People ask and say: But what do we really care about corruption? It has little, if any, effect on our lives!
Only recently, something happened which has had a small but highly significant impact on the lives of each and every one of us. Had the country not been in the throes of debating corruption and dealing with the surreal situation we are facing on a daily basis, we might have noticed.
Instead, we were all hustling making a fool of our country, with sensible people calling for the resignation or removal of Mizzi and Schembri while blindfolded folk like Dr Anthony Degiovanni and Eddy Privitera were defending the indefensible.
And while we were engaged dissecting the ins and outs of secret offshore companies as if we were all experts, with the more intelligent clamouring "Proof! Proof! Proof!" and the more gullible arguing that you don't open a secret company to deposit the rent of a small house in outer London - the Council of Europe chipped away at the real enjoyment of one of our individual rights.
I might be wrong and I stand to be corrected, but I cannot remember a single drop of ink wasted on the effects of the protocol to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms Malta signed this week.
The Convention has been amended to shorten, by two months, the time limit given to the individual to file an application before the Court. Now, the time limit is no longer six but four months. The official purpose is to "help maintain the effectiveness of the European Court of Human Rights". But, as a lawyer friend told me, the reality is that the amendment will have a serious impact on individuals for whom four months are not enough to find a lawyer able and willing to take the case to Strasbourg.
The enjoyment of our fundamental human rights has been tampered with and we were too busy wasting our time to notice simply because Messrs K&K are still occupying important positions when their position has clearly not been tenable for a very long time.
Now that's how corruption affects your life. Apart other things, it distracts you from the serious matters.
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In the meantime, to my mind, Joseph Muscat has made a serious mistake when dealing with the American University of Malta fiasco.
Replying to a journalist this week, he said that he thinks there are traces of success in the AUM.
The mistake was not the drivel he dished out to the journalist. Dr Muscat is not the first and will not be the last politician to talk nonsense just to save face.
His mistake was to use his trademark smile while conveying untruths to a public who is in a position to compare his fanciful statements with the truth.
Dr Muscat would have been wiser simply to admit that there are problems at the AUM. He might have chosen to qualify them as teething problems, but to lie through his teeth like that, when we all know the enormous flop the AUM has turned out to be, has essentially given his trick away.
I don't know about you, but I simply adore Spaghetti Westerns. One trope in these old movies is when the hero enters the saloon, sits down at the table where the big shots are playing poker and joins the game. He loses the first round on purpose, as it allows him to observe how the other plays give their bluffs away - nervous ticks, eye movements, or similar behaviour which can be easily associated with bluff.
Dr Muscat has just given away how he bluffs.
Now whenever we see him replying how he replied to the AUM question, we will know that it is certainly not the winning hand he's keeping against his chest.
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Many journalists and others too, mostly belonging to the generation after mine, are doing a good job at exposing the corruption and maladministration of this government. But - at least in my humble opinion - they are making two cardinal mistakes by using the English language.
One. They are alienating that part of the electorate which speaks Maltese and resents other Maltese speaking the English. Mostly it's because of the unwarranted social stratification subtext. Essentially, those who resent English spoken in the Maltese-English accent can't digest this silly idea that because you speak English you think you're something better. If these activists are wise (in the philosophical and the street sense), they'd better switch to Maltese and do their job in Maltese.
Two. They are promoting the Maltese Islands image instead of the Malta image. I don't think I need to clarify that I am all for Malta, and not at all for the Maltese Islands.
Despite Mizzi's and Schembri's best Panama efforts, we are not a Caribbean former colony. We are an Italic (not Italianate or Italian) former British colony, and our identity is Latin and Catholic. Even the Anglophones are Latin; and even the atheists are Catholic. Just spend some time in England and you will realise that we are not English and analyse deeply our culture to see that it's not Protestant, not even Anglo-Catholic.
I very much dislike this phenomenon so aptly described in Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus and by Martti Koskenniemi in his The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law. The latter is a brilliant book which speaks of how the former (mostly African) colonies bought the white man's worldview as the ticket to board the ship of civilisation. We Maltese (or at least many of us) have been civilised for at least nine hundred years, and the ship often moored here. We don't need to buy any ticket.
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In Graviland, a land far away from here, people had just discovered multi-storey construction.
As they started building two, three, even four storeys one on top of the other, they began to wonder what would happen if people started jumping out of windows.
There were two schools of thought.
According to the first one, if you jump out of the window, you would fall to the ground and hurt yourself, possibly even die.
The other school of thought argued that since there was no proof that you could die if you jumped out of the fourth-floor window, say, then there was no need to put railings or other obstacles to hinder the free enjoyment of the liberty of jumping out of the window.
The best architect in Graviland, Membrus Magnus, was discussing this new conundrum with his husband Sebastanus, but their son Vivian kept interrupting them. After a whole evening of trying to find slots to discuss this in between keeping Vivian quiet, Membrus and his husband finally managed to agree that since liberty was a top priority, and there was no proof that jumping out of a window could be harmful, it followed that there was no need to hinder the free enjoyment of the liberty of jumping out of windows.
Membrus was satisfied with the deep discussion he had had with his husband, and the following morning hurried off to his firm to convince his colleagues that they should not plan houses and blocks of flats in such ways that could hinder the full enjoyment of the liberty to jump out of windows. There had been no proof of any harm, and it was only the scaremongers - the "troglodyte conservative altiphobes" - who peddled these baseless fears.
Graviland became one of the foremost countries in the world to grant full freedom to its citizens to jump out of windows. At least for some time, until a certain part of the media started publishing news that could no longer be derided and dismissed as fake. But that's another story.