It’s doom alone that counts

I was just beginning to wonder when the next good old-fashioned moral panic would break out. It’s been a while, you know. Let’s see now… when was the last time someone warned us all of dire apocalyptic consequences, threatening ‘the very fabric of human civilisation and all life as we know it’, etc. etc.?  

Ah yes: that would be before the last election in 2013. In the event of a Labour victory we were told (among countless other nightmare scenarios) that Malta would need a ‘Greek-style bailout’ within two years; then there were the billboards showing huge queues before the employment office, etc. 

But wait, that doesn’t really count. Not so much because these predictions clearly got slightly lost in translation (Malta is currently around the second-fastest Eurozone economy, and employment has hit an all-time high)… but because they don’t exactly fall into the ‘moral’ category. Nor are they in any way unique to that particular election, or even to Malta as a whole.

In fact, I don’t recall a single election (and I’ve voted in six) that wasn’t characterised by exactly the same sort of ‘worst-case scenario’ prediction… coming, as a rule, from both sides. Take 2004 as an example. Had Labour won, the worst-case projection by the Nationalists would have involved Malta becoming some kind of ‘pariah state’ under an increasingly desperate Alfred Sant: isolated from the civilised world at every level, geographical, political, diplomatic, etc. 

And weighing in at the opposite corner was the equivalent prediction in case of a Nationalist victory: with Sant thundering ominously from the podium about all the factories that would have to close – all of them, in fact – not to mention, of course, the most dreaded calamity of all: an unstoppable invasion of Sicilian hairdressers.

We all know what really happened, of course. Some factories closed, others opened… and as for the Sicilian invasion, this turned out to consist almost exclusively in restaurateurs... which also means that Maltese restaurants now actually serve good Spaghetti Vongole for a change… which also means that no one in his right mind would possibly dream of complaining. 

As for those insane enough to object, they would most likely be bumped off by the Mafia anyway. So there, you see? As a result of EU membership, life has undeniably become more competitive in some areas, and less protected in others.

Naturally, we can’t with any certainty say what would have happened had things worked the other way round. But going on the success rate of all the other equally exaggerated electoral prophecies, my hunch is that Malta would have simply reverted to the sort of place it was between 1996 and 1998: no great shakes, but not particularly awful either. Certainly not a ‘failed state’, of the kind so lovingly foretold before 2004…

But in any case: the best thing about our national culture of apocalyptic electoral soothsaying is that it gives us all a bedrock of certainty we can all rely on. No matter who gets to actually govern the country, we all know – because we’ve been told, in suitably panicky tones – that the future will invariably be BLACK. 

Ah, such a cheerful place to live. It’s like having your fortune read in Tarot Cards… only to draw ‘The Hanged Man’ or ‘The Tower Struck By Lightning’ every single time. Let’s face it: with both sides forecasting unmitigated disaster in the case of the other’s victory… and with an almost mathematical certainty that one side or the other will, in fact, win the election… the Maltese population is virtually guaranteed to enjoy at least one Apocalypse every five tears.

And let’s look on the bright side: life would be insufferably boring any other way. What the heck would we have left to argue about, if we all suddenly stopped trying to constantly save this country from an impending tsunami of misery and woe? Parking tickets? Traffic? Noise from the café down the street? People whose dogs poop all over the pavement? Junk mail stuffed into your letter-box, despite clearly legible signs suggesting a wide variety of alternative places where such mail can be stuffed...? 

Well: OK, yes, I suppose there would still be plenty of reasons to always be at each other’s throats. But what about the excitement? As things stand, the advantage of living in Malta is that you literally live each day as if it were your last. Tomorrow, everything might come crashing down about your ears. All it takes is one careless moment of inattention by an electorate impervious to the tearful, impassioned political appeals to avert catastrophe… and KAZAM! The portal to the Underworld will suddenly yawn open at our feet, and out come pouring all the legions of Hell…

That’s the sort of thing that keeps a country on its toes, you know. So even if the only reliable thing about these predictions is that they invariably fizzle out into farcical nothingness every single time… going along with them still provides some form of tangible benefit. If nothing else, it conjures up a wonderfully eschatological narrative into which we can all weave our own personal mythologies – anything from “I remember the bad old days of Mintoff”, to “My grandfather was one of the ‘Suldati Tal-Azzar’, excommunicated in 1960 and buried in the Mizbla’, etc. – and automatically feel like we are ourselves part of a never-ending cycle of history.

Hang on, I’ve digressed. Could have sworn I was actually going somewhere with this. Ah yes, of course! Moral panic. Not exactly the same sort of animal, though there are similarities. Political parties sometimes tend to latch onto them to bolster their own scaremongering… but this hasn’t happened for a while, because… 

Well, for much the same reason as political prophecies tend not to come true very often. There is, after all, a limit to how often you can predict the collapse of a society that was supposed to have collapsed countless times already: with the enactment of the 1975 marriage act, the legalisation of sodomy, the removal of censorship, the introduction of divorce, the Civil Rights Act, and now the decriminalisation of blasphemy. 

Remember all the warnings of ‘the erosion of the basic unit of society: the family’ during the divorce referendum campaign? Or the old slippery slope argument, whereby all conceivable roads – divorce included – invariably lead to abortion?

Now THAT’s the sort of panic I originally had in mind. And the divorce referendum was not the best example – only the most recent. Back in the day, it was Satanic masses. None of this obscure ‘social disintegration’ jargon: people were less into sociology back then, and were thus easier to scare with evils of a more… shall we say, fundamental kind. 

Like Satan himself, no less – the Prince of Darkness, horns, pointy tail and all… lurking around every Maltese rubble wall in the hope of inspiring one or two layabouts to sacrifice the occasional chicken in his honour. Personally, I’ve often wondered why such a powerful and nefarious Force of Evil would content himself with such modest pickings. I mean, doesn’t he have a genocide or an Ebola epidemic to work on, or something? 

But judging by the alarm bells that went off across the country – with entire episodes of Pjazza Tlieta dedicated to “Is-Satanizmu!’, uttered in the same tone Joseph McCarthy used when uttering the word ‘Communism!; – the panic that this absurdly medieval superstition instilled was very real. All it took for horror stories to dominate the media for weeks was the discovery of ‘devil worship symbols’ spray-painted on the wall of an abandoned building. No other evidence of Satanic ritual was required, of course: the mere sight of a pentagram daubed in paint on a wall was enough to instantly pin the blame on ‘Is-Satanisti’: a conveniently shadowy subculture that no one seems to know anything about, and that quite frankly probably never even existed (unless you count the ‘proof’ in that Pjazza Tlieta programme). 

It became such an obvious automatic alibi, that even the vandals who struck Mnajdra temples in 1992 – an attack that was later established as having nothing to do with Satanism at all – also sprayed the megaliths with Satanic symbols after toppling them over. You know, just to keep the intrepid investigators’ options open that much longer…

And just like these ‘Satanic symbols’ turned out to be a red herring, so too do these cataclysmic predictions invariably fall flat on their faces. The divorce scenario again springs to mind: despite countless warnings of social disintegration, Malta still has the lowest divorce rate in Europe; and where we previously had the highest rate of separations, this statistic (partly for obvious reasons) fell by one fifth in the first year.

It may be too early to draw similar conclusions about the introduction of civil unions: but again, the thrust of the scaremongering was all along about the ‘need to protect the family unit’: for all the world as if the recognition of unorthodox relationship would automatically cause the spontaneous combustion of thousands of happy ‘normal’ families across the country.

As things stand today, the only known effects of this law are that a handful of couples here and there have had their relationships formally acknowledged by the State – saddling them with rights and privileges previously reserved only to married couples – and… um… no, that’s pretty much it. 

No earthquakes, no tsunamis… a couple of waterspouts halfway through August, yes, but that’s more likely to do with global warming… and oh look: the Maltese family is no healthier or unhealthier than it was before. Malta did not descend into chaos, either; if anything the chaos lessened, as more types of relationships are now on the State’s radar. Same goes for divorce, where the number of previously unregulated relationships has dwindled.

But hey! Let’s not allow a few boring facts and statistics to get in the way of all the fun. Moral panics are what this country specialises in… so by all means, let’s have another one to append to all the rest. What’ll it be now? Embryo freezing… ah yes, jolly good, it involves fertilised embryos, so it can always be linked to that instant, panic-inducing magic word, ‘abortion’… it’s a sufficiently complicated, technology-heavy subject that few people genuinely understand (so it’s easy to convince them of the untold horrors it will invariably produce)… so let’s kick up some good old-fashioned mass-hysteria about it, like only we – and maybe the Westboro Baptist Church in the USA – know how to do.

Of course, it’s far likelier that the effects of embryo freezing will be every bit as devastating as the effects of divorce or civil unions. In fact, the only foreseeable consequence will be a boost to the success rate of locally provided IVF services: which should theoretically result in the birth of more new life that would otherwise not be possible. But like all the other moral panics we have seen in the past, the reality of any given situation is hardly the point here. 

As Bob Dylan would have ended the song, “it’s doom alone that counts.” We are addicted to apocalyptic prophecies of cataclysmic proportions. So by all means, let’s have our fix…