The Urban Dictionary defines “a Karen” as “a woman perceived as entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is appropriate or necessary”. Karen is annoying and being called one is a chilling caution if and when one goes over the top. Don’t let anyone call you Karen, however – unless that is the name to which you were born – to prevent you from speaking up for your rights.

When you’re being swindled, when you’re being treated shoddily by people who charge you to insult you, it is your swindler who wants you to blush in embarrassed silence because you don’t want to be perceived as a Karen. They are the ones who want your conscience pricked by far bigger problems so you don’t complain about the smaller pain they are causing you. How can you complain about the faulty gear box in your car when there’s famine in Somalia, asks rhetorically and unhelpfully the shady car parts vendor?

This is another particular stratum of gaslighting we are, as citizens of this very small, very odd country, collective daily victims of. How dare we make a fuss about being treated unfairly by the planning agency, or the health department, or the manic road building unit when the country has still not got to grips with an alleged Iranian serial swindler who ran a laundry for blood-thirsty tyrants from a flat in Ta’ Xbiex?

There’s so much industrial scale larceny that goes unpunished that it feels capricious to complain about a little state-perpetrated brutalisation of anonymous victims. This is why the ombudsman system in this country is just not working.

When first introduced here in the 1990s, the notion of an ombudsman was an institutional innovation we adopted in imitation of the Scandinavians. Note that we didn’t find the model in some failed state recovering painfully from years of civil war.

The model came from long-standing, successful, stable, consistent democracies that functioned well and where the rule of law prevailed. Ombudsmen are not designed to transform failed states. They’re there to capture and help fix the mistakes of a well-intentioned, otherwise optimally functioning democracy.

That’s what we were in the 1990s. The police and the prosecution service functioned reasonably well and reasonably autonomously keeping the other institutions to the straight and narrow. The ombudsman institution was set up to look into complaints by people treated unfairly, though often not necessarily illegally, by some public authority.

Since this was about unfairness rather than unlawfulness, the ombudsman was not given powers to punish wrongdoers (there are the courts for that). The idea was to give the office moral authority to persuade public authorities to do the right thing.

Failing that, ombudsmen can speak out, to name a public authority and shame it for refusing to take up their suggestions. That is not an executive power. But in a functioning democracy it still amounts to real power because the ombudsman’s public statement would bring about moral outrage in the press and the public. The government would be, if not forced to implement the measures, at least forced to defend their decision not to do so. Then the public can decide.

But given the mess we’re in in this country, given failing prosecutions against Pilatus Bank, given the return of Joseph Muscat – the dark prince of corruption – to public life, given that Yorgen Fenech is still cashing returns from the Electrogas contract, who’s reading the ombudsman’s reports?

Certainly not the government. They are systemically ignoring him and his office. Consider the laments in the ombudsman’s last two annual reports. Consistently, public authorities ignore the ombudsman’s requests for information which they need to determine whether the authorities have acted unfairly. The information is typically either given late or not at all, mounting fresh unfairness over the unfairness first complained about.

The idea was to give the ombudsman moral authority to persuade public authorities to do the right thing- Manuel Delia

Then a fresh hell emerges when, after much struggle, the ombudsman decides that the authorities have indeed acted unfairly and, in spite of the ombudsman’s entreaties on behalf of their victims, the authorities refuse to do anything about it.

There are several reports by the ombudsman tabled in parliament documenting unfair and unremedied conduct by the authorities. The reports are largely ignored perhaps because they seem trivial at first glance.

Consider the case of a citizen whose car was damaged when the pavement around St George’s Bay, in Birżebbuġa flooded in rising seawater, a problem that has plagued the area’s residents for a decade. The ombudsman wasn’t asked to see if some authority owed money to the complainant for the damages to his car. The poor citizen merely complained that Transport Malta wouldn’t reply to his letters of complaint and if that was because they aren’t responsible for repairing the pavement they could not be bothered to refer the suffering citizen to someone who is.

The case went to parliament because Transport Malta ignored the ombudsman, then the transport minister ignored the ombudsman, then the prime minister ignored the ombudsman.

You’ve guessed it. Parliament also ignored the ombudsman. No MP took up the issue presumably because none of them imagined they could get anywhere the ombudsman failed to reach. The press didn’t have time to write about the damages caused to the long-suffering residents of St George’s Bay, Birżebbuġa, in between reporting on illicit payments allegedly paid to Muscat and an uninhabited villa Robert Abela leased to ghost dual citizens of Malta and Russia.

Even if anyone out there might have been tempted to express some indignity at this state failure, they wouldn’t have known about it because anyone who could have done something about the complaint ignored it and buried it.

Like embarrassed Karens we’re made to shut up. Moaning about systemic governmental unfairness has been reduced parodically to partisan entitlement. If anyone dares complain they are reminded by the Squealers of our particular Animal Farm that we suffered much worse under the tyrannical Nationalists. Surely, everyone would rather their car sink in seawater than go back to the dark days of Lawrence Gonzi.

Except sometimes Karen struggles to remember just how dark those days used to be and she wonders if the biggest thing she misses from Gonzi’s times is her capacity to get angry.