Life is like a box of chocolates

Years after watching Forrest Gump for the first time, it dawned on me how deceptive the movie tagline really is. “Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get.”

Erm… not to pick holes in Gump’s mum’s analogy, or anything… but if you’re going to rifle through a box of chocolates, it’s a pretty safe bet that ‘what you’re going to get’ is actually going to be ‘chocolate’, you know. I, for one, would be exceedingly surprised to unwrap a ‘Bacio’ from a box of Baci… and discover that the wrapping contained a dead mouse instead… or a severed human toe… or a miniature nuclear warhead… or anything that was not a goddamn bit of chocolate with some nuts thrown in for good measure. And I reckon Forrest Gump’s mother would have felt exactly the same way, too.

So what was clearly intended as a maxim to illustrate the unpredictability of life, actually illustrates the clean opposite. The wrapping may be a different colour, and the chocolate within may be any of a quasi-infinite number of varieties and flavours; but you can rest assured that the base will consist of a thick, dark brown paste made from roasted, ground cocoa seeds. 

All things considered, I almost prefer the new interpretation. ‘Life is like a box of chocolates. It is always going to be the same old stuff in different wrapping paper.’ Yes, that works much better indeed. It reverberates with an Universal Truth which was clearly lacking in the original. 

Look beyond the wrapping of any human activity, and – beneath all the toppings and flavours and fillings and layers of other stuff – everything will have been built on a solid bedrock of immutable, unshakable (and often very predictable) human nature.

Take Maltese political parties, for instance. Not only is the modified Gump quote entirely applicable to them… but they actually look like a box of chocolates, too. (A bit like ‘Quality Street’, though I’m not too sure about the ‘quality’ part). Joseph Muscat would be the one in the glitzy bright scarlet wrapping, which promises an exciting explosion of progressive, moderate flavours… only to melt into an unsightly mush of clashing, contrasting ingredients just three years after being unwrapped. 

Then there are the other chocolates in the box… the ones you try only after you taste the other two, and find they are equally unpalatable. They have nice wrappings, too. There is a shiny Green chocolate with a smiling yellow sun on the package. The latest flavour comes in Orange, and like all the others promises to be exciting, new and above all different.

In some ways, they are indeed different. The ingredients making up the Green alternative variety do not clash with each other quite as much as the Blue and Red, for instance: there is a consistency of flavour that has now withstood the test of a good 20 years. And as far as I am aware, the wrapping hasn’t even been peeled off the Orange Party yet, so… who knows, really? 

Initial indications are not very promising, however. The Green Pastry (I mean, party) has just finished its internal debate on euthanasia and end-of-life issues… and predictably took up a position against euthanasia, as indicated several months ago by its leader Arnold Cassola. Of course that is absolutely fine, if that is how the Maltese Green party feels about it. It is, after all, an issue that touches on life and death. We can’t all expect to agree. 

The only troubling detail is that Malta’s is the ONLY Green Party I have so far come across in my online searches – which have taken me through most of Europe, America and all the way to Australia – to have pre-emptively taken up a position against euthanasia. This in turn suggests that the ‘Green’ wrapping, on at least this issue, may indicate a different flavour here than anywhere else in the world. 

In any case: I’ve already gone over my differences of opinion with the Greens (Malta version) on this particular issue, and I see no point in repeating the arguments here. What remains to be discussed is the recipe at work behind this sort of thing. There is a base ingredient – common to all local political chocolates, regardless of the packaging – that seems to always ensure that the end product tastes the same on issues such as this.

That AD is an exception in the global Green movement on the issue of euthanasia – as it is with abortion – is something I can live with. What I find problematic is the vacuum this creates in the political spectrum: the supposedly ‘varied’ and ‘unpredictable’ box of chocolates, remember?

If even the ‘alternative’ partly say exactly the same things as all the rest of them… what choice are we left with, exactly? Where does that leave those of us who DO believe that people should be entitled to a dignified death… especially in cases where medical science and palliative care cannot guarantee dignity (nor even, for that matter, painlessness) at the utmost end of life? 

This is the moment when your hand hovers over that other chocolate in the box, the one with the orange wrapping. Are they, too, going to base their policies on important issues on their own gut feeling of what they think a largely conservative country expects from them? Will we have yet another political party which simply regurgitates all the same old, ill-conceived policies on ‘moral’ issues, to match a tired stereotype that doesn’t even remotely resemble today’s reality anymore?

As yet we can’t really say, because the party hasn’t been formed yet. It’s an odd situation, actually: the wrapping paper’s already in place… and it even has a sitting member of Parliament in the form of Marlene Farrugia. So the chocolate is already in the box, so to speak. Yet we shall have to wait until September before the wrapping paper fills out with anything more than Marlene herself. Only then will we know what sort of cream and caramel will be added to the mix.

All we have to work with at the moment are Marlene Farrugia’s various outbursts on various topics. I am unaware that euthanasia was one of them (though her husband did regale us with his opinion, which turns out to be utterly indistinguishable from Cassola’s or anyone else in Maltese politics). She did, however, indicate her views on emergency contraception. And what an interesting fudge they turned out to be, too…

This is an exact quote, lifted from an online comment (in response to the question, ‘why is morning-after pill abortifacient?’. “Because it can cause an abortion before an abortion can ever take place!!!”

Erm… come again, please? It’s not just me asking, by the way. Farrugia’s comment gave birth to an instant online meme: variations of dumbfounded, head-scratching people trying to negotiate the impossible labyrinth of that logic. 

And well they might scratch their heads. According to Marlene Farrugia (who has a medical degree, incidentally), the morning-after pill can miraculously cause an abortion before there is a pregnancy to abort. It can, in brief, do the impossible.

Not even Pokemon Go comes close to that for absurdity… and it specifically deals with grown adults hunting for things that don’t exist. So all things considered: sorry, Marlene, but you can’t just throw something as perfectly bizarre as that out into the public domain, without even a word of explanation.

Did you mean that the morning-after pill can be abortifacient because it prevents a fertilised egg from implanting? If so: a) it’s not exactly what you said, is it? And; b) medical studies approved by the World Health Organisation and quoted by Malta’s Medical Authority have all emphatically debunked that myth.

This leaves us with the other, infinitely more worrying interpretation. If the morning-after pill can cause an abortion before abortions are possible… it will have done so by preventing fertilisation from actually taking place. And this gives rise to a small problem: Dr Farrugia appears to have redefined ‘abortion’ from its present meaning of ‘terminating life after it has already begun’, to ‘preventing life from occurring in the first place’.

Huge difference there, Dr Farrugia. If ‘preventing pregnancy’ now counts as ‘abortion’… why limit your objections only to the morning-after pill? Any form of contraception whatsoever – even condoms, even the Church-approved natural method, for crying out loud – ‘prevents pregnancy’. That is, in fact, the whole point.

So is the Orange Party against contraception? I kind of doubt it myself. But the problem I see here is another. The Orange Party doesn’t even exist beneath its wrapping paper… yet already it has to struggle to maintain credibility because of the extraordinarily random statements of its leader. As with all the other colour wrappings, the confectionery being prepared in the kitchen is already laced with conflicting ingredients and flavours. Already you can tell that the resulting party will simply deflate into a mess of irreconcilable differences once opened.

So it looks like Forrest Gump’s mother had it right all along. Life really is like a box of chocolates. The only snag is that not all of us have the same taste buds. And I guess the political pastry chefs in this country never really thought about that, did they?