Malta graduated

Only in Malta do we regularly witness something as surreal as students celebrating graduation by “buscading” (an awful word, if it even exists except for headlines in Malta) all over the place to bounce up and down for a photo-op with senior politicians.

No, they’re not there to egg them (unless it’s to egg them on), or to protest some policy (or lack thereof), or to do what students are supposed to do.

In my day – cue chunter chunter – one graduation ceremony was interrupted when the President stalked out, slavishly trailed by his minions, because he decided that a couple of statements of principle were being directed at him, poor lamb.

The day ended with graduands still managing to graduate because the Rector insisted, and with Michael Frendo, who delivered the oration, being prosecuted for lèse-majesté, or whatever it was.

Today, they dutifully trot along to take selfies with the Great and the Good. It’s a ritual that says everything about how power works here: you get your degree, and your first instinct is to go pay homage and have a selfie with the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition (separately, of course) – or any minister that will open the door.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. We live in a country where the Prime Minister, in full solemnity (well, in a sound bite to a journalist, which is as solemn as it gets), lectures the nation about suing journalists for peddling “misinformation,” while neatly forgetting that misinformation is not actionable at law. Not unless it’s defamatory.

And defamation requires something very specific: for example, tap-dancing on its edges by accusing a media outlet of peddling falsehoods and being politically motivated.

The irony, of course, is that those who howl loudest about “misinformation” are usually the ones who most wish the law allowed them to silence critics with a flick of the wrist.

Sadly for them, and happily for what remains of the rule of law, freedom of the press still means something, even if the admirers of the Orange Oik wish it didn’t.

Meanwhile, on another stage not a million miles away, we’re watching a perfect storm: an arbitration that has imploded, a prosecution in its death-throes spasm, a government spinning like a child’s top, and, clearest of all, vital (see what I did there?) signs of a system in multi-organ failure.

The question that should be keeping us awake as the Vitals prosecution gasps its last is a simple one: Who benefits? Because someone always does.

Every institutional breakdown in Malta produces winners. Every collapsed process, every botched investigation, every conveniently “unclear” legal outcome ends up serving somebody’s interests – increasingly rarely discreetly, usually lucratively.

Once you start looking at patterns instead of isolated events, the picture stops resembling coincidence and starts looking like a choreographed pantomime.

Moving on: did you catch that comment by an “expert” who declared that people only come to Malta for sunbathing or tax “efficiency”? Offered in the context of some gaming outfit upping sticks from Starmer’s Brexitonia, no less.

It does not require clairvoyance to predict that this genius will soon be taken on as a “tourism excellence consultant” or “cultural ambassador” or something equally vacuous. Because, why not?

If Joseph Muscat can be quoted with a straight face (if only by the less discerning ends of the media) as a learned economist, then absolutely anything is possible in this crypto-colonial “tourists are welcome” dot on the map we call home.

Credentials matter elsewhere. In Malta, say something quotable and the red carpet unrolls.

It’s depressing, but this is where we are: a nation not much bigger than a medium-sized town behaving like a village, but with the budgets, egos, and scandals of a State.

We were inching toward true nationhood, but we’re regressing to a place where students genuflect to politicians instead of challenging them; where politicians cry “misinformation” while spreading their own; where institutions malfunction with suspicious regularity; and where expertise is manufactured like festa fireworks – loud, colourful, and guaranteed to explode.

Some, generally from the Labour Party’s media channel ONE end of the spectrum, will no doubt cherry-pick bits of this rant and crow that “Il-Boċċa hates Malta.” (They do it regularly, complete with old photos.)

Others will shrug and say, “That’s just Malta.” And that shrug,  that fatalistic, shoulder-dropping resignation, is precisely why we’ve got here.

The less they expect, the less they get, and the more the rest of us must endure the absurdity of living in the Little Valley of the Po, minus Don Camillo and Peppone to keep things entertaining.

It doesn’t have to be like this. But until enough people decide that adulthood means something more than posing for photos with politicians, Malta will remain trapped in a state of permanent adolescence; clever enough to see the problem, but not yet brave enough to grow out of it.