Private lives, public figures and structural insanity
On 8 May 2008, in his now defunct blog Rebbiegha Gdida (New Spring), the fictitious politician Dr Sigmund Bonello – who spends five years in Brussels before triumphing in his party’s leadership race – had formulated a somewhat original theory about Malta’s social scene:
“By the time we were twenty, we had worked out the key to understanding our nation. Like Pawlu on his way to Damasku we were blinded by the clarity of our discovery. It was a question of statistics and it goes like this:
“400,000: the total population of the Republic of Malta. 200,000: the approximate female population. 40,000: the number of females aged 18-35. 20,000: the number of females in the 18-35 age-group who were in a ‘meaningful relationship’. 18,000: the number of remaining females with whom conversation would be ‘severely limited’. That leaves you with 2,000 women. A fair guess is that out of those 2,000, about 400 of them would find you OK.
“400 eligible women seems like an ocean of possibilities. But we were not just cynics, we were also artistic snobs. We hated mediocrity. So we decided that for a variety of stylistic preferences (noses, accents, tastes in music) the real number would boil down to 50 eligible women. This was a deceptively encouraging number – before experience kicked in. By the time we had survived two tedious years of university, most of us had indirectly exchanged fluids with several of our closest friends. Our calculations soon showed us that it was either a lifetime with girl number one or a lifetime of pathological wife-swapping in a predominantly Catholic country...
“We had decided that the insanity of our country was simply structural. No ‘new way of doing politics’ would ever change that. Harry Vassallo was fighting a losing battle, a modern Don Quixote.
“It was time to get out. Fast.”
Perhaps subconsciously acknowledging that the situation described by Dr Bonello is not so far off the mark, the local media has, until now, generally adopted a hands-off approach to people’s private lives whether they be pop starlets, footballers, judges or politicians. At this juncture it’s probably worth pointing out that there exist no hard-and-fast, universal rules about who falls into the ‘public person’ category and what exactly constitutes behaviour worth exposing. Some societies think that footballers’ peccadillos constitute relevant public information. Others offer their politicians substantial private leeway.
It’s also quite clear that Maltese political parties respect an unwritten rule of engagement by which they seem to have designated the private lives of the enemy troops as a no-go zone.
Did the parties come to that arrangement because they realised that it was the only workable solution in a country this small? Is there some wisdom in an approach which seems to allow for a bit of respite in an island which is already unbearably claustrophobic?
Let’s be realistic here. The latest controversy, whether or not it looks like a morbidly entertaining local version of Desperate Housewives, alters the rules of the game considerably. Alfred Sant’s famous ‘friends of friends’ description was, of course, a rather accurate analysis of the situation but his objection lacked punch – we all knew that it applied across the board and that it had deep roots.
The friends of friends network is, essentially, Malta’s unofficial but incredibly engrained operating system, which has worked well for most punters on either side of the political divide. In our miniscule society, few politicians and other public figures – apart perhaps from the most priest-like and the most ascetic – would be immune from an aggressive investigation into their professional and business interests, the company they keep, their family ties and emotional relations.
If we’re serious about this whole private lives issue, we should take it beyond the individual story of a magistrate and her politician lover. I’m quite sure that we won’t do that; far too much is at stake for too many people. Which is why I suspect that this story is less about public principles and more about the settling of private scores.
Any comments?
If you wish your comments to be published in our Letters pages please click button below. Please write a contact number and a postal address where you may be contacted.
Search:
MALTATODAY
BUSINESSTODAY
Download MaltaToday Sunday issue front page in pdf file format
