The country, we are constantly reminded, is doing brilliantly. There’s a surplus, no unemployment to speak of, an impossible waiting list for yacht berths, soaring credit ratings, blue flag beaches, investor optimism, pole position on gay rights, breathless labour migration, a property market that can’t keep up with its own greatness, new roads everywhere you look, and so on.
No surprise, then, that Malta’s up five places on the world happiness index, that Labour’s majority is what it is, that the Opposition is dismissed as a pasture for sad losers, and that the Prime Minister is widely known as ‘il-king’. It’s dilated pupils all round, really.
Except there’s a problem, and the clue’s in the pupils. Muscat’s Labour may have brought all manner of gifts but it hasn’t brought stability. Malta in the reign of King Joseph I is rather like a day in the life of Bonnie and Clyde: cigar chain-smoking, excess, tommy-gun drama, and much pleasure on a car seat among the wads of cash and spent ammo.
Stability’s not an easy notion to put a finger on. In some of its forms, it can be a byword for the kind of lethargic ennui you might expect in an Antonioni film. Old-school Marxists would probably see it as the greatest threat to social progress, and French people celebrate its opposite every year on July 14.
Still, there is something to be said for the sureties of everyday life. It’s a good feeling to be able to go about your daily business secure in the knowledge that most of what you know and value will still be around tomorrow.
Malta in the reign of King Joseph I is rather like a day in the life of Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde would say that slow death by stability is a terrible thing, and that robbing a bank is more exciting than a cash withdrawal in the traditional fashion. Which is true, except we know where all the excitement got them.
Instability can often be recognised in its twin, inconsistency. Take the Planning Authority’s decision earlier this week to schedule the Mintoff house in Tarxien, and an adjacent rustic building called the Dar tal-Kejka, as Grade 1 buildings. The Dar tal-Kejka is a standard village house. Certainly it deserved some kind of protection, but why can’t the same be said of the hundreds of similar village houses being bulldozed all over Malta?
The Mintoff house itself may be fairly easy on the eye, but there are stacks of better examples of modernist architecture. No Grade 1 scheduling there – just last week, two excellent modernist houses were demolished outright, one in Iklin and the other in Fleur-de-Lys. As I write, there are plans to do the same to Villa Moira in Balzan.
There is of course the argument that the memory of Mintoff is part of our political history. Which it is, but that didn’t stop his L-Għarix in Delimara from being ‘redeveloped’ beyond recognition. Nor did it stop the Freedom Press in Marsa – a key symbol of post-War Labour history – from being knocked down to make way for a flyover.
More broadly, nothing sums up the general instability better than the environment. Practically everywhere you look is dug up or waiting to be dug up any minute. Trees, normally the paragon of a rooted solidity that is valuable precisely because it outlives us, are here today gone tomorrow. Our built environment is a chaos of trucks, skips, tower cranes and JCBs. People as young as 30 tell me they no longer recognise their surroundings.
It had to be Sandro Chetcuti, the shark that smiles at you even as it takes your legs, to sum it up. “Make hay while the sun shines,” he told his fellow developers. In other words, smoke those cigars quickly, Ms Bonnie, before it’s too late.
To his credit, Chetcuti is the zeitgeist incarnate. My students tell me that independent living has been made an impossible dream by the short-sighted profiteering of landlords who double rents overnight, often for properties that haven’t seen a lick of paint in years. I don’t entirely blame landlords. They’re simply rehearsing the general theme of quick cash, while it lasts.
Politically, too, the instability is painfully palpable. There are, for example, no signs of closure on the Panama matter. The Prime Minister seems to expect us to just forget about it, to focus instead on anti-fouling for our boats, or the Tritons fountain. Which sort of works, but only just. There’s only so much spectacle that Mario Philip Azzopardi can come up with, and it has proved difficult to stop people from whispering about Konrad Mizzi when the Tritons’ backs are turned.
I say people, not Nationalists, because it is not just Nationalists who feel the instability. There may be different versions of things according to partisan allegiance, which is fine in a democracy, but there’s no escaping the sense of unfinished business either way.
I don’t think it’s fair to call Muscat’s Malta a Mafia state. That’s too much of a sweeping statement, and it’s really quite untrue that all is rotten from top to bottom. There is, however, one resemblance. Think Bernardo Provenzano, unimaginably rich yet unable to shed the anxiety of what the next knock at the door of his hut might bring.
mafalzon@hotmail.com