Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1471185
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 19 JUNE 2022 COMMENT What are we skinning? Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo's impressively agile and undeniably elegant response to a weekend made particularly heady for him by those pesky meddling kids of Moviment Graffitti. Why are we skinning it? Because he's somehow managed the Herculean feat of superceding his predecessor Julia Farrugia Portelli in gifting the nation with a gaffe-quote so deliciously gaffey that it eclipses the thing about "mechanisms" supposedly keeping tourists and locals covid-safe during the summer of 2020... To be fair, he does look like someone who is constantly being whacked with a stapler on the face for no apparent reason, and at any given time. True, one can only expect so much from someone who appears to be in a permanent state of confused shell-shock. Shouldn't he have a lie down instead of being given the helm of one of Malta's most economically-crucial areas? We can't know the masterplan in advance though, surely. The mechanisms, man – the mecha- nisms! I thought mecha- nisms were just a COV- ID thing. That's what they want you to believe. They've never really left. But the cogs are spinning in earnest, even if you can't hear them... Of course I can't hear them over the blaring catarman music! And now, you'll be deafened in Valletta too... unless you find yourself lucky enough to be situated in the two or three remaining streets where the "tasteful" unz-unz of bar music is still banned. Somehow I preferred Valletta when it was a supposedly 'dead' city. I preferred Comino when it was a de facto nature reserve. Are we too old, then? Is that what the kids want? Well, the environmental hero for the woke, politically-correct kids is Greta Thunberg, and the Mov- iment Graffitti crowd are largely made up of shower-phobic twenty-somethings, so… We're really looking at fat boomers ruining the party for everyone again, aren't we? That, and their kazin-grown enablers… like Ian Borg and, indeed, Clayton Bartolo… Do say: "Tourism was particu- larly hard hit by the pandemic, but that doesn't justify a free- for-all on a Natura 2000 site." Don't say: "Want to keep the money flow- ing into the tourist coffers while keep- ing environmental- ists happy? Charge entry to Comino at a price that only Henley & Partners' much-cov- eted 'billionaires' can afford. The privilege of not opting for PGTM PAGE 12 The Skinny Malta, shrunk down MICHAEL FALZON Visit Rwanda! PAGE 7 No 144 – Karma Comino JOSANNE CASSAR Keep moving, nothing to see here… just another week of bizarre headlines PAGE 6 EDITORIAL Crime-fighting requires resources, not just words PAGE 2 SAVIOUR BALZAN The Plain Truth PAGE 5 "People may opt for PGTM because they have personally experienced or witnessed the negative effects of genetic conditions... bear in mind that you are privileged if these scenarios are unfamiliar to you"