Reading reports of the court proceedings against former judge Raymond Pace, I couldn’t help but think “How cheap”. My kingdom for a horse, indeed, the difference being that unlike Richard III, Judge Pace had neither real nor perceived need of that horse.
Of course, this may just be the evidence on which they got him, a fraction of what really went on, but still it remains that this man and his career have been undone by freeloading meals at a naff Bugibba steak house, bumming a CCTV system for the garage in which he breeds birds (is there a link between bird-breeding and poor judgement?) and for his house, getting part-payment of his wife’s car, and having that car repaired at a drug dealer’s expense when the bill was €1,300 and he could have paid for it himself.
Exactly what was the point of all this? Maybe former judge Raymond Pace is prone to thinking small, unlike the individuals involved in that other corruption issue, with their demands for €10 million and €60 million. But then one imagines that other lot are old hands and are accustomed to operating on a much bigger scale. Yet that alone is insufficient explanation for Raymond Pace’s behaviour. As a Labour supporter – hence his selection for the judiciary by the short-lived Sant government – he is probably not very strong in the rational thinking department, but even he must have weighed up the risks versus the rewards of having a drug dealer pay for some minor stuff that he could well have paid for himself.
Does a judge, even a judge whose wife doesn’t bother to earn any money herself, really need to have somebody else pick up the tab for a wholly unglamorous and inexpensive meal at a tourist steakhouse?
I can’t help thinking that this former judge belongs to that class of Maltese persons who are conditioned from early childhood to getting stuff for free, whether they need it, want it or not. There is even a verb for it: “niddobba”. The nuances of ‘bumming’ in British slang are completely different, highly pejorative, and full of contempt.
By comparison, ‘tiddobba’ u ‘hadtu b’xejn’ are considered positively and are even worthy of praise. To get what you can for free is an honourable objective, an admirable quality in a person. And it has nothing to do with thrift. People go wild for discounts. They collect, endlessly, tin cans and food labels which they then exchange for things like a mug they don’t need, with some company logo emblazoned all over it, when for €1.50 they can choose their own attractive mug from one of hundreds of shops all over the island. But they would rather have the free, ugly mug, obtained through such effort and inconvenience, than a mug they actually like and have chosen for €1.50. It’s a mentality I am unable to understand, though I know it exists and is widespread because I come up against it all the time.
When I wonder what makes people do it, I always come back to the same explanation, the only possible one: early conditioning. Never give anything away even if you have absolutely no use for it. Keep things you hate because they cost money. Never throw anything away if you paid money for it and even if it’s worth nothing now and you neither like it nor need it or want it.
Keep a horrid and unfashionable coat that you bought 25 years ago for two weeks’ wages because ‘it’s still good’ (I once met somebody who was still carting about the world a pair of dated boots she bought in 1990 because ‘they’re still in good condition’). Never pay for anything if you don’t have to, even though not paying for it will end up costing you more in financial or other terms. Never look a gift horse in the mouth – so if somebody gives you something, don’t question it or its provenance or look at the strings which might be attached. Just take it and run.
I suppose it is, in a way, the result of Malta being a subsistence/starvation/deprivation culture for so long. None of this has anything to do with the culture of thrift of Protestant/Methodist societies, or the reuse, recycle, waste-not-want-not attitudes of the socially and environmentally aware today. It is more of a ‘take what you can when you can get it’ way of thinking. You see it at hotel buffets, Malta’s favourite way of eating against payment, because buffets play right into this way of looking at things. You can heap food on your plate as often as you please, even if the cost to your health and figure is high and it would have been cheaper to stay at home and grill some chicken, if cheap and free is what you’re after.
And while on that subject, here’s a related one: new research into identical twins, which Tim Spector writes about in Identically Different: Why You Can Change Your Genes (Weidenfeld) has pointed to our ability to change our DNA through our behaviour, whether that behaviour is through choice (like heavy drinking) or forced upon us (like starvation). Starvation through war or natural famine, or constant deprivation from proper nutrients through poverty or self-starvation (extreme dieting), can cause a tendency towards obesity in your descendants just two generations down the line.
Maybe it’s time we stopped blaming working-class dietary habits entirely for the explosion in obesity right across Europe and North America in the late 20th and early 21st century. If Malta is at the top-end of the scale for obesity, then it might be worth remembering that it was also at the top-end of the scale for extreme deprivation, for centuries. If changes to our obesity genes can be traced to starvation just two generations back, then the starvation Malta endured in World War II might be directly linked to the huge number of fat people now, especially among the descendants of those who went hungry the most. And if North Americans are among the world’s fattest people, then it is worth remembering, too, that most of them are the descendants of Europe’s poorest and most deprived.
As for former judge Ray Pace, he clearly failed to understand, as the €60 million bunch apparently do, that you might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.