Money makes the world go round

I really cannot understand this Credit Crunch; in fact, I am completely bewildered by it. I have just read in the New York Times that Chrysler, the US's third largest auto company, will be seeking bankruptcy protection by allying itself with Fiat. The actual bankruptcy case which was envisaged to be a "swift surgical process" was set to be filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court in New York next week.

So it appears that Chrysler has been saved by the Agnellis, ergo, there actually is a way out of this sickening mess we have all been plunged into by people who in all truth should be either behind bars or in a loony bin for the criminally insane. I cannot understand the Maltese situation at all. While we have been told by the people in the know to prepare for the worst, the roads are full of swanky cars, each costing a fortune, while the building frenzy carries on unabated.

The restaurants are full, even mid-week, and the supermarkets are chock-a-block with people from all walks of life stuffing trolleys that could fit a baby hippo!

So where is the crunch? Apart from the very ill-advised comments about opera and the opera house by the double-chairman Peter Fenech recently, we have had no dire prognostications, no writings on the wall apart from a couple of annoying graffiti and now that the energy bills have arrived nobody except poor me seems to be alarmed by them. I am just as befuddled as to how the estimates are calculated, however in my particular case the number cruncher at Enemalta must think I am Croesus!

The estimated bill for four months exceeds the actual one for seven! I calculated that by this time next year I will have loaned Enemalta the princely sum of €2,000!

Dare I ask why? I am amazed that in the middle of this entire financial crisis the majority of us Maltese are so flush that they are able to grant interest free loans to the Malta government besides paying VAT and tax! I am utterly amazed; truly! It is therefore surreal when one reads about middle class Spaniards queuing at soup-kitchens isn't it?

But let's get back to opera, a far less slippery and accident-prone slope in my case than discussing my financial puzzles. The upshot of Dr Fenech's peculiar pronouncement was "let's cancel the BOV Opera Festival".

The numbers Dr Fenech used were the statistics of this year's festival which anyone with even the slightest idea of what opera is all about will realise are grossly misleading. An English one-act opera of unsurpassed lugubriousness, a French bagatelle performed in the courtyard of Palazzo Bonici and a worse than school production of Mozart's Die Zauberflote was hardly the kind of fare to attract one to spend "a night at the opera" unless one is a glutton for punishment or an omnivorous culture vulture like myself. Basically the message was received and understood.

The fact that such few people bothered about it shows that maybe chairman Fenech may be right and nobody, except a dying breed of cantankerous oldies like me, gives a tinker's whether there is opera at the Manoel Theatre or not.

We are so dreadfully uninformed and irredeemably insular. We are completely unaware that in other civilised countries opera is thriving to the extent that contemporary composers are churning opera out as never before. The government has absolutely no commitment to culture.

Radio Bronja was closed down and now it is rumoured that subjects like history will be reduced to not more than an hour a week which is totally ridiculous.

With Systems of Knowledge placed the way it is in the local syllabi like "cloves of garlic on a cake", can one be really surprised that Mr Average's knowledge of opera is, with luck, "Bravu Ċirillu" or, if he likes football, "Nessun Dorma"?

Culture is simply not being given the attention it deserves. Education and culture make strange bedfellows when joined under one ministry. One suffers at the expense of the other. De Gaulle's Minister of Culture, the visionary Andre Malraux, singlehandedly lifted not only France but all of post-war Europe out of a cultural depression.

This is why a divorce from education on the grounds of incompatibility is required. Cultural perception in Malta today is as baffling as the credit crunch. We have lots of grillionaire technocrats, financiers, lawyers and engineers who rule the roost while the artists, musicians, writers, poets, dramatists must live from hand to mouth as in my experience Mr Average perceives my being a professional artist as nothing but a caprice. If I chose to paint pictures for a living and not have a "proper job", then I deserve to shiver and starve in a garret like the guys in La Boheme! Which, Dr Fenech, proves that more people than you think may have seen the first act of Puccini's glorious tearjerker after all...

kzt@onvol.net