There was a time; I should say about 20 years ago, that the game, Trivial Pursuit, took the world by storm. This was at a time before we all had PCs, Macs, iPads and iPhones to supply our every need and satisfy our every whim. I have not played it in years. One of the things I distinctly remember is that one shot out the first answer that came into one’s head. Thinking about options and alternatives usually obfuscated the directness of the question and one nearly always got the wrong answer.
The undeclared election sits among us like the ghost of Banquo- Kenneth Zammit Tabona
Life is very much like Trivial Pursuit.
As the weeks pass, leaving the vestiges of a long, hot and humid summer behind, we sometimes are forced to stop to think where and how we have got to where we have and, should we actually care enough, try to imagine what our lives would be in future.
It is, naturally, a prognostication, a supposition built on logic but one which, with every day that passes, becomes increasingly nebulous as the protagonists who run our country (or think they do) become ever more quixotic and contradictory in a political scenario that is anything but healthy. It is like living in a state of siege.
The undeclared election sits among us like the ghost of Banquo, colouring our every conversation and peppering our every argument. Everyone I meet seems to be dreading it. It has become like putting off an overdue root canal treatment at the dentist’s.
Contrary to popular perception people do not like change all that much. Ideally for most people, elections should be like a round of retail therapy.
I am one of those people who hate the idea of shopping for the sake of it and have to brace myself for pre-season wardrobe sprucing with all sorts of excuses and reasons to get down to it.
The odd thing is that while I am at it I enjoy it. However, I find that after a week has gone by I have merely renewed my time-honoured style and, should my preferred colour be blue or grey, it will remain blue or grey and the brown shoes I bought, for the sake of change, will remain in the cupboard till my conscience pricks me to the extent that I will have to invent an excuse to wear them.
Elections are precisely the same! One does not change for the sake of it but because the outcome will guarantee a continuation of our quality of life whoever we are and whatever we do.
The party in government has been there for so long that the status quo has been engrained to the extent that even supporters of the Opposition party have found comfortable niches and ways of life that run the risk of change should a new party be elected.
The Opposition knows this and the message, direct and implied, that, should the Labour Party be elected, there are not going to be upheavals is coming through loud and clear giving a renewed meaning to the Maltese saying that deplores the destruction of one church in order to build another.
It is the dissipation of fear of the dreaded kaizen that the PL’s electoral campaign appears to be based and the Nationalist knows it so much so that the latest edition in the billboard war is one of Joseph Muscat surrounded by candidates who are popularly perceived to be ‘old guard’, men and women with a pre-1987 track record designed to send the floater scurrying into the arms of the governmental incumbents. But then who are these incumbents anyway?
I was nonplussed last week to read that the Prime Minister wants to set a healthy contest for the role of deputy leader once Tonio Borg is accepted by Brussels as competent to regulate the production of genetically-modified food and not get embroiled in imbroglios about snus.
“A contest,” I thought as I read the report with increasing alarm, “for whom” It seemed that the only person getting very excited about this contest was... yes, you’ve guessed it, none other than Franco Debono! All the papabili have, up till the time of writing this article; last Friday, kept their cards very close to their chest, all except Simon Busuttil who is reported to have attempted brokering a reconciliation between Debono and the PN executive, which is rejected by the executive with the inflexibility of the priests’ chorus in Aida repeating “traditor” after each attempt.
This is why I keep wondering why Busuttil is doing this. This is why it reminded me about the consequences of thinking too long about Trivial Pursuit questions. Does he really want to rehabilitate our own parliamentary Violet Elizabeth Bott? What on earth for?
Hesitation and procrastination have become the order of the day as we cannot plan out our lives not knowing when the Prime Minister is going to formalise the election campaign that has been escalating since the divorce referendum.
It has been too long. This is why it would be commonsensical of the Leader of the Opposition to advocate a change without sturm und drang for, yes, he must have read books like Machiavelli’s Prince and Lampedusa’s Leopard to know that “things must change in order for them to remain the same”. That is a fact of life.
Should, like the Opposition of yesteryear, Muscat had kept hollering about post-electoral games of Snakes and Ladders that would certainly terrify the floater into ensuring that for yet another five years things would remain as they are.
As he showed us all during the divorce issue, he is, possibly for the first time in our history, going to try to be the Prime Minister for the whole of Malta and not only half of it. Time will tell.