Letters | Sunday, 24 January 2010

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Name-calling not the best form of analysis

I wish I could understand how Saviour Balzan’s mind works, assuming it is in fact his own mind, and assuming it does in fact work. Whenever he is short of things to say he picks on someone at random, as in a lottery, using his skull as an urn, and then labours to fit that someone inside the structure of what he hopes he will end up writing about. Last Sunday he as much as admitted to this mental process, by referring to ‘this convoluted opinion column’, the same one he was writing. By that time, he had thrown me in with Joanna Drake into the pot on his way to homing in on Muscat and Gonzi as the other two ‘weak opportunists’ in the land.
Well, anyone can call other people names, as if calling people names were a display of one’s power of analysis. What point would there be if I were, for example, to call Mr Balzan clearheaded, modest, democratic, or plain lovable, unless I could be bothered to scavenge the data for each one of those descriptors? To do that I’d have to analyse his variegated writings so as to demonstrate a consistency anchored in solid values; I’d have to count the number of times he writes about bettering Malta and the world while understating his own contribution to the process; and I’d have to secure statements from his employees about his good-natured relations with them to ensure that their levels of stress never again reach breaking point. As for lovable, I shouldn’t need to go to any trouble, as he probably would agree with me without difficulty, like everyone else.

Dominic Fenech
St Julian’s

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