I wonder if people remember the Jerry Springer Show. It was something like our Xarabank (in fact, I think it was the inspiration behind the local show). Quoting Wikipedia: “Guests were everyday people confronted on a television stage by a spouse or family member’s adultery, homosexuality, prostitution, transvestism, hate group membership or other controversial situations. These confrontations were often promoted by scripted shouting or violence on stage. The show received substantial ratings and much attention.”

Such TV programmes are known as ‘tabloid shows’. A contemporary example is Cheaters.

I watched a few episodes, laughed a lot, felt it was all rigged and scripted and moved on. It relied on crass vulgarity and language, with audio bleeps blanking out foul and obscene language to the extent that you only got bleeps for some time, and was meant to take Middle America slumming

It also meant you to get involved and take sides. It was very interactive, but you felt dirty after watching an episode.

The present United States presidential election is tabloid, for sure. It also has many of the elements of the Jerry Springer Show. To take but one example, we do have adultery, if that makes any sense any more in the present-day scenario, and the campaign thrives on the sensational exposure of faults, weaknesses, debilities.

The election is a no-holds-barred mud-wrestling contest that has seismically rocked placid conservative electors in the US and, perhaps, challenged entrenched notions and expectations in the rest of the world.

It is probably less impressive in scandal-gobbling Malta, where the breakfast boiled egg tastes better if a great one (or better still, your neighbour) has his head chopped off.

This is a wild free-for-all in which the outcome is not to exhibit the best features of a candidate but the worst ones

This is geneti:; we inherited this schadenfreude and sense of voyeuristic comfort from our ancestors and their proverbial peeping from behind the balcony window’s ħasira screens.

But this has made us cynical vultures waiting for the end to come, because we know it will. And it makes us feel clean.

This presidential campaign is unlike any other, because it deals more with breaking taboos than with offering anything tangible or practical. There is something strange about going beyond the accepted limits

The enfant terrible often becomes the secret hero who has bludgeoned our repressions.

We outwardly condemn him but inwardly applaud him, for he or she does what we’d never do – but wish we did.

The disturbing and rebellious Bob Dylan has received the Nobel Prize, and the transgressive Beatles received the Royal Sword.

We are attracted by what is wrong. If I were to lock someone up in a room with just two books –the life of St Rita of Cascia or the biography of a famous prostitute –  I know which one the prisoner would read.

I am not a US citizen, so I cannot go into evaluations of the presidential contestants. But I am permitted, I hope, to express my disappointment at the way the campaign has been allowed to sink to abysmal levels.

I think it is because there is no US national entity that monitors and regulates presidential campaigns. There are no rule books. If boxing is violent and dangerous, at least Lord Queensbury forbade hitting below the belt.

This is a wild free-for-all in which the outcome is not to exhibit the best features of a candidate, but the worst ones.

US citizens are going to have to choose the lesser devil, so to speak, because there is no angel in the cast of actors. My fear is that this attitude, approach, technique – call it what you will – will become the established pattern for campaigns all over the world.

Again, it would not touch us greatly, because we are used to slanderous onslaughts in electoral campaigns, where you elect the lesser sinner, but it is a pity, isn’t it, that the world has no inspiring model to look up to.

Charles Caruana Carabez sits on the National Commission for Further and Higher Education.