George, what have they done to you?

If you walk what I believe is the central pathway in Sant'Anton Gardens, right up to the President's Palace, you will find yourself in a semicircle where the busts of two King Georges stand, looking straight at the steps leading up to the Palace.

If I were to take a leaf out of Charles Xuereb’s book, I would argue that those two busts should be placed elsewhere, in a museum say, as they belong to the past, and their place should be taken by something else that reflects the current constitutional situation, something that embodies the spirit of our Republic.

But though that’s an intriguing point, it‘s not the point I want to make. Instead, I want to focus on two other Georges, the former President and the current. The former President is the éminence grise whispering in the Prime Minister‘s ear – the PM himself assured us, at least on one occasion, that he sought the former President’s advice, confirming, if indeed confirmation was necessary, that he still isn’t his own man.

The current President, the other George, spent a lifetime amassing a fortune in moral capital. In the 1980s, he had stood up to the bullying of a few ugly customers from his hometown, earning the respect of many in the process. Just to understand how ugly these ugly customers were, they once tried to persuade a former minister from my hometown, a notary, to “change his view” ( ibdel ilfiehma) on something or other, but I think it was related to some business he had to deal with in the Labour Party’s Disciplinary Board. The only way for him to show them the door was to open the top drawer of his desk and grab the pistol he kept there.

Having stood up to these ugly customers consolidated George Vella’s reputation for integrity, so much so that he was offered the leadership of the Labour Party in 1992, but he declined.

Thereafter, whenever he spoke, his words unfailingly carried enormous weight because his integrity was beyond doubt and beyond question. When he decided to sponsor Joseph Muscat’s career, his endorsement opened many, many doors for the up-and-coming Burmarrad kid.

But the smarty-pants with a wily smile from Burmarrad, who cannot speak Maltese without a dialectical inflection, outsmarted the grand old man. He appointed the President’s sonin-law to the top position at the Gaming Authority. This son-inlaw was then appointed to the analogous position at the Malta Financial Services Authority. Clearly, this son-in-law is a politically exposed person in virtue of his relationship with the then Minister and now Head of State. The question begs itself: was Joseph Cuschieri (George Vella‘s son-in-law) appointed to those top positions because of his qualifications, curriculum, track record, and expertise, or because of his relationship to Dr Vella?

Mr Cuschieri seems to have depended a lot on Edwina Licari, a lawyer. Was this because he lacked the necessary qualifications for those appointments?

George Vella had amassed a veritable fortune in moral capital. (Even though, one of his staff once admitted to me, in writing, that he’s not wellversed in human rights – a serious shortcoming for a President of the Republic, in my very humble opinion. But this shortcoming might or might not have any bearing on his moral standing.) The imbroglio his son-inlaw got him in squanders Dr Vella’s capital. Mostly because one wonders what emboldened Mr Cuschieri (and Dr Licari) to display such madness and accompany on a fantastic trip to Las Vegas a principal actor in the economic sector they were entrusted to supervise and regulate. Did Mr Cuschieri feel shielded by his father-in-law’s position and by the closeness with the Burmarrad wheelerdealer? If indeed this was the case, then George Vella has a lot to answer for.

Doctors passing water outside the urinal

Malta Today is being carried away by its pro-abortion frenzy. A few days ago, one of its big shots, Matthew Vella, wrote a piece aimed at ridiculing Catholics and other people who take their religion seriously, mostly because these people are against abortion. He addressed a number of insults at them, which, for obvious reasons, I shan‘t repeat, except for one: “antediluvian”. I keep asking myself: what is there so prehistoric, so barbarian, so antiquated in being against killing one’s own children?

What’s there so glamorous, so fascinating, so modern in claiming the right to kill your own child?

Mr Vella, and others who belong to the Liberal equivalent of Madame Tussaud’s, are shallow thinkers. They are metaphorical wax figures – as soon as you bring the torch of reason next to them, they melt.

They are unable to think beyond or outside the dominant ideology – they have delegated their thinking to the ideologues, and the ideologues are all too happy to think on their behalf. Mr Vella and the Madame Tussaud Liberals never ask themselves, Cui bono? – who stands to gain from the acceptance and application of the dominant ideology? Had Mr Vella lived at the time of America’s colonisation by the Spaniards, he would probably have defended the conquistadors who enslaved the Amerindios and would have called the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas and his supporters “antediluvian” just because they argued that Amerindios too had souls and should be treated as human beings.

Now, that media house is publishing mediocre, if not even shallow, articles by medical doctors putting forward proabortion philosophical arguments. I wonder where medical doctors got their philosophical formation from. I also wonder whether medical doctors who write for Malta Today are also thinking of offering advice on how to fill your income tax form, plan your estate for after your passing away, apply to build a villa on an ODZ, and how to restore an old painting.

In Maltese we have a beautiful saying: to pass water outside the urinal.

Maltese Quirks (8)

I‘ve recently seen the packaging of a product (consisting of roast potatoes with rosemary) claiming to be “patata bir-rożmarì“. Rożmarì doesn‘t exist in Maltese; “rosemary” is klin.

Now it might be that someone‘s aunt was Rosemary or the more common Mariroż, but rożmarì isn‘t the name of the spice and – at least according to Erin Serracino Inglott’s Miklem – isn‘t even a word in Maltese. Why on earth did they coin a new word? Why not use “klin”? I don’t know who designed the product’s packaging, but I wonder whether they could have spent five minutes looking up the equivalent of “rosemary” in Maltese instead of resorting to divining the word.

In countries that are more developed than ours, some public performers entertain their audience by poking fun at members of society – mostly politicians – who are unable to express themselves correctly in the national language. The joke is usually two-layered: on the surface, the butt of the joke is ridiculed for not knowing the language; on the deeper level, not knowing the language is equated to the inability to think clearly. Ignorance of the language thus becomes not simply a linguistic shortcoming (a question of knowledge) but an intellectual shortcoming (a question of intelligence).

You can see the dynamic of this type of joke in the Italian TV programme Striscia la Notizia: the presenters poke fun at public figures who fail to master the Italian language.

Luca Medici, say, created the character “Checco Zalone”, a linguistically-inept regular guy, who made him a veritable fortune at the cinema – his four movies top the list of Italy’s highest-grossing films by box office revenues. Medici, however, went one step further and equated linguistic incorrectness to political incorrectness: the mechanism he created is so smart, functioning on two levels at the same time, that Medici has managed to become a favourite with both the Right (which enjoys the linguistic joke, the joke at the surface) and the Left (which loves political correctness, and therefore loves the joke on the deeper level).

In the Anglophone world, such jokes are also common. For instance, PG Wodehouse (18811975) plays with the readers of his novels by exposing characters for the fools they are through their linguistic shortcomings. There’s an excerpt – but I can’t remember from which novel (Wodehouse wrote 71 of them) – in which two young ladies are discussing a young man, and one of them tells the other, “Oh, he’s very loquacious!” “Yes,” replies her friend, “and he’s talkative too!”

Such jokes aren‘t possible in Maltese. Because in Malta, being incompetent in the national language is nothing to make fun of. It’s the state of affairs.

Just consider the use of attentat to mean “attempt”, when it should be tentattiv. Since attentat is phonetically closer to the English “attempt”, many are misled into thinking that it must be the word. Attentat is “an attempt on [somebody’s life]”; tentattiv is “an attempt”. One could envisage a tentattiv ta’ attenat – a failed attempt on somebody’s life.