I love Christmas so it’s not because I’m a Grinch that I can’t stand the spectacle of vulgarity and showing-off that is the Community Chest Fund’s end-of-year fundraiser. By the time I sat down to write this column yesterday evening, some €2 million had been collected, and the money was still pouring in. Is it because “the Maltese are so generous”, as one of our favourite myths has it? No, it’s because the Maltese are a nation of fanfarons and so competitive, and this festive shindig raises funds precisely by turning charity into a competitive exercise between fanfarons. The motivating factor is not generosity of spirit, concern for one’s fellow man, or even a sense of civic duty. It’s “let’s see how much we can raise this year”, “my cheque is bigger than yours”, “let’s work to beat last year’s figure” and “let’s show everyone and prove to ourselves just how generous the Maltese are unlike the stingy rest of the world”.
I don’t know about you, but I find that kind of thing perfectly distasteful. It is crass boastfulness and showing off taken from the personal to the national level. That it is symptomatic of Maltese cultural values is correct, but it’s not generosity we’re talking about here. It’s fanfarunagni. Among Malta’s dominant and most numerous demographic, being a fanfaron is not considered something laughable and contemptible, but admirable. Fanfarons are taken seriously. If they are boasting and showing off, giving away money while making a show of it, taking their red Ferrari out for a Sunday drive, talking in loud voices at a restaurant table and making a big production of acts of charity, then they are impressive and successful people. Those whose cultural values are different, who regard boasting with absolute horror and for whom the word fanfaron (Maltese, fanfarun) is an expression of contempt and mockery are now by far in the tiny minority. So when members of this tiny minority shudder at the boastfulness, self-praise and fanfarunagni that is passed off as “Maltese generosity” at this time of the year, they are brushed off as mean-spirited spoilsports.
The worst of it is that all the politicians on both sides of the House feel press-ganged into participating, no doubt because of this very sentiment. And they turn up and express the usual platitudes. But these are not Victorian times and we are meant to have a welfare state supported by taxes, rather than people getting by on charity. Whose responsibility is that? It’s the responsibility of the very same politicians who should be working hard to organise things so that people are no longer dependent on charity. Instead, they turn up – the prime minister included - on the day urging us to donate more and more money to the Community Chest Fund, which then goes ahead and spends it on cancer treatment and other forms of medical and social support which are meant to be funded through the national health and social services but are not. Of course the prime minister wants you to donate as much as you can to the Community Chest Fund. If the Community Chest Fund has €3 million to spend on cancer treatment which should be provided by the national health instead, that gives the prime minister €3 million to spend on trips abroad and on putting party cronies on the state payroll instead.
It would have been immensely refreshing if the Opposition leader had used yesterday’s opportunity to draw attention to the fact that begging, even if it is formalised, and charity should be anachronisms in 21st-century Malta. He should have said that when he is in government he will pull out all the stops to make the Community Chest Fund redundant, and to spare people the indignity of having to beg a charitable outfit for the financial support and medical treatment they should be receiving by right, without favours, charity or begging, from the state. It would have won him respect and support. People who see this annual farce as a dismaying spectacle of begging and showing-off, a patronising Victorian exercise in raising alms money for “the less fortunate”, are in the minority, it is true, but they are the very minority whose respect and admiration the Opposition leader needs.
President Coleiro, in her speech, described the fundraiser, laughably, as “a feast of solidarity, generosity and love of which only the Maltese are capable”. You would think that she cannot possibly be serious, but she was. She said that with a straight face, and she has never been a woman given to irony anyway. This idea that only Maltese people are generous is one which has found currency among those who can’t face up to the fact that giving money does not equate to generosity, or that charity is somehow superior to civic responsibility. Giving money is one of the easiest things to do; it is certainly a lot easier to giving your time or finding out about people’s problems and actually helping them, rather than throwing your spare change into a tin or, even easier, pressing a couple of digits on the phone that’s glued to your palm anyway.
The reality is that Maltese people are anything but generous, which is exactly why the very same archbishop who went along to the Community Chest Fund fundraiser and asked us to donate also said, in his official Christmas message, that Maltese people should not treat foreigners differently or pay them less or an unfair wage just because they are not Maltese.
“We expect today to be a show of the values that truly distinguish us Maltese from any other people – solidarity and generosity,” President Coleiro said at the start of the event. The operative word there was “show”, and her words really gave away the motivation: it is not about helping others but about showing the world (a world that isn’t looking anyway) how fabulously generous the Maltese are. It’s a “show of generosity” rather than an exercise in selflessness. It doesn’t occur to the President or to those people who stupidly repeat the untruth that the Maltese are terribly generous that other people in other societies donate money and perform acts of charity the European way: by not making a show of it and ensuring that the left hand does not know what the right is doing. Some non-Maltese people leave legacies to charity, in their wills, that outstrip anything collected in a single year by the Community Chest Fund – but they don’t put out a press release about it.
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