Today is the feast of St Joseph the Worker and all over the civilised world May 1 is called Labour Day. It is essentially a socialist feast celebrating the emancipation of the blue collared workers from practical slavery of the Industrial Revolution. In a mere century the workers, through the efforts of labour movements and trade unions, have turned the tables to become what they are today: a force to be reckoned with. This has led to a situation wherein only centre left and centre right politics have the necessarily wide appeal to win elections.
Who will be the new patron saint of the newly poor?- Kenneth Zammit Tabona
Society has levelled itself to the extent that the lifestyles of an ever growing middle class hardly vary however up and down the so-called social scale one slides.
This is especially true in Malta where it seems we are unaffected by what is going on around us and everyone seems to be having a jolly old time, electricity and fuel price hikes notwithstanding! Restaurants are full and Malta buzzes with activity, financial, social and cultural, denoting that people do not appear to have a cash flow problem. The amount of cranes that scrape the skies is incredible; we have become one vast building site denoting that the banks are unfazed by the dire tales from London, Madrid and Athens, not to mention Lisbon and Dublin. The swanky cars on the road each cost a considerable fortune as despite the relative scale of import duty imposed according to horsepower, battalions of supersonic juggernauts hog our holey roads practically bumper to bumper; anyone would think they sold like the proverbial cheesecakes!
Still, despite all this affluence, there is an occasional sinister note being struck as stories about people queuing for food have, of late, hit the headlines and sad stories about pensioners not eating properly and being unable to heat their houses in the horrendous winter we have just experienced are becoming more numerous. They say there is no poverty in Malta but yes, it exists and it is on the increase. The gap between rich and poor has not yet become an unbridgeable chasm but if things are not checked it will. Then, boy oh boy, will the proverbial merde hit the fan!
So who was this St Joseph the Worker really? As far as I know the liturgical feast of the foster father of Jesus Christ falls on March 19. It is also a public holiday. I find it very curious indeed that the humble carpenter in Nazareth is, two millennia later, the role model for the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers of the 21st century! It’s absurd.
Today, all over Europe the Labour and Socialist parties along with the trade unions will process in their respective capitals proclaiming the victory of the proletariat wearing red ties from Valentino, Bulgari and Versace. Yet the poor, the real poor that is, will be nowhere to be seen. Malta is no exception. Since the 1980s the so-called “Nationalist” Party, the party that once represented the aristocracy, the landed gentry, the industrialists, the capitalists, the professional classes and the white collar workers, has abandoned this rarefied pool of noisy bullfrogs and long ago transformed itself into a very pink party in a calculated move to eliminate the effectiveness of any socialist ideologies swinging the political pendulum the other way. It is this very same social democrat ideology that has kept the PN in power since 1987 bar the 18-month blip of Alfred Sant’s New Labour. This has led to Malta being becalmed in ideological doldrums.
Cyber influenced elections are being fought not over what a particular party offers by way of suffrage but over allegations of corruption and mismanagement. Incumbent governments have the power to boost social services before an election that will leave them with insurmountable piles of debt should they be re-elected and with humongous headaches for any another party which will be either forced to impose terrifying measures of austerity to restore the checks and balances or, not to renege on rash electoral promises, go along with the charade of panis et circensis. I am uneasy about this and judging by the sizes of the latest batches of electricity bills, so should you.
I am told that St Joseph was ignored until relatively recently. His iconographic popularity, an old man holding a lily of purity, was never high and although always present in a Nativity painting hovering in the background or leading a donkey into the land of the Pharaohs, the most popular image is a 19th century saccharine one. He was supposed to have died when Jesus was still young and if one was to conjecture about the life of the holy family, Jesus must have continued his father’s trade, as in the Millais painting, till he was 33, a great age for a Jewish boy to be still unmarried and not yet a grandfather!
I suppose in the absence of widows’ and orphans’ pensions the Blessed Virgin must have been self sufficient or like young Macduff must have lived like the birds… but I digress. It is the saint’s dogged sense of duty that has made Joseph the belated hero of the workers of this world. Because of that I am quite sure that somehow and some way the saint made sure that both Jesus and Mary were well provided for. Yet the connotation between St Joseph and Labour day today still continues to baffle me as I learn more and more how the other half live. Who will be the new patron saint of the newly poor? I wonder.