Help! I’m being ‘ferociously attacked’!

Sometimes, it takes an actual ‘ferocious attack’ to remind us all that ‘words’ come complete with things called ‘meanings’, too. Yes, ‘attacks’ do take place; and yes, they are very often truly ‘ferocious’. It’s just that – luckily for us – they don’t happen anywhere near as often as reported in the media.

Consider how many ‘attacks’ were reported in the news this week. The obvious example would be last Friday’s horror story from Nice, Provence: in which over 80 people were killed by a truck driven through the crowds celebrating Bastille Day.

I think it’s fair to say that that was a ‘ferocious attack’. And though different words may have been used, all major newspapers stressed both the ‘ferocity’ and the clearly homicidal intent in their coverage. 

But then, you click on the homepage of a local paper (in this example, it was The Times; but it could have been any other)… and stumble upon a headline such as: ‘Take action against Falzon’s ferocious attacks, PN tells Muscat’.

Hmm. ‘Ferocious attacks’, huh? I hate to say it, but I’ve always suspected that the former parliamentary secretary for lands had something of a temper beneath that mild-mannered exterior of his. That’s what he evidently meant with that immortal ‘Lions of Change’ quote in 2008: cross swords with him over any given issue, and he will ‘change’ into a ‘lion’ before your very eyes.

But having read the headline and article twice over, I can only conclude that the already fierce Michael Falzon is now in urgent need of anger management classes. It seems he is no longer content with simply storming out of Parliament every so often… now, he has apparently taken to ambushing hapless civil servants after nightfall, and savagely beating them to a pulp. What else can we conclude, when his actions are described in the same terms normally reserved for serious acts of criminal violence? 

According to the report, Falzon’s victims on this occasion were all National Audit Office employees. Strangely, however, the article didn’t give any indication of how many of them were seriously injured (or, for that matter, killed) in the ‘attacks’: which incidentally seem to be ongoing as we speak. Other newspapers have since taken up the cry, adding that ‘Falzon has kept up the attacks’… without once giving any details about what actually took place. I guessed he must have holed them up in the NAO headquarters, and now plans to storm the building with tear gas and rubber bullets… what else is there to think?

Meanwhile, we were not even told what physical form these attacks took. OK, so he attacked them. How? With a baseball bat? Did he flatten them with a few nifty Ju Jitsu or Tae-Kwondo moves? Did he shoot them with an AK47 assault rifle? Or did he plough into them with a truck, indiscriminately killing as many as 80 people in one go?

Don’t look at me, I have no idea. I found not a single article describing the exact nature of the bloodbath for which the PN now demands reparation. As so often tends to be the case, the media limited its coverage only to a political party’s response to an event… not the event itself. And I suppose that makes a lot of sense, too. If you have a choice of running a story in which a Labour MP physically (and ‘ferociously’) assaults a bunch of public servants, and another describing the PN’s reaction to the assault… it’s a no-brainer, really. Which editor in his right mind would not run with the PN’s reaction, at the expense of what could easily be the news story of the year?

But back to the story itself. At this point, my only option as a reader is to either accept the inference that Falzon must have committed some form of violent assault on numerous victims, with unknown consequences; or to just call him up myself and ask him what really happened. I have his number somewhere on my phone. Most journalists would; including, I imagine, the ones who broke the news of his ‘violent behaviour’ this week. 

Why did they not bother using it on this occasion? Probably for the same reason I won’t bother, either. We all know what a local newspaper means by the word ‘attack’. I should know more than most, seeing how many times the word has been used to describe my own articles. 

In local parlance (in and out of the media), “to attack” means “to express minor disagreement with [someone]”. Nothing more, nothing less. A ‘ferocious attack’, on the other hand, is usually an expression of minor disagreement that happens to also sound slightly annoyed or irate. 

So I guess that makes Michael Falzon’s venture into the assault and battery department ‘the story of the century’, right? Falzon expressed minor disagreement with a bunch of NAO employees, in a way that suggested he might have been genuinely pissed off. I mean, gee… will the world ever recover from the trauma?

Personally, however, I’m quite happy with these new definitions myself. They make my job a heck of a lot more interesting, without me even having to work any harder. And if I ever have any grandchildren of my own, I can now one day sit them down and tell them of the time when I physically assaulted His Grace the Archbishop of the Malta Archdiocese during the divorce referendum campaign. 

“And just when he least expected it… I wrote an article saying something like: ‘Your excellency, I respectfully disagree.” BAM, KAPOW! And there he was, sprawled out on the carpet, while the umpire raised my gloved hand in victory…”

Ah, the thrill of that encounter! I can still feel the adrenalin rush now, all these years later…

But of course, I’d also have to tell them about all the times I have likewise been ‘ferociously attacked’ over the years. Using the standard Maltese media definition of the word: if only to be ‘criticised’ is to be ‘attacked’… heck, I reckon I’ve survived more assassination attempts than Fidel Castro (in a single thread, under a single article). 

And that makes me no different from anyone else who puts stuff out there for public consumption. Make no mistake, folks: it’s blood, guts and gore everywhere you look. When we’re not busy ‘ferociously attacking’ each other, we’re busy being ‘ferociously attacked’. All the time…

So like I said, the new definitions are great news for local journalism. Suddenly, that little argument at the grocer this morning, over the correct change for a jar of coffee and two cartons of semi-skimmed milk, assumes all the proportions of the Battle of the Somme. Not a single minute of a single day goes by without some kind of massacre or bloodbath taking place right underneath your window. In a country where every minor squabble is instantly elevated to the status of chemical warfare, Malta must rank as the most exciting place in the world for a journalist to work.

Things only become a teenie-bit problematic when genuine ‘ferocious attacks’ do suddenly take place, as happened in Nice this week. Once those words have been duly devalued to fit their new, largely non-violent context… what words are we left with to describe, well, THAT? You can’t call it an ‘attack’, without instantly deflating the last 200 million times you’ve used that word in a headline. So either we come up with new (and ever-more hyperbolic) words to replace the original definition of ‘ferocious attack’… or we finally wake up to the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be drawn into the language of aggression and conflict, where there is no real need.

Two considerations arise from this observation; and I think they’re both extremely relevant to the bizarre phase this country seems to be going through right now. One: our use of language exposes our so-called ‘political divide’ for the sham it really is. There is no real underlying ‘difference’ worth fighting over; in fact no real ‘fighting’ ever takes place here. So if the language we use to describe this rather lame, unexciting political background of ours is an exercise in fantasy… it is only because the political reality we’re describing is every bit as artificial and over-inflated. Stripped of all its posturing, all its grand claims and grandiloquent sound-bites… it’s just a bunch of people mildly disagreeing with each other. Nothing more, nothing less. And the more we describe it in laughably exaggerated military terms, the more ridiculous it begins to look.

The second consideration is what all this reveals about our country’s real attitudes towards things like ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘critical thinking’. It is not, after all, a coincidence that the verb ‘to criticise’ would be linguistically confused with ‘to attack’. In Malta, criticism of any kind is automatically viewed through the same lens as violent, anti-social behaviour. This is a country in which people genuinely feel they have a right not to be criticised… as though the act of criticism, like physical violence, is somehow ‘wrong’ or ‘reprehensible’.

This in turn explains the ongoing resistance to the recent relaxation of censorship laws. In fact, I think it explains just about everything you really need to know about the state of Maltese politics in the 21st century.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to work on the logistics of my next ‘ferocious attack’.