Generalising the madness

ust when the crunch looked set to steal Christmas, it didn't. Contrary to predictions, the big day wasn't any gloomier than usual. As for the prophesied scrimping, the fact that my local supermarket (no, not that one) ran out of pudding in practically hours makes me wonder. Be that as it may, what is certain is that there was no shortage of conversation fodder for those endless office lunches.

For starters, there was the shooting in Mqabba. It wasn't so much the wherefore that had people talking as the extended drama of it all. Not since Sergio Leone had we seen someone smash a pane and pump rounds into the saloon with such alacrity.

The main course had to do with the land of the dead. A bunch of miscreants chose to spend their festive season evenings smashing up tombstones in Kirkop and Safi. Satan, racial hatred, and the usual suspects were wheeled out as explanations, but I have no doubt that, if and when caught, the perpetrators will turn out to be boy-next-door types who just happened to run out of Playstation games.

Finally, we had the 'no-go area' question, raised by an unfortunate succession of serious incidents around the immigrant open centres.

Disparate events, no doubt, but there was some method in the madness of the reaction they provoked. The general feeling seemed to be that Maltese society is going to the dogs. In the first case, the fact that the shooting followed closely two others led many to raise the perennial, and predictable, comparisons with crime and gun control in the US. The point was also made that we are becoming a lawless and trigger-happy society.

Both the comparison and the generalisation are questionable. Gun licences are, in fact, very tightly controlled in Malta, unlike in the US where many believe they have a constitutional right to bear arms. And it takes more than a coincidence of shootings to make the argument that 'we' (including presumably thousands who have never even seen a gun, let alone contemplated unloading down at the local) are becoming cowboys.

What I find unfortunate is that all the broad thought tended to somewhat blind us to the rather interesting specifics of the case. No one seems to have questioned, for example, the consistency of police response. In 2007, police officers shot and killed a mentally-ill man armed with a penknife; in 2008, police officers managed to restrain a cowboy on a shooting spree.

More grand thought prevailed in the second case, the logic being that if 'we' (including presumably thousands who have never even passed by a cemetery at night, let alone contemplated wielding the crowbar) can do this to our dead, then the days of 'Maltese society' are numbered.

On the timesofmalta.com comment-board someone saw fit to quote a poem by no less than Dun Karm. In this hypochondriac masterclass (wisely sidelined by the critics), the national poet talks of Malta as the new laughing stock of the world. He bemoans the loss of the shyness of women and of their 'flower', and tells how 'foreign poison' has infiltrated Malta.

Let's just say, partly out of respect for Wied Qirda and his many wonderful works, that this wasn't Dun Karm's finest hour. But to quote it now, decades after it was written, as some sort of sign of the times, is mad.

So no, foreign poison is not infiltrating Malta.

And what happened in Kirkop and Safi was no zeitgeist, but a one-off act by (I believe) a bunch of bored teenagers who will in due course realise the stupidity and nastiness of their actions. The less we read into this, the better.

On to the third, and probably the most sensitive, case. Here, the drift of the response was that unless 'we' do something fast, 'they' (including presumably thousands of immigrants who have never as much as sneaked a second glance at a 17-year-old girl, let alone contemplated raping her) will take over the island and turn it into a seedy back alley of Mogadishu.

I am not talking about the response of the semi-literate lunatics on the Vivamalta website here, but rather that of average decent folk. The same folk who picked on the case of a gang-rape in Gozo as an example of the depravity at large on that island.

This, then, is the method to the madness I referred to earlier. It is called 'generalising'. In scholarly circles, it has a nasty habit of making or unmaking individual reputations.

In the former instance, generalising scholars become the grand theorists and classical sociologists whose texts we (rightly) assign as undergraduate staples. In the latter, over-generalising types are (rightly) consigned to the dustbin of sociological history, the charge being an overly-keen leap from the individual to the social.

In sum, just as the puddings flew off the shelves, we are looking here at a classical Jeremiah syndrome. The problem, if any, with society is simply that there is too much of it. It might make sense to talk a bit less about 'us', 'the Maltese', and 'them', and concentrate a bit more on the case in question.

mafalzon@hotmail.com