Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/652704
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 13 MARCH 2016 24 Opinion Let's make Malta hate again… O h, look. We're back in election mode. Billboards, mass meetings, public 'shaming' of rival politicians… MPs threatening each other (and the media) with libels… or 'challenging' each other to debates, or to repeat statements made in Parliament, or to a duel at dawn… all day, every day, in every public forum, everywhere… And as campaigns go, this one is arguably the dirtiest we've yet seen. The usual exchange of insults and barbs seems to have plummeted to hitherto unknown depths… only to discover newer depths to sink to. And the usual shit- factories seem intent on taking us all lower still: going into overdrive to 'out' other people as 'disabled' or 'autistic', to expose extra-marital affairs, or simply to keep up an unrelenting f low of insults. I never thought I'd live to say this, but Maltese politics has simply never been dirtier or more repulsive than it is today. Which, naturally, brings us to the microscopic organism in the ointment. The 2016 election campaign may already be in full swing… filth, dirt, stench and all… but (how can I put this?)… there isn't actually an election scheduled for this year. Leaving aside plainly ill- informed rumours of a snap election next November (which would in any case still be eight months away) and barring unforeseen eventualities such as an unlikely full-scale backbencher revolt… the next election will be held towards the end of next year at the earliest. At the latest, it could be in 2019. It's a bit like having a birthday party without any birthday to celebrate. Oh sure, there's cake, food, music, booze… but no candles to blow out. No birthday boy (or girl) to toast. No conceivable reason to give presents or convey best wishes. Just a party for its own sake. Lewis Carroll would have no difficulty with that arrangement: he called them 'unbirthday parties', and it was for this reason that the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse convened for their mad tea party in 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. You will, of course, appreciate the subtle difference between those scenarios. Carroll fully intended his fictitious world to be absurd and surreal: he was writing within the 'nonsense' tradition of Edward Lear. Hence the overwhelming allusions to insanity throughout the book: it's a mad tea party, a mad hatter, a mad March hare… a psychotic Queen of Hearts, a paranoid White Rabbit, a schizophrenic Cheshire Cat and a clinically depressed Mock Turtle… all invented long before any of the above psychobabble jargon even came into use. And it served a purpose, too. By subverting sanity and (especially) logic in Wonderland, Carroll forces us to question our own everyday reality. The Alice novels are unsettling precisely because they lift the ordinary and mundane out of their contexts, placing them so as to appear extraordinary and amazing. That is ultimately what all art strives to do. But the ongoing 'unelection campaign'? That is no fictitious creation within an established literary tradition. Nor is it a work of art intended to sublimate some form of deeper significance. It is just madness for its own sake… without the intellectual stimulation we associate with literature and art. It is also the inevitable outcome of a political model that has simply lost sight of its original meaning and purpose. The two parties no longer represent anything outside of themselves; their only concern is their own survival, and to maximise their own grip on power. And those objectives can only be achieved by keeping the country in a permanently high state of political tension. It is Tweedledum and Tweedledee all over again. Only not even Lewis Carroll could have designed a more completely and utterly insane reality than the one unfolding before our very eyes. But hey! If that's the way they want to play the game… fine by me. I can do insane, too. And if I say so myself… I can out-psycho the lot of them put together, without even getting out of bed. And besides: the 2016 unelection campaign has already started… so I am already late for a very important date. I may as well immediately enter myself as an official unelection candidate (as I said I would last Sunday. See? Already the beginnings of a slogan can be discerned: unlike certain people, I keep my campaign promises…). But of course, I'd need to make preparations first. Being mad is no excuse not to do mad things properly. And obviously, the first thing I'd have to do is change my name. "Vassallo, Raphael" isn't going to get me very high on an alphabetically arranged ballot sheet, now is it? So I'll be legally changing my name to…'Aaron Abdilla Abela Agius Ancilleri'. That way, not only will I be guaranteed the top spot on the list… thereby automatically inheriting the votes of all earlier preferences eliminated during the count… but I'll also beat the record for longest name in European political history (currently held by Roberta Metsola). Raphael Vassallo