Cutting off one’s nose to spite your face

 There was a poisonous liquor case, in which three young men died, and not in Madras, or rather Chennai, where such events usually take place, but in our very own Faisalabad. Our Christian community was not involved, because it seems the tipplers had chosen Eidul Azha to get blotto.

The boys’ families claimed in the FIR that the liquor was poisoned, not poisonous, and their poor innocent boys had not tried to celebrate Eid in a decidedly disapproved fashion. If you ask me, concern for their posthumous reputations might be getting in the way of uncovering those responsible.

You see, it’s clear the liquor was tampered with. Now, one tampering is where poison is added secretly to an alcoholic beverage, perhaps methyl alcohol, so that the drinker will be killed. The other tampering is where someone mixes fruit juice, methyl alcohol and an alcoholic beverage, to make a sort of ersatz beverage, which could be poisonous. Or an unscrupulous bootlegger might spike his goods with methyl alcohol to add ‘kick’. That is probably the case with what is known as ‘country liquor’, when some enterprising yokel tries to distill a liquor from some fruit juice. I know it’s possible to distill alcoholic beverages from grain, potatoes, but while some bright spark must have tried at some time or another, I don’t there’s been much experimentation, and there’s been a sticking to fermenting or distilling fruit juices.

But what has happened is that not only have the boys’ families prevented any attempt to discover the bootlegger who probably spiked the beverage, but they have got the police haring off after the unknown poisoner. The families do not care about their boys’ posthumous reputations to save them from the suspicion of almost total gormlessness, because they did drink the liquor, and failed to realise that it was alcoholic. Alcoholic cricks smell nasty, and even someone with no exposure to alcohol knows what he’s smelling.

I suppose those well-known topers, Ali Amin Gandapur of the KP PTI and Sharjeel Memon of the Sindh PPPm know what I;m talking about. They have exercised due diligence, which is why they are with us today. There’s a lot that would drive both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to drink, especially the sort of phone call they had,

The contents were leaked to the press, and the US press, in an excess of professional zeal, said it was a leak, in which Trump used language that can’t be quoted in a family newspaper like this one. Basically, he told Israel to get out of Lebanon, to be told that it wouldn’t. Someone noted that Netanyahu had done the same with Biden over Gaza, refusing to stop the slaughter.

This time, though Trump told Netanyahu that he was keeping him out of jail, a reference to the corruption charges against him, which included his wife Sarah misusing the Prime Minister’s House .Well, she could claim an American precedent in how Mary Todd Lincoln, Abe Lincoln’s wife, misused the White House facilities.

Well, so far there has been no sign of American youths taking any means to avoid conscription, though talk of the need for conscription has begun. During the Vietnam War, when it was last used, the preferred means of avoidance was to go to Canada. Well, they’re using conscription in Russia, and some young men have started going abroad.

No more extreme measures, like chopping off one\s trigger finger, has been reported. The chopping of one\s trigger finger was used not just in the Vietnam War, but both World Wars, and even in the Russo-Japanese War a decade earlier.

Of course, the oldest mention is of young Roman men who chopped off their right thumbs (so they couldn’t grip a sword) back in the fourth Century AD. One Emperor, Theodosius, ordered that they be conscripted anyway. Catch Bill Clinton or Fonald Trump, renowned draft dodgers, mutilating themselves. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face, or rather your thumb to spite your emperor.