When Alice fell through a black hole into a world where everything was distorted, logic flew out the window and nonsense gibberish became the norm.

I often get the feeling that Malta has become the land of Mad Hatters.

On the one hand we’re told we’ve never had it so good and poverty is just our perception, and yet public opinion paints another picture – of families struggling to make ends meet, and of a pay cheque which disintegrates the moment it enters your bank account. Is this ‘poverty’ in the sense we mean when we send donations to famine-stricken Africa? Obviously, not. But if people consider themselves poor because no matter how much they work and how many cutbacks they make, their euro doesn’t stretch far enough for their basic needs, Gonzi’s remark that it’s just a perception is downright insulting.

The Prime Minister also seems to think we suffer from amnesia. It seems it was just the other day we were presented with a lavish marketing campaign trying to sell us the idea of Smart City, Smart Island, Smart Women and Smart Everything. The only thing that is smarting, however, is this government’s face after it was metaphorically slapped by the cold hard reality of an investment which will probably never happen. Searching around frantically for something, anything, which Lawrence Gonzi will be able to present to us with a “ta da!” flourish on the eve of 2013, Ladies and Gentlemen I give you…the White Rocks sports complex.

I’m not going to criticise it, don’t worry – it might be a fantastic project for all I know, a lasting legacy which will ensure that Gonzi’s name will forever be etched in marble as one of the few politicians who really cared about sports (plus 300 flats and a hotel). In fact, I cannot comment much because I don’t have enough information seeing that the details are still trickling out very slowly, in dribbles. But where my radar starts bleeping is when I hear that there’s going to be a PR campaign.

To do what exactly?

To tell us that there’s going to be a sports complex? We know that already.

To convince us to use the facilities? Well, I’m sure anyone who loves sports will do so. To make us go weak at the knees in gratitude at the Great and Good Nationalist Government which has Vision for 2015 and Beyond? Yes that sounds like it; after all partisan propaganda has always been this administration’s forte.

We drove up and down the Birkirkara bypass past Mater Dei for 17 years before it was finished and every man, woman and child knew that this was going to be the new hospital. And yet, when it was finally ready, we found ourselves staring at billboards just a few kilometres away from the actual building to tell us that …we have a new hospital. Then, because we were so eager to see just how our millions were spent, we all flocked to Mater Dei every chance we got, to ooh and ahh at all the nice, shiny, gleaming new equipment. This stampede of hopeful patients required yet another billboard and media campaign telling us that our little itty bitty bandaged finger did not require the use of the hospital.

In another lifetime I will definitely go into the billboard business.

Wasn’t me

There was yet another “things are not what they seem” moment this week. Answering a PQ about air quality, the Prime Minister said that 22 of the 52 times when particles in the air exceeded those permissible by the EU were attributable to natural sources such as the Sahara desert and aerosol coming in from the sea.

So that’s OK then. If you wake up with allergies each morning, coughing and sneezing and your eyes watering, in 22 cases, it’s not due to local pollution at all. If your children are wheezing and they have to carry inhalers, just blame that pesky Sahara.

Buses belching black smoke, the power station and other sources which emit dangerous particles are only to blame the rest of the time, but we’ve managed to convince the EU that our air quality is fine because mostly, “it’s not our fault”.

Oh, and that black dust in the south is the figment of the residents’ imagination.

Seriously, most of the time it’s like we’re living in a parallel universe. It’s no wonder that between the perpetually late White Rabbit and the ever grinning Cheshire Cat, we feel like we are a nation of Alices, bewildered and confused, wondering who to believe as we stumble along in Wonderland. Alice finally made it over through the other side of the Looking Glass, much wiser and more mature after her weird and incredible adventure – let’s hope we do too.

Fundamentalist and proud

Another surreal incident occurred this week as Archbishop Cremona joined hands with the head of the Islamic Centres and Propagation Bureau, to speak out against same sex marriages. (Don’t worry, there won’t be any similar cosy photo opportunities when they come to the subject of divorce.) Homosexuals who happen to be either Catholic or Muslim must have felt very comforted. Of course, gays are free not to embrace either religion, but for those who still feel a need for spiritual guidance by what they believe to be their faith, this was yet another blow.

I also don’t see why the marriage of a gay couple should be equated with the breakdown in marriages between heterosexual couples.

The sentence which really popped out at me, however, was where the Archbishop “called for the State to help couples prepare for marriage due to an increase in couples deciding against faith marriages”. Like Freddie Mercury, I thought I was going slightly mad and had to read this line several times. That’s great – not only are we not moving anywhere near to the separation of Church and State, but we are now being continuously bombarded with blatant interference of the Church in civil matters. If a couple want to get married in a civil wedding it is a deliberate choice, which probably has a lot to do with their not wanting the Church to dictate their relationship.

Let me break it to you gently: nothing prepares you for marriage or for living under the same roof with another person day in day out. A governmental version of the Cana course is certainly not going to do the trick, because guess what? The Cana course isn’t working either.

The media is being asked to do its bit to help promote stable marriages (do I smell another lucrative PR campaign?) but here again, do they honestly think a couple of billboards showing happy families will keep a warring couple from heading to court? I think the only way to promote marriage stability is to teach girls (especially) that the answer to their lifelong happiness is not a ring on their finger. Let’s stop with all this preposterous social pressure to have a dream wedding which two years down the line often turns into a nightmare. Along with instilling some good manners, let’s start talking to children about why, when they grow up, it’s crucial to get married for the right reasons, rather than because everyone they know is doing it.

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