Let’s make Malta hate again…

Oh, 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 flow 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). 

There. I haven’t even started, and already I’ve won something.

OK, the next logical step would be to change job to something more... electable. Statistically speaking, the legal profession is the likeliest BY FAR to land me in Parliament. Small snag, though… it takes seven years to qualify as a practising lawyer (and another seven at least to raise the millions needed for the campaign). Hmm. How do we get round this one, I wonder?

I know! The American University of Jordan! Apparently, all it takes to get your degree recognised is the promise of a few measly hundred square metres of pristine land outside the development zone: which can all very easily be arranged once elected. And hey presto! It’s DOCTOR Aaron Abdilla Abela Agius Ancilleri, thank you very much. I didn’t send that email to be called ‘Mister’, you know. 

Now for the question of funding. This one’s trickier. By my count I’d need a minimum of three million: one million for the billboards and advertising, one million to run the campaign office on a day-to-day basis, and another million for the traditional consignment of fridge-freezers, washing machines and other household appliances with which to buy votes in the last week of the campaign.

Judging by how other parties do it, I’d say the quickest way would be to bribe a Third World dictator. Sadly, I’ve left it too late to cosy up to Gaddafi (as all Maltese Prime Ministers have done, from Mintoff to Gonzi)… and Kim Il Sung has his hands full trying to bring about World War Three. My list of allies is growing thin…

Hang on… of course! Why didn’t I think of it before? Donald Trump! Oh, never mind that he isn’t exactly a dictator, and America isn’t exactly ‘Third World’. Both those things will most likely have happened by the end of this year, and that’s what counts. In fact, I’d better give him a ring right away.

“Donald? Hi, it’s me, Aaron Abdilla Abela Agius Ancilleri, your biggest fan. Of all the incredibly idiotic things you’ve said and done over the past year, the one that impressed me the most was the proposal to build a wall separating Mexico from the United States. Now, that is precisely the sort of idiocy the whole world needs right now… especially Malta. So here’s what I propose: together, you and I will build a wall… not just between two countries… but between two CONTINENTS. That’s right, Donald. A brick wall right across the Mediterranean Sea, to stop the flow of African migrants into Europe (and hence, to America). What d’you say?”

I knew he’d like the idea. Especially when I added that the wall would need to be patrolled from end to end, and that we’d be perfectly happy to let the American armed forces invade the Mediterranean in order to take over security operations. In any case, Donald’s already in with $300 million… of which, naturally, I get 10%. By my count that’s $30 million. Heck, I could just buy both parties, assets, liabilities and all, and not even bother contesting at all. But then again… what sort of fun would that be?

No, no. We’re in this for the long haul. And the next step, naturally, would be to hide those $30 million. 

This shouldn’t be too difficult, considering how so many of our Cabinet ministers have managed to do that in the past… with only three or four ever getting caught. Obviously, I’d have to avoid all the usual suspects that the others got busted for. That’s Switzerland, British Virgin Islands and Panama immediately struck off the list. All that remains is to find another suitable jurisdiction with a similarly opaque financial system… ideally, somewhere small and inconspicuous, where dozens of dodgy companies have already set up shop to launder dirty overseas money… also, somewhere where the fiscal authorities are sufficiently castrated so as to somehow only ever pick on the low income earner, while overlooking hundreds of millions in invisible cash right under their noses. 

Above all, it has to be a place of near-zero accountability; where ministers aren’t even required to make compulsory declarations of their earnings to Parliament. A place where politically exposed people can always get away with it when caught, simply by saying the magic words: “I did nothing wrong”.

Let’s see now… what sort of country would fit that description? It sounds a lot like… 

…Malta. Ooh, what an utterly, deliciously, malevolently ingenious idea! Yes, that’ll do very nicely indeed. Nobody would suspect that I’ve hidden $30 million in the last place they’d ever even dream of looking. And the best part of it is that I don’t even have to leave my home. In fact, I can just hide the money under this tile, right here…

OK folks! Looks like everything is in place for my unelection campaign to begin in earnest. Oh wait… I forgot. My campaign slogan. Can’t go to an unelection without a campaign slogan, now can we…?

So how about… “Let’s make Malta hate again”?

Yup, that’ll work…