A few months ago I mentioned, in an interview on Dissett, that blogs were holding a mirror up to our society and that our society did not like what it saw. The process of reflection has been going on for some time now and whether it is the sudden urgency with which we are discussing Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s Bill or whether we are lost in the aftermath of the Stitching decision in court, we are constantly confronted with a picture of Maltese society – warts and all.
Much has been made of this idea that the battle between conservatives and progressives has reached its defining moment, but there is more to it than the centuries-old battle between preservation and change. While following debates on both divorce and censorship over the past week, I have noticed a trend in some of the arguments. Both subjects deal with specific values and bring to the discussion table a plethora of issues that have for a long time been dealt with quietly and away from the public eye. There lies an important point for this argument. I harbour a strong suspicion that one field in this debate – that of the conservative elements who are normally both anti-divorce and pro-censorship – is firmly rooted in denial.
This denial is built around a permanent incapacity to reconcile the facts thrown at them daily by the world around them with the principles and dogmas that they have been brought up to regurgitate. There is an innate inability to question and examine the unfamiliar allied with an ability to blot out huge portions of their own experience that would be incongruous with the very principles they would love to follow. It’s complicated. But you’ll soon see what I mean.
I can’t believe it’s not Shakespeare
Back in the time when I could play football for hours during break without fearing for life and limb, I used to return to my fourth form English literature lessons looking forward to the latest text on offer. I still vividly remember a particular play about a dysfunctional, murderous couple who were never up to any good. The woman (should I say woman?) in particular was quite a devil of a woman. To this day I am impressed by the passage of the play where she invokes the spirits to unsex her pronto and to transform her into the very embodiment of cruelty that is bereft of any remorse – a machine honed to commit any form of evil without any pangs of conscience.
That a woman would be prepared to relinquish her very own sex in order to become a perfect evil machine was surprising enough. There was more though. She then proceeds to invite murderers to come suckle from her breasts that, thanks to the aforementioned transformation, no longer provided maternal milk but had been transformed into a source of gall. Gall being of course the mediaeval word for wrath, anger, hatred… you get my drift.
Behind every great man lies a great woman. With this couple the woman is both schemer and mastermind, egging on a weak-willed husband to murder and remorseless backstabbing for the sake of power. When her husband’s will seems to wane and when he seems to be reneging on his conspiratorial promises, she once again provides him with an inspiring speech. Well, inspiring is one way of putting it. What she does tell her pussy-footing husband is that if it was her being held to her word, she would do so even if she had promised to bash the brains of her own infant. Her nonchalance is legendarily spine-chilling. She has “given suck” she says and “knows how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me”, but she would still “while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this”.
A charming Lady she must have been, no doubt, this Mrs Macbeth. For yes messieurs et mesdames, this devilish dysfunctional couple is none other than the ill-fated Thane of Cawdor, Glamis, etc and his belovèd wife, and the play in question was written by the much acclaimed Bard of Avon himself – one Mr Shakespeare William of Stratford-upon-Avon. Given that the shenanigans to which these two got up could easily fall within the parameters of dangerous sexual perversions, as well as the imagery of assault and murder of suckling babes, it is a wonder how our English teacher – good, old Ms T. Friggieri – managed to present this play to a class of young impressionable adolescents without too much trouble.
Censor this?
Even if Ms Friggieri had the text whipped from her hands by Malta’s punctilious Bord ta’ Klassifika ta’ Pellikoli u Palk (hard one that, given that she is also the chairperson of said board), we could always fall back on William Golding’s magnificent Lord of the Flies and the wonderful metaphor of collective sexual climax among shipwrecked pre-adolescent boys as they stab away at a pig while being carried away in an ecstasy of violent and murderous pleasures. Who ever said school literature was boring? I wonder what the kids at Saint Aloysius’ College are reading today in the post-Stitching world. And will the Jesuits take the pupils on a trip to the cinema over Easter to watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ replete with exaggerated scenes of violence and sadistic suffering far beyond anything found in the Scriptures?
Gibson, Golding and Shakespeare. All use their medium to deliver a message. The audience is not expected to sit back and literally consume all that is set out before it but is rather expected to question the content. The complex characters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth expose the dangers of a quest for power – Tolkien gives us the Ring, Shakespeare gives us an unsexed half-demonic woman prepared to bash the brains of her own suckling offspring. Golding examines humanity at its most crude and Gibson? Well, Gibson took the narrative of the suffering of the Son of God and exaggerated it beyond recognition. By the very standards imposed by the Stitching decision, Gibson’s film should never have made it to the silver screens in Malta (nor, should we really be punctilious, should most tracts of the Bible).
I could go on. The list is endless. As Rupert Cefai rightly pointed out, we might be the victims of our own hypocrisy. We would be prepared to censor the portrayal of a father lifting a dagger to the skies about to murder his own son as being “violent” and “offensive to sentiments”, but we might change tack if we called the dad Abraham and the son Isaac. Every narrative has its medium and, yes, some are quite shocking. But the mere fact that they are intended to provoke does not mean that they are “bad” or “censurable”. In the end we must ask the question: Are we protecting our values or are we cushioning ignorance? The debate (unfortunately) continues.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my Jeffrey
Michael Briguglio, AD’s chairman, penned a brilliant article last Friday called “Censoring (post)-Modernity” and you can find it on www.mikes-beat.blogspot.com. In the article, he argues that when referring to “Maltese civilisation” the Court that gave us the Stitching decision was actually referring to “the dominant interests of the dominant institutions in Malta”. It goes without saying that, having written of the dangers of the stranglehold of bipartisan politics in Malta for over five years, J’accuse is in full agreement with Mike. The mainstream of both political parties is unable to deal with substantial issues such as divorce or the latest questions of censorship.
The traditionalist stranglehold must not necessarily be seen with a chiaroscuro sense of “good or evil”. It does, however, threaten to choke the rights and expressions of a different (and growing) minority aspiring to a more liberal (or if you like a toned down term, a more personal) lifestyle. This is the unrepresented minority that is not content with having others think for itself. It’s the same unrepresented minority that would like to be provoked and challenged with new ideas and which believes that the building block of society deserves a shot at a second chance if it is broken, and irretrievably so. It believes in not imposing its values and thoughts on others but, ironically, it also still feels part of the social fabric that keeps us all together.
Which brings me to JPO (abbreviation for convenience) and his Bill. It’s clumsy and elegant at the same time. It’s oxymoronically magnificent and has shocked the lethargic dinosaurs plodding at the head of Mike’s “dominant institutions” into action. Shocked was GonziPN (the man, the label and the immediate entourage) by the sudden need to take a stand without faffing away or hiding in a bishop’s frock (plus the lurking danger of a new perceived fragmentation of the party). Shocked was Muscat’s Progressive Party by the sudden realisation that its bluff, with all its flaws and miscalculations, had been called and that the honeymoon with all things progressive would soon be over once the cover has been blown. The lone part-time farmer, journalist and dentist from Zebbug had struck again with a vengeance and hooray for that. Yes, we applaud JPO for this shock treatment. No wonder we chose him as our Personality of the Year in 2008.
The Bill itself has a long way to go and there are many tricks up the sleeves of the dominant institutions before we could actually see a proper divorce bill introduced (hopefully not this cut and paste Irish job). There’s free votes and qualms of conscience, there’s an uphill battle to educate about the tutelage of minority rights, there’s a possible refusal by a Catholic President to sign the bill (an excuse to get out of the way after the recent faux pas?), and then there is the mother of all threats: an abrogative referendum. For if fundamental fanatics like the GoL people can go to extremes to coerce parliamentarians into signing bits of nonsense, how can we not expect equivalent tactics to get a future divorce bill abrogated by busybodies who would tell you when and where to copulate, if they could.
The battle lines have been drawn. Right now we should focus on the debate rather than on the people jumping in and out of the limelight. I for one am grateful for the empowered journals with their mini-video vox pops that persist in their duty to lift the mirror straight into the face of Maltese society but please, please, someone get that Board of Censors to prohibit the use of the phrase “as such” in an interview. This practical debate (fortunately) has begun.
Encyclopaedic
This article threatens to reach the encyclopaedic levels of old and that is because of the two subjects that provoke endless discussion. Do pop over to J’accuse the blog because we have been having quite a few interesting exchanges over the last few weeks. We’ll be writing and blogging from home base (Malta) next week and you’ll be able to hear about the latest ECHR case obliging a state to provide a proper set-up for its residents abroad to be able to vote (cheers to the Runs for the flagging). I pick up my rental car on Thursday morning and I hope that the roads will be a little calmer than has been reported over the last few days. Easy on the gas pedal, guys.
Finally, the World Cup will be one match short of being over by the time you finish reading this article. We will either have Spanish or Dutch celebrations – either way it’s a European victory, which is small consolation for those of us whose hopes lay elsewhere in the beginning. Unlike the eight-limbed cephalopod of note, my predictions for this world cup have been absolutely atrocious but I am still convinced that we have seen some good football. Speaking of the World Cup and Octopi, I leave you with a quote I pulled from Facebook. It’s by a colleague and fellow Juventino Damien Degiorgio:
“I’ve got nothing against Paul but World Cups used to be remembered for a Paul Gascoigne, a Paolo Rossi or Paolo Roberto Falcao, not for Paul the octopus” – brilliant.
(Errata Corrige: Chief Justice Roberts is NOT resigning as erroneously asserted in last week’s J’accuse. Chief Justice is there for life (a bit like a pet) – it is Justice John Stevens who has retired and will be replaced by Elena Kagan. Thanks to Indy readers the Jacobin and John Lane for the quick corrections.)
www.akkuza.com – uncensored, uncut, and unmarried. “Two-thirds of the country is divorced from reality. The rest would vote for divorce.” – from this week’s J’accuse.
