The Frenc connection

What thanks does Mrs Holmes get for publicly praising this son of Gharb's stunning achievements in the field of international medical science? She gets haled to court on criminal libel charges, naturally.

Now I have an inkling of how Scott of the Antarctic must have felt, when his ill-fated expedition finally made it to the South Pole... only to find a note saying “Shackleton woz ’ere”. 

OK, the conditions may have been slightly less arduous for me – no frostbite, no slow death by hypothermia, etc. – but still: there I was, freshly-made coffee in hand, just settling at my PC to start this column… only to find myself reading the exact same article I was about to write, authored by someone else.

It was almost as though my mind had been burgled. Even the headline I planned to use was almost identical: “Pardon their Frenc”. Oh well: fair play to blogger Jacques Renee Zammit for pipping me to the post. Next time, perhaps he would be considerate enough to leave at least one or two stones unturned for the rest of us…

Oh, wait there are a couple of small pebbles left. For the larger stones, you may as well just read the Jaccuse post. There you will be reminded that the Gharb local council – in its infinite wisdom – felt aggrieved by a plea recently launched by Mrs Kate Holmes for clemency towards her son Daniel Holmes: currently serving an 11-year sentence for cultivation of cannabis. 

What ruffled the local council’s feathers was Mrs Holmes’ suggestion that Gharb’s most celebrated historical personality – a man so famous there is even a restaurant named after him on the Marsalforn road – might also have been a cannabis dealer.

So they threatened to sue. 

Hm. OK, it has already been pointed out (by someone with more legal qualifications than myself) that this case has about as many legs to stand on as Anakin Skywalker at the end of ‘Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith’. (Actually, fewer: Anakin’s severed limbs would shortly be replaced. But no amount of prosthetic surgery will ever get the Gharb local council’s logic onto its feet.)

There are, however, two deeply intertwined facets to this remarkable initiative that have yet to be explored. The first is the extraordinary sense of entitlement, whereby a minor civic authority that is responsible largely for garbage collection and other such basic amenities – and which didn’t even exist until half a century after Frenc Tal-Gharb’s death  – suddenly arrogates unto itself the right to speak on behalf of all people ever born within its jurisdiction. 

Sorry to break the news to Gharb’s local councillors, but… the inhabitants of Gharb, living or dead, do not actually qualify as ‘council property’. It takes a particularly self-aggrandised view of one’s own importance to even assume that one can represent the legal interests of someone to whom one has no connection whatsoever, and who has been dead since 1947. 

Now, may I gently remind you that there’s a pothole the size of Frenc’s halo in Bishop Molina Street, and it’s been there for years. Fixing potholes falls within the Gharb local council’s remit. Legally representing deceased village mystics, on the other hand, does not.

The second aspect, which arises directly out of the first, is the spectacular disdain for Mrs Holmes’ right to freedom of expression. Having already appropriated the legal rights and patents to all Gharb’s residents, past, present and future… the local council went one step further, and also assumed the authority to prevent anyone, anywhere in the world, from ever voicing an opinion about any of its dead constituents.

Extraordinary. In other countries, such tyrannical, despotic levels of powers are only ever acquired through force of arms, often resulting in millions of deaths. Not in Gharb, however. In Gharb, such formalities are dispensed with in the bat of an eyelid. We are all expected to just bow our heads, and accept the local council’s right to censor any opinion with which it disagrees.

I mean, what galaxy do these people come from, anyway?

But let us, for argument’s sake, assume that the Gharb local council really is legally entitled to such massive executive powers – greater than any central government in the democratic world. And let us take another historical figure widely believed to have had mystical, magical powers of his own. 

Dom Mintoff. Half the country believes he cured Malta of all its Colonial woes some 40 years ago; the other half believes he was the cause of all this country’s present ailments. Both these polar opposite viewpoints are expressed in public, every day, all the time. 

As a result, Mintoff has been vilified in every way imaginable– I’ve heard him described as a despot, a tyrant, a psycho, an aberration… and that’s just on one blog. To the best of my knowledge, however, he has never been accused of smoking the occasional reefer here and there.

What a pity, I’ve often thought. Can you imagine what this country would be like today, if Dom Mintoff really was a closet toker along the lines of Cheech and Chong? All those unnecessary confrontations, all those tantrums, all that rumbustious posturing, brinkmanship, filibustering… all gone in a hazy, lazy puff of ganja-smoke.  

Mass meetings would have been interesting, too. No rabble-rousing, no fiery indictments from the podium, no wild gesticulations… just a dopey smile from ear to ear, and Mintoff’s unmistakable voice drawling: “Peace and love, bro… peace and love…”    

Sadly, however, it was not to be. Without the calming, therapeutic effects of good old Mary Jane to keep him in check, Mintoff was his usual, volatile, irascible self. And Eddie Fenech Adami clearly didn’t partake in any puff, either… so instead of ‘peace and love’, all we got over was prejudice and partisan extremism. 

And there you have it: one irrefutable argument in favour of legalising cannabis, right there…

But like I said: this is one accusation that has never actually been levelled at Mintoff. What if I were to level it now? What if I inferred, however remotely, that the former prime minister was a secret drug user? His family, I imagine, would sue for libel (as they have repeatedly done over other, real insinuations). But the local council of his hometown, Bormla? By what convoluted reasoning could it expect to act as legal custodian of Mintoff’s good name?

And why limit ourselves to Bormla? Mintoff may have been born there, but he actually lived most of his life elsewhere: in Tarxien, in Delimara, etc. Those places have just as much cause to claim him as their own. And seeing as we are talking about one of the most maligned (and, simultaneously, adored) historical Maltese personality of all time… their local councils would have to be in and out of court all the time, defending their beloved Perit’s reputation from never-ending attacks.

And that’s just Dom Mintoff. If the Frenc precedent were to be applied in all cases… any local council would be able to sue anybody at all, over any slur directed at any historical figure who just happened to have ever been associated with that locality. So go ahead: pick a historical figure, any historical figure. The late Francis Ebejer, for instance, was a much-loved playwright from Dingli. The locality certainly acknowledges him as one of its worthier sons: the first thing you see driving there is his monument.

So if a hypothetical researcher were to publish a PhD thesis on Ebejer’s work, and impugn the author with some improbable and patently fabricated vice – to keep it safely ridiculous, let’s say that he allegedly had a habit picking his nose and flicking the bogeys into people’s faces – what then? Would the Dingli local council also get its day in court to fight for the Ebejer legacy?

Obviously not, because authors like Francis Ebejer (and politicians like Dom Mintoff) fall into the category of public figure. They are subject to a greater level of scrutiny and criticism than private citizens. Speculation is both permitted and warranted, as long as any allegation can be substantiated, or at least reasonably argued. 

Historical figures like Frenc tal-Gharb, on the other hand, are rather hard to place in any clear category. He has been described as a ‘holy man with miraculous healing powers, frail of body but close to God, who was revered in his lifetime and afterwards’, etc. 

I guess that makes him a ‘Super-Fragile Calvinist with Extra Apotheosis’ (who may or may not have also smoked pot). And as I far as I know, there are no laws protecting that particular category of person from public scrutiny. 

Which brings us to the allegations raised in Kate Holmes’s appeal. It just so happens that this is not the first time I heard about this ‘Frenc-Cannabis’ connection. Mrs Holmes certainly did not invent or discover the claim herself… though she may well have been the first to air it so publicly. 

Whether she can ‘prove’ it or not is irrelevant. The point here is not whether or not Frenc really did use cannabis in his medical preparations: it’s that he could have, because cannabis does indeed have recognised medical qualities. The argument here is that we are mistaken in regarding cannabis as a harmful substance, when in fact – and Mrs Holmes supplied all the evidence in her letter –world scientific opinion holds it to be less harmful than alcohol, and possibly more beneficial than many patented medicines.

Bearing all this in mind: on what basis does the Gharb local council argue that Frenc’s reputation was in any way ‘tarnished’ by Holmes’ allegations? As far as I’m concerned, it’s the other way around. Kate Holmes’ appeal actually raised the old mystic several notches in my esteem.

Look at it this way: if science has only now swung round to the view that this plant has medicinal properties… what are we to make of the possibility that Frenc Tal-Gharb – who had no scientific qualifications or background – knew the same thing way back in 1927? And availed of those properties (then unknown to science) to improve the quality of life of countless persons suffering from illness?

At the risk of shaking my otherwise unshakable scepticism in such matters… we shall have to consider the possibility that he really was a visionary mystic with magical powers after all. Such foresight places him in the category of Charles Darwin and Leonardo Da Vinci. He was almost literally a century ahead of his time.

And what thanks does Mrs Holmes get for publicly praising this son of Gharb’s stunning achievements in the field of international medical science? Achievements which have never before been acknowledged in public, still less so lavishly praised? Why, she gets hauled to court on criminal libel charges, naturally.

Only one way to make any sense of that logic, I fear. You’d have to smoke half a tonne of super skunk...