What you see is what you (don't) get

It may be the spirit of carnival, or that the mysterious black dust is actually a mind-bending experimental substance produced by the Taliban and tested on an isolated population. Fact is, my head's in a bit of a spin at all the retrograde nonsense I've heard last week. It's been exceptional even by Maltese standards, which is saying something.

Here are some of the finer moments:

Edwin Vassallo (chairman of the Social Affairs Committee, heaven bless us) said on Radio 101 that he thought it a shame that the conference on the family hadn't started with a prayer;

Justyne Caruana (another member of the said committee, heaven bless us doubly) vowed to stop pregnant women travelling abroad for abortions;

Toni Abela changed his mind on abortion to a pat and a doggie biscuit from Gift of Life;

The Commissioner of Police worked day and night on the important task of 'vetting' song lyrics;

The Bishop of Gozo told us that abortion and divorce are all but synonymous;

There was much talk of how public morality will be upheld at Nadur;

There were proposals for care orders for 'the unborn' (Just imagine: 'Two care orders? Must be twins then.');

Joseph Muscat had a vision of a national forum on divorce that would include 'ecclesiastical authorities' (some hope of a consensus that forum would have);

The Prime Minister 'refused to put down his weapons and go home' on divorce.

And so on, building up to a sense that the country is well on course to become the thick man of Europe.

Except it isn't, and this is where the story begins to get interesting. Because even as the sky darkens with high-flying rhetoric from our great and good, we common people sort of get on with our lives. No divorce? No problem, we have our ways and means. No 'vulgarity' at carnival? Who cares when you can swear in private. No seditious university rag? Easy, try the internet. In short, the more stupid restrictions one dumps on people, the more they'll dodge and fix.

Which would be fine by me, save for a couple of slight issues. First, a nation of dodgers and fixers is not necessarily a desirable one to live in. The problem is not so much that people try to swerve around the rules. That happens everywhere all the time. It's that when the rules get too many, too silly, or both, dodging becomes an institution in its own right.

The best home-grown example is marriage annulment. Reasons and proceedings have become a big national joke in which courts and tribunals are routinely fooled (one wonders why they seem to have no objection). Only, even as it begins to look convenient, it will spill over into other areas. Liars are liars are liars.

That, then, is the first issue. When fixing (we have a word for it in Maltese and that's ħaxi, pardon my italics) becomes the norm rather than the exception, spare a prayer.

There's another thing. Let's take a detour to, say, pre-1989 Romania, or contemporary North Korea. Totalitarian regimes are very useful case studies. They may be extreme, but they do tell us a good bit about power in general and how people relate to it. They're the hydrothermal vents of politics if you will: mad and boiling and sulphurous and all that, but useful to biologists to understand how life adapts in less hostile places.

In Ceausescu's Romania, most of the population lived in misery. But on television, things appeared strangely different. The supermarket shelves were full, the pastures green, and everything was bathed in eternal sunshine.

In North Korea today, people have to make do with very little. Understandably, hairstyles are not high on their agenda. Even so, State rhetoric constantly feeds them images of perfectly-groomed comrades, whose hair has been 'trimmed in accordance with the socialist lifestyle' (I'm not making this up).

Extreme cases no doubt, but they go to show that people's lives and the ways in which they are officially represented can be completely detached. The questions then are: How do people cope in the circumstances? How do they relate to their alter egos, so happy and well fed and so unlike their true selves?

The answer is that most of the time they don't bother. They just switch off, give the finger to toytown, and withdraw to their private lives. Which is great if you happen to be a dictator, less so if you're hoping to run a country democratically.

At the risk of being melodramatic, I see a real danger of people switching off. I happened to be in a bar when the television report on the happy marriages conference was broadcast. One chap raised an eyebrow, yawned, and turned to his ale. His drinking mates didn't have to bother, they were already there. So much for 'participation'.

Our public sphere (media, political rhetoric, etc) is being hijacked by a bunch of prigs who just won't stop talking the same old gibberish. Many of them are also powerful enough to get the Police Commissioner to spend his time juggling with metaphors and kinky carnival costumes. On the ground, meanwhile, life in Malta is much the same as in other places. Reality and representation - now that's one divorce you really want to avoid.

mafalzon@hotmail.com