Second thoughts

Nothing wrong with that in itself: I have second thoughts all the time, and... well... just look at me.

The only trouble with Vassallo’s second thoughts is that they only betray the flimsiness of his first ones. It’s as though he suddenly turned round and said: um, maybe it wasn’t such a clever idea to roundly announce my resignation from the party on a point of moral principle, like I did the other week. Maybe I’d be better off today if I just kept my trap shut, or at least chose my words with slightly more care. So can I come back and have another shot?

Of course he is free to do precisely that – though I suspect he wouldn’t be, if he acted on his own advice and emigrated to Iran – and who knows? The Labour Party is probably daft enough to take him back.

But if you ask me, the fact that he is now flip-flopping on the issue – and in the typical Maltese politician way, too (They made me say it! Those pesky journalists with their hidden agendas!) – strongly suggests two things to my mind: neither of which is very encouraging.

1) Never mind the conservatism. The key to understanding Vassallo’s true motivation lies in his constant references to himself. Consider his actual statements: “I would prefer to live in Iran’ – like anyone gave a damn where he decides to make his humble abode. “Nobody stuck up for me” – like he automatically deserves support from an army of well-wishers... and on it goes.

2) Vassallo does not have a peg to hang his political philosophy on, other than a very widespread (but equally vague) sentiment that society is somehow falling apart at the seams, and that the cause of the rot is ‘liberal permissiveness’. Many will no doubt sympathise, BUT...  what is Vassallo’s solution? Short of inventing the time machine, and returning to a forgotten ‘glorious age’ when heretics and homosexuals were burnt at the stake... what, exactly, is Vassallo’s great proposal to reverse this perceived slide towards moral depravity?

Answer: CENSORSHIP. No, it doesn't get any more imaginative than that. It seems even adult politicians like Adrian Vassallo seriously believe that all the world's wickedness can be made to disappear through a simple act of Parliament. Nor is it particularly original. After all, censorship of the kind envisioned by Vassallo is already old hat in some of the countries he admires so much – including China, it seems from his interview with MaltaToday. Only they don’t just censor pornography. Oh, no. They also censor political opinions. Criticism of government. ‘Glorification of Western lifestyles’, whatever that is supposed to mean. And so on and so forth.

Adrian Vassallo may well stamp his feet and insist that his vision of censorship is altogether different – after all , it’s HIS vision, and he is... um... special. The question is: can the same Adrian Vassallo also guarantee that what starts out as a personal  crusade against pornography, will not outgrow its original raison d’etre and become censorship of anything that poses a threat to the prevailing regime? And if so... how?

Strange to have to point this out to a GP, but people like Vassallo - and there are many  - are actually delusional. They genuinely believe that they themselves have the power to control that machine of censorship and bend it to their own, purely megalomaniac purposes... even after their deaths. For unless Dr Vassallo also believes he is immortal (who knows? It seems he believes quite a lot of other nonsense) he must surely realise that he will no longer be able to control proceedings when he is no longer around to do so in flesh and blood. I would go a step further, and say that he would be hopelessly, hopelessly, HOPELESSLY unable to control it even in his own lifetime. Someone a little more devious and less honest will slip into the machinery before Vassallo himself is even aware that it happened. And that, I greatly fear, is where the real trouble will begin.

Yes, it suddenly makes for a pathetic picture, doesn’t it? I can see it now:  a frantic Dr Adrian Vassallo, tearfully pleading that ‘it wasn’t his intention’ for people to get murdered for speaking out against the state – as happens every other day in his homeland of choice, Iran – while simultaneously being forced to concede that ‘liberal permissiveness’ may not have been such a bad thing after all...

...at least, not when compared to its direct antithesis: repression.

Meanwhile, I await - with much eagerness and a large bucket of popcorn - the next instalment of the Vassallo saga: i.e., when he finally gets his third thoughts, and settles down in his natural home, the PN.