-write and/or amend as necessary. When these clowns are permitted to flaunt their supposed erudition at the expense of even a faintly structured column, you have to wonder why the editor is letting them embarrass themselves in this way. Without wanting to sound like a cheerleader for dumbing down, how is it that the Times editor cannot find anybody that can write in a comprehensible, or competent even, way on topics about which people could probably be made to take an active interest?

For now, we await the next salvo. Turn Joseph Mifsud Bonnici.