I was shocked, as I watched an Italian TV news feature the other day, to learn that the bikini, perhaps the most popular piece of female beachwear around the globe and named after an unfortunate atoll in the South Pacific, is marking its 65th anniversary this year. Goodness gracious, I murmured self-satisfyingly to myself, it is older than me! Not by a lot, but older.
I could not resist the temptation to assimilate the current divorce referendum campaign with a similarly blessed (pun intended) campaign way back in the sixties when, as young teenagers, we used to eagerly buy the UK tabloids that regularly ran pictures of bikini-clad ladies. When they were not crudely black-inked out by local censors – yeah, the predecessors of today’s “No Stitching” gang of four – we used to cut them out and stick them to the inside of our desktop lids in class. It was always a joy to have a quick look by surreptitiously raising the lid in between lessons, especially before our morose Maths teacher trudged in, yellowing logarithms book creeping out from under his ample armpit.
It was a time when local newspapers were still afraid or unwilling to carry such pictures. The Times of Malta people, for example, even turned down adverts showing the latest swimwear models, while policemen were asked to hunt down the braver of the female species, more often than not foreigners, who sported the bikini in its rightful place –the beach. On one particular occasion the whole scene turned into an impromptu Benny Hill sketch.
“Excuse me, madam,” the sweat-soaked policeman told an attractive bikini-clad woman at Għadira Bay, as he tried to keep his eyes on the multi-coloured ice-cream van nearby rather than her sand-embroidered navel, “it is illegal to wear a two-piece swimsuit in Malta.”
The woman was of course caught off guard, but she quickly recovered and replied: “OK, constable, which part do I take off to make it legal?”
When the old Malta News, then known as “the Daily Mirror ta’ Malta” and well before my entry into the fold, finally and with some apprehension became the first Maltese newspaper to carry pictures of bikini clad girls, not necessarily shot locally, there was as much condemnation as there was false indignation. What had already become standard beachwear for women all over Europe and the United States was still an unlikely source of both religious hypocrisy and political embarrassment on this forsaken little isle.
Most of us students thought we could now buy the paper freely, secure in the knowledge it would not have had some idle, and no doubt as horny as us, censor covering it all up with his horrible black ink. The problem was that our college masters, most of them members of a religious order, would not allow us to take it into class. One of them even searched our satchels. He was the same one, in fact, who eventually discovered our vast and growing array of smiling bikini princesses glued to the interior of our desktop lids. You are here spared the misery of reading about what he did and the tantrums he threw.
Now beam me up from that mediaeval Gonzi-inspired scenario to Gonzi-peeved 21st century Malta, exactly today, and what do you find? A divorce referendum campaign that has taken such a pathetic twist that it makes you wish you had been born in the middle of some vast wilderness... the prairies, savannas, pampas and steppes of the world, anywhere big and boundless, really, but this crazy blob of land.
What should have been a neat and educated national debate on a strictly non-religious topic has become a tragic comedy in which the acting saints and sinners of yesteryear are reborn to play a part on the stage. Not only has the politicisation of the issue taken a most unwelcome dimension, but its “religious” misinterpretation has also created a disgusting atmosphere generated by sheer public ignorance and a complete disregard of the truth.
To have a government minister sanctimoniously talking about crying Madonnas is already a surreal experience for someone living in this day and age. To have broadcasting regulators going as far as censoring a clip showing a respected octogenarian priest, based in divorce-permitting Milan and happily away from the humdrum of uptight, straightjacketed Malta, declaring there was no justified reason to be afraid of the introduction of a divorce law, is an affront to people’s intelligence. Thank goodness for YouTube. The censored clip has been viewed by a lot more people than it would have attracted on local TV.
It is also incredible to watch a smiling archbishop denying the Church has been mounting a crusade against divorce when parish priests and their lay henchmen have been putting up hopelessly misleading billboards, holding meetings and pumping all available sacred oracles to propagate a ‘No’ vote. If that is not a crusade, what is it then but a shameless scheme of misinformation expressly meant to turn the democratic discussion on what is indisputably a civil right into a solemn panegyric?
There is only a week left. That this nation has had to be dragged into all this unholy muck is testament to our national state of mind, no doubt fed and abetted by the blatant lie that we have lived for the past 20 years. It is not easy for a people, especially one as docile and nose-led as ours, to burst out of the stupor bubble of egoism it has been locked in for so long. A nation in which villagers are more inclined to protest if their parish priest is changed without prior notice rather than on the shocking reality of a divorce apparatus for the rich only, cannot be taken seriously.
Like the bikini, however, divorce as a civil right will eventually, inevitably and belatedly become a tiny, everyday piece of boredom. If not this week, on another day and at another time, as incredible and possibly amusing as this may sound to others who have enjoyed it for donkey’s years.
Just vote yes on Saturday to show there is real hope. And heaven can wait.