Brazilians have a joke they often recount about their country and about themselves. It is a joke that has universal application. It is a joke about a country that although blessed with many advantages and opportunities, consistently undermines itself and its potential. It is a joke intended to explain the utter mess countries and citizens routinely create and many times even relish.
It is a joke with deep resonance for Malta (and, it must be said elsewhere).
So, the joke.
God and St Peter were in heaven engaged in the business of creating the world. Peter was observing as God distributed large quantities of resources and possibilities to each newly created country in the world. Different places were given differing amounts, but Brazil was always given the largest quantity.
Peter was perturbed by this apparent inequality and challenged God, insisting it was inherently unfair and unjust behaviour. God smiled benignly at Peter and retorted "but Peter, you have not yet seen the people I’m putting in there."
I am often reminded of this folktale when reflecting on the economic, social, and cultural mess that now dominates every aspect of life in Malta. There is almost nothing left that is not considered fair game for plunder.
Despite all its resources and possibilities, a consistent majority of Malta’s people aided and abetted by a dysfunctional and criminal political and economic system have managed to steal almost total defeat from the jaws of available victory.
And, most depressingly of all, many see it as a circumstance to be revelled in, hailed, and even celebrated. It is as if many Maltese want to verify the lazy trope that the country’s population is congenitally corrupt.
At particularly depressing moments, I feel that this land of Malta does not deserve the people it has been given. That a land so rich, so beautiful yet so fragile should be repeatedly raped by many of its own people, especially by its self-styled ‘leaders’, is an historic tragedy.
The ever-popular and ongoing sport of blaming foreigners is intended to deflect the focus away from this reality. Do we really believe that significantly reducing the number of ‘foreigners’ in Malta will solve Malta’s endemic ills? Are we really that naïve and easily led?
The mess that Malta now finds itself in is overwhelmingly a local production, conceived, planned, and executed by many Maltese at the expense of many other Maltese.
The fact that most of the institutions and structures intended to protect individuals and society at large from the rapaciousness of elites have been captured and hollowed out, places this tragedy in even higher relief.
Individually and collectively, we have become almost immune to the daily litany of revelations of systematic criminal behaviour at the highest level; their behaviour has become normalised.
Increasingly, those who mastermind and benefit from that criminality no longer even feel the need to disguise it.
They have adopted the Trumpian strategy of very publicly undermining society and democracy and cheerleading themselves in the process. Witness the recent appalling treatment of Jean Paul Sofia and his family - treatment also meted out to Daphne Caruana Galizia, Lassana Cisse, Miriam Pace, their families, and the countless unknown others condemned at sea.
Meanwhile, the island’s elite profess themselves ‘serene’.
They know that a majority of the people will either ignore it, accept it, or acquiesce in it. Cynicism has now, sadly, become a dominant Maltese characteristic.
That many (but not enough) Maltese care about what is being done to their land and their communities serves only to further illustrate just how low national standards of public life have been driven for a majority.
Inhabitants of this potentially amazing land are fully aware of the costs associated with the dominant model of ‘development’. Each and every day, they encounter it and its consequences. Incompetence, arrogance, and blatant corruption are standard fare, fare routinely matched by aggression and threat.
Malta today is a testament to the underlying dark truth of that Brazilian joke.