D.I.V.O.

As tedious types go, there are two great strands. On one hand, you have your mage of inconsequentiality that can will reams of opinion in spite of an utter deficiency of actual beliefs. The other category is the cocktail party bore, whose gargantuan surfeit of views will cause instant mental gout in anybody so foolish as to listen. Austin Sammut, blow-hard that he is, tries to have his cake, eat it, and then shove the remains down his miserable readers' trousers.
Affecting chastely professorial ambivalence, he opens his recent opinion piece on the battered old nag of divorce by disavowing any claims to judgment. The introductory text is reproduced fully so that the reader can see, without having to consult the original article, how Sammut flip flops from meaningless one platitude to another, only to duck the actual task of offering his own utterly pointless perspective:

"The divorce debate has raised its head once again. As expected, this has happened over the years at regular intervals with the arising of every opportunity to peg onto it. It is a debate that will continue for a long time. It is a valid debate. It is not an easy one to decide upon. There are pros and cons and strong arguments on both sides. To make things more complicated (though not necessarily right or wrong) we have the Church ingredient. Quite frankly, I have my views, but no hard and fast position on the issue; but certainly it is an interesting one and worth discussing."


When millennia have passed and future archeologists somehow rescue this text from a sunken National Archive, they will remove their tin foil hats and scratch their heads in wonder at what god of indecision this devolved exemplar might have praised at the feet of.
Incidentally, it must be for just such time-distant chroniclers of the past that Sammut must feel it appropriate to patronize and insult the reader by spinning out no less than 250 words of contextualization of an issue that only an a determined cave dweller could have avoided — a point he makes himself in the very first sentence of the article.
Such tricks are the result of the low cunning that the self-absorbed megalomaniac, who thinks that the paper cannot do with any less than a thousand words of his wisdom, has to resort to. It is nothing more than a variation on the old schoolboy shortcut of doing lines faster by sellotaping three pencils to one another.
The waffle also performs the function of forcing the half-hearted reader (does The Times have any other kind?) to quite forget Sammut's erstwhile coyness about divorce once the usual half-witted arguments eventually get trundled out.
His most stimulating excursus in the midst of the pitchwater-dull exposition is a troglodytic attempt at an indictment of the levity with which the topic is handled in contemporary drama:

"We hear on television very often in some dramatic series: 'I want a divorce'! It's as simple as all that. 'I have a meeting with my lawyer tomorrow. Why don't you get yours to meet him so that they can sort things out?'"


Obviously, as the former chairman of the PBS, he speaks with some authority on the irresistible influence that broadcasting can have on the impressionable putty brains of Maltese viewers. To read Sammut's script for this terse scene, one can only lament the loss to the country's dramaturgical heritage that his competencies did not also stretch to screenwriting. This is, after all, just how people speak in real life and these are the genuine dilemmas that real people, one's without newspaper columns, have on a daily basis.
Sammut's version even has space for a saintly conscience in this scenario, albeit one that sounds more like the wife of Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons ("Why will nobody think of the children?") than Thomas Aquinas:

"But what about the institution of marriage, the social fabric, the family as the basis and core of our society, the good of the children?"


"But where does one draw the line?" Sammuts asks further down the page. Or, to read between the lines, "Is this waffle enough for this week?"
Sure enough, once Sammut becomes bored with his the voices in his head, he summarily signs off with an unenthusiastic call for a referendum on divorce, a Hail Mary and what almost sounds like an apology:

"Personally, I tend to be against divorce, but then who am I to impose my views on what might be a majority of the people?"