The driest spring in years

It hasn’t been a terribly productive few months. The ‘No to Divorce’ camp has showered us with tedium, nonsense, and much useless irritainment. The opposition had little choice but to respond, at times in kind. I found four things about the debate particularly despicable.

First, the rhetoric. Oodles and reams of it, each battalion more mind-numbing than the one before. ‘The family’ was first sacralised into a sort of national deity, a first cause to all bliss and solidity. It was then sectioned into two colourless types, ‘strong’ and ‘broken’. Each of these was then blown up into a caricature.

Strong families are united, happy, ever-smiling and so on. Broken ones are hell on earth. It follows their respective offspring turn out model citizens or drug-crazed criminals. Really, there was more three-dimensionality in a computer game from 1985.

The malaise, we were told, needs to be ministered to. We need to ‘strengthen the family’, heap on the ‘family-friendly measures’, ‘invest in the family’ – you get the picture. Pity we were never told what these measures and investments might be.

I quite imagined the family brigade would come up with a trump card on Thursday night, a list of tangible incentives that would drastically reduce marital problems. Instead they took off like a crowd in a hot-air balloon.

The second thing about the debate which really got on my nerves was the bizarre way in which men and women were represented.

No such political and social topic can be gender-neutral, truth be told. Even so the case in point is grim by any standards. Much as I hate to say it, the two sides were partners in crime on this one.

According to this vision, women are passive objects who hover around (the kitchen sink presumably) praying they won’t be dumped for a foreign blonde or beaten to a pulp. Andromeda-like, they need to be rescued from their predicament. Will divorce do the trick or will it speed up the foreign blonde’s advance? Either way, it’s chauvinism through and through.

My third point concerns the honourable men and women in the No camp, lawyers for the most part but also doctors and such. For all their titles and eloquence, they turned out to be a mediocre lot stuck in a mouldy rut.

I am not referring to religious objectors (that’s a different species which doesn’t concern me) but rather to those who opposed divorce as a civil right, on secular grounds.

Anywhere else, this bunch and their irritating stodge would exist somewhere between the no-where and goodbye of the political landscape.

Not so in Malta, where they quite merrily stood for the ‘decent’ mainstream and kept straight faces as they said some of the silliest things I’ve ever heard.

If anyone deserves the fast track to sainthood it’s Deborah Schembri for not once losing her cool in the face of such claptrap.

The supreme irony is that those telling us how wicked and brutish the rest of the world is were the very same people who a few years ago waxed so progressive in the EU membership debate. They’re also relatively well-travelled and generally polished, at any rate not obviously Jurassic to the naked eye.

The silver lining is that they’ve made my lectures on globalisation that little bit easier to prepare, for two reasons.

First: they’re living proof that travel does not necessarily broaden the mind. Second: they show how, in an age in which ideas and information supposedly render space obsolete, place and locality in fact still matter very much indeed.

The fourth thing about these past few days especially has to do with the media. More specifically, with the ways in which old-fashioned ideas drive our media institutions. The main obsession seems to be ‘balance’.

Someone out there thinks there should be a perfect media balance, in this case between the Yes and No sides. Two examples come to mind.

The more pathetic involved a hapless Norman Hamilton being apparently forced to read out a manifesto foisted on him by Żwieġ Bla Divorzju as a kind of what we might call ‘blood airtime’. It seems the original crime was committed a day earlier by John Bundy, whose Affari Tagħna had, horror of horrors, favoured the Yes guys.

The second example is that of the ‘spots’ brought to us by the Broadcasting Authority. I had to laugh every time I heard that solemn voice, ‘spot imtella mill-Awtorita tax-Xandir bħala parti mill-kampanja...’ Seriously, even assuming that ‘balance’ is desirable, how on earth does one begin to impose it in a sky so dark with airwaves?

Since we’re at it, the other funny thing about the media was the ‘day of reflection’ on Friday. Odd that reflection should be imposed as in some sort of Lenten fast, but that’s not my point. Rather, I find it curious that the pundits haven’t yet woken up to the fact that it has become quite impossible to control information, not with so many fingers itching at keyboards and yesterday’s streamed programmes easily available ‘on demand’.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Good sense may have prevailed yesterday after all, in which case the balloon will have disappeared into the sunset. Good riddance.

mafalzon@hotmail.com