Imagine. No angry opinion columns, no talk-shows, no opinionated letters to the editor, no press conferences, no editorials, no ‘manifestations of courage’ and no blogs taking the piss.
Just imagine if everyone had to give each other a break from it all. Our assiduous army of columnists might choose to pitch a tent in their garden and gaze at the stars, politicians might give the talk-shows a miss in favour of a bit of paper-work, while irate letter writers might compose a few love-letters instead.
I’m saying this because it seems to me that for a country which has no serious political, ethnic or religious conflicts, we’ve become a pretty intolerant bunch. If the people in the limelight are anything to go by, it’s not simply about the occasional disagreement or justified spat over policy. No, it’s all very personal. The sight of a goatee or a particular hairstyle, the mere sound of certain accents (in English or Maltese, take your pick) make several fellow countrymen and women reach for the sick-bag. From some perspectives, and in small doses, it’s all quite fascinating, entertaining even. Compared to other small countries where nothing terribly spicy ever happens (take the expat havens of Belgium and Luxembourg, where few people I know bother to buy the fairly dull newspapers), Malta is an intense place which offers layer upon layer of sociological nuance and weirdness and an astonishing stream of controversy.
How has a country this size spawned so many distinct ways of pronouncing words, its own strange class divide, its own complexes, its own tribal system and its home-grown version of tall poppy syndrome?
This would be all well and good if we were happy to live with these differences, but it looks like we’re still carrying a load of crippling hang-ups around with us. Perhaps we cling to these differences because they give us a sense of identity. But there’s something very disconcerting about the way some people go about dissing ‘the other within.’ In the most explicit and, it must be said, brutally frank expressions of what some people can’t stand about Joseph or Terrence or Tracy, you can sense a feeling of rejection and disgust which verges on the pathological.
I suspect that our way of doing politics (it’s invariably ‘new’, of course) doesn’t help to tone down the aggro and something tells me that the brand, spanking new versions ushered in recently are bound to make things worse.
Politicians have long played an absolutely dominant role in Maltese society, occupying large swathes of the limited public space that a small country offers. While political animals in other countries share the scene with pop stars, writers, sportswomen, comedians and a host of celebrities in the Paris Hilton mould, the Maltese politician has always towered above the other contenders for public attention. With the advent of party TV stations and the fast pace with which the Americanization of the Maltese political landscape is progressing, over-exposure is a very real threat.
One really does get the impression that the choice today is between overdosing on politics and simply choosing to cop out of the whole noisy affair. Many people I know have chosen the self-imposed isolation of the second route.
There is another factor, I think, that creates the feeling of rejection which one or two outspoken commentators express in explicit terms. It is the frustrating feeling that while elections come and go, while policies and politicians are discredited and political battles are lost and won, the same old faces will continue to peer out at us from our television screens and from podiums all over this fair land.
Let’s be honest here: change is something that other countries can believe in. Perhaps it’s time we admitted that, like the kid who starts to thwack his sister’s ear when his toy’s novelty value runs thin, our obsessive hang-ups about each other might simply be the result of desperate boredom.

David Friggieri lives and works in Brussels.

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