The opposite of madness

Something tells me history will be a good deal kinder to Franco Debono than it ever will be to his army of detractors.

In my experience, these tend to fall into two distinct categories. First there are those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - a €40,000 pa retainer fee, perhaps; or a cut on 15% commissions on oil purchases worth a million each day - and who therefore respond with disproportionate panic and aggression to anything that may threaten their own direct dial-up connection to the national swill-trough.

Then there is a second, arguably much more annoying category of mostly mindless automatons, who still prefer to allow others do their thinking for them... and who, in nearly all cases, have never really made a single contribution of their own to the ongoing experiment that is 'project independent Malta'.

Neither category is particularly appetising, I am the first to admit. But this time round it is actually the second that interests me more. In particular, I am intrigued by the common thread that underpins many of their most consistent arguments - a thread that can be summed up roughly as follows: "anyone who in any way challenges the dominant viewpoint of his age, and embarks upon a course of action that can only pit him against a ruthless and unstoppable force, intent on looting pretty much all this country's assets for its own purely gluttonous ends - when he could instead sit quietly back and maybe even partake in the illicit flow of goodies himself - well, that person obviously has to be insane."

This week I crossed swords with quite a few such sorry specimens in private conservations here and there. And what emerged from the ordeal was that a very great many people in this country are in fact incapable of forming an opinion of their own to begin with: a rather worrying thought, when you consider the existence of that other category I mentioned earlier - you know, the one whose main aim is precisely to dictate its own political opinions to others (and then make them believe that they had thought it all up for themselves).

Of course, when pressed to defend their position in any way, most of these people will sooner or later get caught up in the loose ends of their own patently flawed logic. Madness can after all be defined in any number of ways: but to identify the root cause of a very real problem, then attempt to address that problem through purely legitimate (and dare I say it, European) means... as far as I am concerned, that sort of behaviour has never been part of the word's definition at all.

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But let us talk a little about lunacy itself. It's a topic we don't discuss much in this country - to the extent that we very often don't even recognize insane behaviour when it is staring us right in the face; and even worse, we tend to diagnose 'insanity' of the most outrageous kind imaginable, even when the actual picture would be one of total lucidity.

So it was when Franco Debono decided to single-handedly take on what he described as an "oligarchy" (his choice of words, by the way - I for one think it is altogether too lofty to describe what is actually a grubby little band of lowlife CROOKS), and bring to public attention the glaring fact that his own government had taken practically all its most sensitive decisions only to accommodate all the leeches, leaving the ordinary man in the street to foot the bill.

On that occasion, the general verdict was that Debono must clearly be insane.'You have to be mad to go against the entire system like that,' one particularly obtuse person informed me this week... little realizing, of course, that if his own words were to be applied to the entire history of humanity, most of the major social upheavals we now consider pinnacles of human achievement - the abolition of slavery, for instance, or even the Moon landings in 1969 - would simply never have happened at all.

But what intrigues me in all this is how the definition of 'insanity' seems to change: not according to what it is used to describe, but according to the personal exigencies of the people using the word.

Strangely, the same people who this week dismissed Franco Debono as 'mad' for having challenged the status quo and robbed his own government of its majority in the House of Representatives, did not use the same adjective to describe Dom Mintoff when he exhibited pretty much exactly the same symptoms back in 1997.

Yet there was arguably much more in the way of (let's be nice) 'eccentricity' in Mintoff's antics than in those of Debono 15 years later. I happen to remember Mintoff's rousing 'we will fight them on the Cottonera waterfront' speech in Parliament in 1997. It was powerful, passionate and riveting stuff, I'll grant you. But it was also nonsensical gibberish from beginning to end (a period extending almost to three days)... and there were even moments when Mintoff very evidently thought he was addressing a long-dead British governor, instead of the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

But nobody called him 'mad' at the time... or at least, none of those who reserve the same adjective for Debono today. Indeed I remember articles and editorials dating back to the period, which sought to ascribe all sorts of 'method' in Mintoff's completely insane ramblings.

And when I - then but a young Padawan who still had much to learn in the ways of the Force- raised the possibility that... heck, maybe he just forgot to take his medication (or took too much)... I was frowned out of the office as 'someone who doesn't understand'.

I do understand now, of course. Difficult not to, when the full extent of the hypocrisy unfolds before your eyes which such remarkable precision. It works like this: the actions of any one man are not, in themselves, either 'sane' or 'insane'. They become one or the other, depending on how that first category I mentioned earlier is affected by the same actions' long-term consequences.

For instance: if they are positively affected (as they were in Mintoff's case) then they will briskly inform you that - in your own opinion, please note - the person behind that action was not only a paragon of sanity, but a national hero to boot.

If they are negatively impacted, then... hey presto! Be that person the very epitome of perfect mental health, 'mad' is how he will nonetheless be described.

Let's apply this to the Mintoff scenario, shall we? When he voted against the Cottonera project in 1998, the immediate upshot was: a) the demise of the Sant administration; b) the re-election of the PN, and finally; c), the 'defrosting' of Malta's EU membership bid, paving the way for accession in 2004.

Never mind that this possibility was obviously light years away from Mintoff's mind when he brought his government down. Never mind, too, that the same Mintoff had also co-founded and fronted the staunchly eurosceptic 'Campaign for National Independence'... and therefore, by definition, could not have consciously intended to hasten Malta's entry into EU.

Yet this only illustrates the same paradox. The truth is that, even if Mintoff's actions in no way tallied with his actual intentions... most people I know reacted almost as though the opposite were true: as if the same deeds constituted the most logical and sensible course of action to take under the circumstances.

Why? Because we now measure sanity in terms only in terms of how a small but powerful minority decides to interpret such matters - whether their interpretation stands up to scrutiny or not.

Now compare this to Franco Debono - whose vote against the Budget last December did not, in actual fact, cut short government's hold on power by even a minute (the present administration's term has actually been the longest since 1992, as Gonzi keeps boasting in the background). Nor did it deny government its majority - for the simple reason that the same 'majority' had not actually existed since the preceding year; and even here, it was two other MPs alongside Debono to have also spelt its demise.

Meanwhile, Debono's own motives were fairly straightforward throughout. Having identified an 'oligarchy' - now much more visible than it has ever been in the past: and boy, what a pretty sight it turned out to be in the end - he proceeded to pull the plug on the very machine that had kept the same oligarchy hooked up to all the country's infrastructural power nodes.

Are these the actions of a madman? Not according to any definition of 'madness' that I would be willing to go along with. Quite the contrary: Debono's actions followed on from his own thought processes in a perfectly rational sequence. Consider it this way - his alternative was to simply sit back and allow the same "oligarchy" to rule the roost unchallenged. How would that course of action have logically followed on from his earlier, declared mission statement to destroy the oligarch once and for all, or perish in the attempt? 

But the determining factor is quite another. Having kept the country guessing for weeks, Debono eventually bowed out of the election last Wednesday - putting paid to rumours that he would contest as an independent candidate, or form a party of his own, or contest with Labour, or contest with AD, or whatever.

In the end he did nothing of the kind... thus emulating Mintoff, who likewise allowed rumour to run riot in 1998, before fading quietly out of the electoral race.

And in both instances, this constitutes the very opposite of madness. Mintoff (who I think still holds the record for 1st count votes in any one district) clearly did not want to end his monumental career with the humiliation of abject defeat. Debono clearly reasoned the same way: but more significantly, he must have also weighed his actual chances beforehand, then made his electoral calculations and concluded (correctly, I should think) that his chances of election as an independent on the fifth district were actually pretty much zero.

Is this conclusion the product of a deranged mind? Not at all... and this can be confirmed by placing the incident into the context of an entire history of people who tried the same calculation, but came up with wildly different answers.

You may remember a time when elections also featured such colourful characters as the late Spiridione Sant and Richard Saliba "Tal-Farfett". The former would regularly burst into a surprisingly rousing vocal rendition of the 'Innu Malti' during practically every BA political broadcast (now immortalized on Youtube, by the way); as for the latter, his most memorable electoral promise was to straighten the Marsa race track "so that horses won't get dizzy".

But if you ask me, what certifies those two gentlemen as (again, let's not be unkind) 'eccentric' was not the sheer wackiness of what they actually said, sang or in any represented on TV.

No, it was the fact that they would doggedly contest one election after another after, never get more than eight or nine votes... and yet never give up trying.

Some would call that "persistent". No offence, but I prefer to think of it as being "one screw short of a porno". Yet now we have Franco Debono doing the very opposite: I.e. NOT contesting in the face of certain defeat... and sure enough the popular verdict is: mad as a hatter.

Personally I would have expected 'madness' to be made of slightly dottier stuff than that. But then again, I also agreed 100% with Franco Debono when he insisted that the "oligarchy" had to go - that the government was (and in my view, still is) corrupt, for failing to take any action against corruption when it had the chance, and indeed doing the very opposite: i.e., stalling anti-corruption laws, discrediting institutions such as the national audit office (when these say things that are not music to its ears), and generally retreating into a universe of denial and omertà whenever allegations rear their heads - so obviously I must be a lunatic too.