In small, closed societies, the stage is often set for the development of twisted behaviour, weirdness and all kinds of perversity going on beneath a thin and yet strangely impermeable veneer of conservative conformity – or at least, conservative conformity as defined by that society.

Thriller films and novels about dangerously perverted people are, with the notable exception of American Psycho, invariably set in some small town or remote village, and reality tends to bear out the cliché portrayed in fiction. When children or kidnapped women are found imprisoned in some underground cellar, when a man keeps his daughter captive in a basement prison along with all the children he has fathered from her, it is generally in some conservative suburb or isolated regional town in which there is nothing to do, which means that people find all kinds of off-the-wall entertainment of their own.

I thought of this today while reading the news from Malta and wondering whether it is boredom or insularity – the word comes from the Latin for ‘island’, as does ‘isolated’ – that makes people in Malta behave as they do which makes the atmosphere so whacky-but-not-wonderful.

A selection of news reports told me that the Head of State is hard at it raising funds and that her Community Chest Fund will only give money to registered charities; that politicians and other leaders of men had appeared on the television show Xarabank to pledge, between them, several thousand hours of community service including the care of drug addicts; that a man who had been arrested after the police found 11 kilos of heroin and cocaine in a senduq (coffer) in his hallway had been found hanged by a bed sheet in his cell; that the Health Secretary is concerned because the state sexual health clinic is registering an average of 50 new cases of gonorrhoea and 45 new cases of syphilis every year and most of these are the result of anonymous and unprotected (obviously) sex; that 14,000 residence permits have been granted to third country nationals in just two years; that the Malta Developers Association is putting the government under pressure to release more land to build flats to accommodate the demand from the thousands of people pouring into Malta with residence permits; that the Maltese government has issued 93 visas to North Korean slave workers since 2013; that the Maltese are against a Muslim invasion because Muslims are ignorant savages who are all members of ISIS, have a hundred babies per household and will take over and make us live under Sharia law.

I try to work out what all of this means, and it’s difficult. We are a people who trawl for sexual escapades on social media – what else are all those self-published photos of men and women of all ages, but especially women of a certain age, in ‘I’m up for it’ poses? – while scaremongering about a Muslim invasion that is set to change “our values”. Maltese people are having anonymous sex up against a public lavatory wall or tree or alley corner with complete strangers in sufficient numbers to drive up the documented (there may be many more) cases of syphilis and gonorrhoea while speaking about progressive liberalism and 21^st-century modernity, and confusing it all. Try explaining that anonymous and unprotected sex on a night out, resulting in syphilis, is not at all 21^st-century but very 19^th-century, and they don’t know what you’re on about.

The subliminal messages of the Labour Party’s 2013 campaign were money and sex, sex and money. Those who understand campaigning and communications at a professional level picked them up immediately. Those who do not understand picked them up all the same, at a subconscious level, and were magnetised without knowing exactly why. In the run-up to the general election, the Labour Party literally soaked itself in sex. On the frontline it put what can only be described – and here I apologise for the ‘Austin Powers’ language – sexy chicks wearing hooker shoes that no self-respecting woman in the civilised world would ever wear, along with false eyelashes and enough thick make-up to sink a yacht (this while speaking about being the most feminist government ever), and what my generation calls ‘metrosexual men’ and what my parents’ generation called ‘pretty boys’, with their groomed hair, plucked-and-Vaselined eyebrows, waxed faces and chests, manicured hands and fey outfits. There plenty of touching, flirting and stroking, lots of posing and chumming up.

And yet it worked, rather than turning people off with its hormone-driven atmosphere, because it was entirely in touch with the Zeitgeist. Facebook, social media, the collapse of marriages like skittles and young people discovering the world outside their Maltese village had resulted not in a broadening of horizons but in a full-on, full-blown, non-stop mating season. Because that kind of thing is still largely frowned upon for reasons of reputation and conformity, rather than for reasons of civilised behaviour as it is elsewhere, it all goes underground. And so you have anonymous sex, secret assignations, grabbing sex wherever and whenever it is on offer, and middle-aged people doing cocaine like its Miami in 1984. Twenty-first-century Malta is not liberal and progressive; it is backward. It is a mix of repressive 19^th-century London and the society depicted in Scarface, the favourite film of this particular demographic, which was more than 30 years ago before HIV hit hard and when cocaine was fun and new. The syphilis and gonorrhoea simply perfect the picture of a society that is regressing while thinking it is progressing. It won’t be long before Jack the Ripper manifests himself in some shape or form. And that’s exactly what American Psycho, also set 30 years ago, was all about.

 

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