Those who would sabotage the plans for the regeneration of Valletta by reducing them to a battle for an opera house or a theatre, in a contemporary style or a replica of what has long gone – they cannot even agree between themselves – appear not to have realised that the fat lady has sung.
It’s all over. The tide has turned, public sentiment has shifted, impatience with their ideas and their way of communicating them has increased, and they’ve been left high and dry on a rock surrounded by whackos and extremists ranging from Norman Lowell’s black-shirts to the communists at Graffiti and any number of alternative types in between, bolstered up by those who object on principle because they didn’t vote for this government and wish to replace it forthwith.
Yes, and there’s Fr Peter Serracino Inglott, who came across on television last week as the worst sort of impractical dreamer, speaking about tunnels and connecting bridges and making space for an opera house, insisting with Renzo Piano’s architect partner that ‘Yes, it can be done’, oblivious to just how arrogant and ignorant he would have seemed, while the other man was too polite – in that very civilised, very French way – to tell him in that very tart, very British way with put-downs, who exactly the architect was in this discussion, and who the know-nothing presumptuous dilettante.
Astrid Vella has no experience in politics and political communication, but the exercise in which she is engaged demands both. Wittingly or unwittingly, she has allowed herself to become a tool of the Labour Party and its media machine. The Labour Party has no interest in whether or not Malta gets an opera house or another theatre. It would certainly like to have a parliament house designed by Renzo Piano, though it would die rather than admit this in public. It is significant that it hasn’t condemned the plans as it rushes to condemn everything else mooted by the democratically elected government it calls GonziPN. Instead, it uses Astrid Vella to foment discord among the faithful, by giving her time and space on the party media and its loyal newspapers, and reporting her hogwash as gospel truth to those with an IQ that renders them unable to analyse information correctly.
Only a year ago, Astrid Vella and her FAA were riding high on a wave of what appeared to be popular support, but which was little more than a frenzy of resentment towards anything connected with the affairs of state and GonziPN. Vella and her group of dilettantes became a vehicle for conveying that resentment. She made the mistake of believing that her popularity was a permanent state of affairs, having failed to register from the experience of the previous year how quickly adulation for Lawrence Gonzi had been replaced by anger and irritation.
If a week is a long time in politics, something that Vella appears not to understand – just as she doesn’t understand that what she does is political – then a year is an absolute eternity. People get fed up. They move on to the next thing. There is only so much whining they can take. They lose interest, and whereas it seems sometimes that we prefer inaction to action, the opposite is true. The Renzo Piano project/let’s change Valletta message was always going to be the stronger one in the end, as positive messages tend to be, certainly much stronger than the ‘let’s do nothing because we want an opera house’ chant.
People are not stupid. If the facts are brought across, then they will be read and understood. The mistake the government made in the beginning was to let the Astrid brigade of dilettantes without business sense and pie-in-the-sky, castle-in-the-air reasoning get in first with a flurry of commonsense-obscuring misinformation and rubbish reasoning.
This was a debate that saw the norms of reason turned upside down. Crowds were sold the notion that an opera house is a popular edifice for The People while a parliament house is an elitist structure reserved for the privileged few. The opposite is true, and you shouldn’t need to be told that, but in the maelstrom of madness, The People did not stop to think and to work this out for themselves. Now they appear to have done so.
The constant references to a ‘roofless theatre’ didn’t help Vella’s group in their mission. It is true that the expression was taken up by legions of those who post comments on the Internet and who make their voices heard – a true cacophony of idiocy – in other public forums. But they have been, in large part, people who are uncomfortable speaking or writing English, which should have given Astrid Vella an indication of their level of education and their ability to assess the plans of one of the world’s greatest architects ever.
Nobody who speaks idiomatic English will ever use the term ‘roofless theatre’ – not unless he or she is a supporter of Astrid’s mission. It is an artificial construct that does not exist in proper English. There are theatres and there are open-air theatres, but there are no roofless theatres, just as there are no closed ones.
Astrid Vella should have sniffed the wind long before she took the decision to hold that demo in Valletta last Saturday. Her tunnel-vision, her inability to read public opinion correctly even without surveys or polls – there are clues which you can pick up if you know what they are and where to find them – have rendered her unable to keep in touch with reality. When she brought out on Super One a petition signed by 1,200 of her network of friends and associates and their friends and associates, and brandished this with pride as evidence that she is on the right track in opposing the city gate regeneration plans, I cringed with embarrassment on her behalf. That is not how you gauge public opinion, how you get a sense of what people really think, not from such restricted circles, and certainly not from going up to someone with a petition and asking them to sign it, which they might well do because refusal offends.
One of the warning signs that Vella should have registered is the public support for her cause manifested lately by all sorts of unusual people, and I use that description in kindness. When that begins to happen, it generally means that the ordinary folk – Mr, Mrs and Miss Normal with no agenda or axe to grind, no black shirt in their cupboard or chip on their shoulder – have moved on and out, leaving space for the whackos and weirdoes and the ones who post STRanGE cOMentZ on tHE iNterNeT!!!!!????
Even with my limited experience of politics and sensing shifts in public opinion, I knew that nobody would turn up to Saturday’s demo. People just don’t feel strongly about the matter anymore. They are in a different place now, one in which any action is better than no action, where a Renzo Piano parliament house is a lot more interesting and attractive than the sight and sound of Astrid Vella tilting at windmills on Super One.
But Vella presses on regardless, causing me to wonder what she will do come 1 April and the start of the project – tie herself to the nearest crane with a Legality Now placard or go on hunger strike, perhaps. A mere 200 souls turned up to her demo and most of them were organisations press-ganged by her persistent telephone calls into doing so. Yes, and there were some fascists and communists, too.
Yet she saw this as massive support and told the television crews so. MaltaToday fed her delusion by claiming on its front page that ‘masses’ turned up to support her cause. Astrid Vella has become a puppet in the hands of those who hate GonziPN, but she thinks she has popular support, rather than anti-government support, which is something else altogether. Every cause she picks up from here on will now be handicapped by these problems of public perception, but she has only herself to blame.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com