This article is about people who don’t feel comfortable voting for Gonzi but who won’t be waving their flag for Joseph either. It’s an article about people who do not have strong anti-religious views but who will wince when the country goes into institutionalised identity overdrive when Benedict XVI pays Malta a visit next month. They are also likely to be citizens who distrust Red and Blue political journalists in equal measure and who (if they bother at all) are looking on in amazement and astonishment as the ongoing and inevitable journalistic-cum-political circus unfolds in all its gory details.
They may choose to call it a farce but they probably perceive its tragic undertones. Quite often, you’ll also find that the people I have in mind refuse to watch Xarabank but might occasionally tune in to Bondiplus.
In spite of their apparent detachment from political life in this country, they are, in fact, interested in politics, in culture, in the way society is developing. They have ideas about how Malta could be a better place. They may be theatre directors, may have set up their own architectural firm, lecture at the university, run a translation agency or own a shop. Some of them might have decided to live abroad.
They have one thing in common: they demonstrate a distaste for the degeneration of public life in Malta: TV programmes which pander to the lowest common denominator; shockingly biased political journalism which – when push comes to shove – serves one master while drowning out any sensible debate; an unclear demarcation between Church and State; an all-round lack of cultural sensitivity on the part of those who lead us and who are meant to set an example. The people I have in mind are neither ‘friends of friends’ nor do they operate as ‘wheels within wheels’.
Focused as we are on the apparent hegemony of Blue and Red, we tend to underestimate what I perceive to be growing dissatisfaction with public life among a certain category of people on this island. It is all too easy to dismiss their stance as apolitical or simply individualistic. They are certainly neither anarchists nor drop-outs and I am reluctant to employ that ugly term ‘floating voters’ to describe them. Rather, I am inclined to think that several thousand citizens feel that their aspirations, beliefs and ideas are unrepresented by the people who run the show in Malta today and that no fine-tuning, marketing ploys or volte-faces by the Leviathan-like political parties will change that fact in any significant manner. To be blunt, it’s certainly not simply a question of taste and neither will they be too impressed by a damp-squib free vote on divorce or a token LGBT section grafted on to the underbelly of the machine.
But as I remarked to my old friend John Schranz this week: “Xarabank won’t go away just because you decide not to watch it”. The same, of course, applies to the political field. The people I have in mind may have endless discussions about what they perceive to be a general decent into mediocrity and vulgarity but if they fail to appropriate the tools with which that mediocrity and vulgarity is being propagated, their potential to bring about change will be dead in the water. Paraphrasing Alessandro Baricco, those tools today are television and the new media. Additionally, I’m quite convinced that if we’re serious about bringing about a culture change (you hear this expression frequently these days) we should be prepared to embark on a new political project, backed up by clearly defined principles and which would bring on board representatives of various fields of expertise. To do anything of the sort you need money, and lots of it.
We can already pick up indications that the next three years are going to get uglier and dirtier as we move inexorably towards what may prove to be the mother of all fins de regne. The influential members of the ‘friends of friends’ networks will warn you that the ‘wheels within wheels’ mechanism has already been put in motion and that it has already started churning out abominations. They will do everything – perhaps short of physical assassination? – to put spokes in those wheels.
What may be about to unfurl in our country is a very local version of Tangentopoli – it always starts with a seemingly isolated spark – which has the potential to show up our system of governance for what it really is: an intricate network of interests made up of a wide cross-section of our upstanding society: journalists in bed with politicians who are in bed with magistrates who are in bed with journalists who are in bed with businessmen. Jeremy Boissevain – whose festa predictions were well off the mark but who was wonderfully spot on about patronage – might call it a refined system of patronage for the talk-show and internet age.
As I see it we have a choice to make and there may be no better time to make it. The time might be ripe to create a significant political event. After all the talk, discussion, analysis and disquisition, this is what matters in politics and in life in general: a society’s capability to make new things happen when old systems fail. Do we simply look on passively in a mixture of shock, disgust and bemusement as the orgy is played out? Or do we actively challenge the system head on when it’s at its weakest? The next three years will show whether Maltese society prefers to cling to the dead weight or whether it still possesses the energy and vitality to create something new.
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