Much of manipulation consists in emphasising the form to draw attention away from the content in order to cheat your interlocutor.

If you happen to like the TV show Fool Us, starring top Las Vegas magicians Penn and Teller (you can watch the episodes on YouTube), you will notice that ‘magic’ is essentially a game of manipulation. One magician who guest-starred on the show explained the mechanics of the game in very explicit terms: he said that you have to gain your audience’s trust in order to fool them.

I must admit that I have learnt a lot from watching Penn and Teller’s Fool Us. Not about prestidigitation, in which I am not greatly interested, but about the creation of an illusion. It is a fantastic art and after you have watched a dozen or so episodes of the series, you start seeing what magicians see – the sleight of hand, card forcing, pre-show work, apparently random on-stage movements, persuasive pseudo-scientific talk and all the other tricks that magicians, mentalists and other fellow professionals who ply this ancient trade make use of to fool the audience.

Unfailingly well-groomed, elegant, polite, calm, self-possessed and endowed with grace and self-confidence, the typical conman is out to pull a fast one on you. His form is impeccable and you are fooled into freely giving him your trust. And then, hey presto! – he stings you with his confidence trick.

But since you’re mesmerised by the elegance of the form, you don’t realise what’s boiling on the content front, and once the legerdemain is done, you think it’s magic. In fact, it is but simple trickery and the conman has had you.

The other day I was watching a NET TV journalist – the not-uneasy-on-the-eye and spirited Lisa Spiteri – as she interviewed different members of the Labour administration, including the Prime Minister, on the (so far attempted) rape of Żonqor Point. My impression was that these people are being coached to be collected, composed, and cool while they dish out dollops of sound-bites to journalists. Again I confirmed my impression – outlined in my book on the Panama Papers – that Prime Minister Muscat governs the country as if he were a magician.

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I do not think I am the only one to have this solid conviction that we are importing English ideological stances skipping all sort of cultural quarantine.

Gozo lawyer Joe Ellis has aired views similar to mine in another newspaper, and other people have articulated similar ideas in private conversation.

This post-colonial trend has been exacerbated under the present government. This is quite ironic, as the other Labour believed in the mitna ta’ xejn, mitna għall-barrani narrative (again, you can listen to Paul Abela’s hauntingly beautiful song, sung by Renato, on Youtube). This present Labour government has, instead, adopted a new narrative based on shallow readings of ideological material churned out by Anglo-American leftish-liberals who have little in common with social democrats and socialists.

Prime Minister Muscat, when confronted with the clamorous U-turn on same-sex matters, admitted he read a couple of books and changed his mind. Just like he signed away an enormous swathe of pristine countryside in Żonqor Point in under five minutes of conversation with a Jordanian construction magnate, so he signed away the right of children to have a parent from each sex after reading a book or two.

I have no doubt that the books Dr Muscat read contained Anglo-American gender ideology and that the Maltese who until yesterday mitna għall-barrani, now cower before the neo-liberal Anglo-American ideologue.

I don’t write these words out of airy-fairy nationalistic sentiments. I am inspired by other considerations, of a tangible, cultural nature, and on the democratic mandate. Luckily, on the subject of abortion, the Prime Minister had to concede that his government does not have a mandate. (Needless to say, the hawk-eyed will have seen that the ultimate objective is the introduction, sometime in the future, of this abominable practice.) But on other, less controversial, matters the mandate argument is put aside and strident campaigning stokes support through top-down manipulation presented as if it were bottom-up demand – another example of the politician-magician who gains the audience’s trust in order to fool them.

But mostly what is of concern to me is that an ideology which developed in conditions different to ours is imported lock, stock and barrel and imposed on an unsuspecting people. Take one of the cornerstones of abortion ideology: the usurpation of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

When this theory was made public in the 19^th century, it was criticised not only on religious but also on social grounds. Many people at that time saw it as a projection into nature of the laissez-faire liberalism of the dog-eat-dog Victorian society, of the cut-throat competition that sanctioned the survival of the fittest in the domestic market and justified the imperialist colonisation of inferior races in the wider world.

Clearly Darwin’s theory provides a convenient template for the abortion ideology. Just as a humanoid ape evolved into the modern human, so the foetus ‘evolves’ into the individual. Little does it matter what Darwin really thought. Ideas – called ‘mentifacts’ by evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley – take a life of their own and influence people and behaviours: they form cultures.

But cultures are endemic to populations. In the book of which he was a co-author, Malta: Culture and Identity, Henry Frendo explains that in Malta ‘nation’ and ‘heimat’ overlap. The latter is a German word meaning ‘home’ but also the identity and culture in which one feels at home.

When a foreign culture is imposed – surreptitiously, fraudulently or otherwise – the identity of a people is displaced by a foreign identity that evolved in a different socio-economic environment and history. Where this can lead is anybody’s guess, but for sure a people that stops feeling at home in its own country can only expect social tensions.

 

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Review of Andrew Sciberras’ El Duende (2010-2017), 2017, 175 pages.

I found this beautifully-produced book, endowed with two short studies by Professors Charles Briffa and Oliver Friggieri, to be a quite intriguing read. It is a collection of poems Andrew (Still-Waters-Run-Deep) Sciberras wrote over a period of seven years, starting from 2010. Having composed the poems in Maltese and English, Dr Sciberras can be regarded as a past master of both languages, which he uses with admirable adroitness. I liked the poems irrespective of the language in which they were written – mostly because the poet’s take on the subject matter is invariably interesting and he is sensitive to the scores of shades of the languages in which he writes and the universal language of poetry.

The themes range from the philosophical to the religious to the personal, and they all reflect an enviable erudition. But what I liked most are the poet’s repeated incantations to his lover. He simply loves talking to his lover, and talk is the true spirit of love, just as poetry is the true medicine of the soul.

This book is a little gem, and one the appreciation of which I strongly endorse and encourage, not just for reasons of subject matter but also for the felicitous turns of phrase the poet seems to produce so effortlessly, enabling you to “tirkeb/ il-merry-go-round tal-ħajja/ did-darba b’differenza”.