The Maltese psyche

We regularly see letters to the editor from foreign visitors who complain about the habits of the locals - bird-shooting, over-charging, dangerous driving, over-building, rubbish in public places, broken down sidewalks, bad service at hotels and restaurants, gruff manners by taxi and bus drivers, and more.

Well, lately (June 18), a lady by the name of Deana Shanley, descended upon us like a thunderbolt out of the blue and wrapped up the Maltese psyche in a nutshell.

Right away, the pitiful apologists, both local and from abroad, out of sheer nostalgia, so it seems, responded so heroically that one would have thought that the Ottoman Turks or the Nazi Luftwaffe were attacking Malta once again.

In reality, it appears to me that Ms Shanley is quite an intelligent person who is very sensitive and very sharp at reading a situation and arriving at the correct conclusion. But the Maltese population in general abhors such "interference" and such "meddling", especially when it comes from "foreigners who should go back home to their own country".

This is so because the Maltese population is isolated and therefore cut off from the rest of the continent, is less well read and travelled and suffers from a malady which is typical of the southern peoples and which the northern Italians call terronismo, or hard headedness. Old habits die hard here and like Plato's People of the Cave, they revel in the darkness of the past and are terrified of the light of the sun or of change.

Thank God Ms Shanley did not stay here any longer to find out about the yearly massacres of protected European and African birds in the hundreds of thousands in both spring and in autumn; cruelty towards animals and the utter disrespect and degradation of the natural environment; the thunderous, ear-hurting noise of petards at festas and the daily, horrible noise pollution in general; the seas stinking from raw sewage and polluting fish farms; the lead and carcinogenic particle-laden air which makes the south of Malta the number one asthma and breast cancer suffering area in all of Europe; the helplessness and hopelessness of the Malta police who out of a basic and natural need for self-protection can at times turn out to be blind, deaf as well as dumb.

Indeed, she would have gone berserk had she been hauled into a court of law where she would have found out that a case can take as long as 25 years to be decided and that notorious offenders are routinely not found guilty and get away with murder, while foreigners, Arabs mostly, and local nitwits are slammed behind bars for very long, harsh periods which defy general reasoning and common sense. (Some warts these are!)

As a Maltese-Canadian who has travelled far and wide and who has studied the Maltese psyche in depth for a long time, I believe the Maltese government ought to be thankful for people like Ms Shanley for presenting such important, constructive critiques without pay and also ought to commend them to one of its research departments, probably the tourist and the education ones.

It is good to heed the advice of others, even the insults hurled by them. The Sicilians call us affamati (imgewhin). As for that "infamous" British doctor, Vernon Coleman, I will only repeat one of his lines: "...the Maltese are a nation of liars, petty thieves and crooks... and Malta is but a shabby, little corner of hell..."

In a nutshell, what these "foreigners" abhor is not the over-pricing of shampoo or other such small matters, but the total lack of basic education, the lack of a sense of honesty, the lack of a sense of fairness and the lack of a sense of justice.

If these were followed as a rule, all else would fit in properly into place, and then, perhaps, Malta could be truly called a paradise in the Mediterranean.