I don’t know how many of you have seen Les Misérables on stage, that quite literally miserable retelling of the French Revolution originally immortalised by Victor Hugo in 1862, but I couldn’t help thinking of the lyrics: “Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men?” when I watched footage of last week’s protest. And in all truth, why wouldn’t the people be angry given there’s more than a whiff of “Let them eat cake” in the air?
It’s a funny time to be living in Malta. On the one hand you have a minister allegedly spending €40,000 on a party to inaugurate a single road which has thus far succeeded in slowing people down even more on their way home and which already looks like a Swiss cheese from some angles, and on the other you have my Italian friend looking to rent a humble apartment and not finding anything costing less than €550 a month (and those are mostly the crappy ones that you wouldn’t even want your least favourite cockroach living in).
Of course, if the daily farces we are regaled with weren’t enough, last week we had an alleged murder kingpin trying to flee the country on his luxury yacht. You literally couldn’t make this up (unless you’re Kirsty Debono and Hermann Schiavone claiming to have met this same man to speak about getting a sponsorship for a conference). I mean, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t met many fancy CEOs willing to pass the time in a room with me discussing how many pastizzi they are willing to provide for my party. They usually pay people to do this while they go around doing more important things.
Forget about the ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ adage: some people are literally just randomly dumping their favourite ingredients into this overfull pot of disaster and then running away cackling in delight
Wherever you turn, it’s like you’re watching some straight-to-DVD crime series, only everyone in this story looks like Danny DeVito’s ugly cousin in a bad suit rather than Brad Pitt, and God knows, no one is laughing. Forget about the ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ adage: some people are literally just randomly dumping their favourite ingredients into this overfull pot of disaster and then running away cackling in delight. They must all truly think we are daft.
And that, I suppose, brings us back to the anger of the people. For two whole years, there have been horrific memorial clean-ups, new scandals uncovered every day, a shocking amount of poorly planned construction and enough quite openly given iced buns to stock a chain of bakeries. At this point, what people should really be asking is why aren’t people a lot angrier.
Why wouldn’t they ask for the resignations of two people who have been found to have shell companies in Panama and then in turn, why wouldn’t they suspect that the Prime Minister is hiding something when he opts to protect the problem rather than dispose of it in a way that would have only won him more support and respect?
There was truly nothing more fascinating to me than watching Konrad Mizzi getting re-elected with an even greater majority than ever before. No wonder so many members of the Labour Party were so indignant when people started to shout in the capital a few days ago. They think they can get away with it because we have let them.