We’ve all met people who spend their life in the past, constantly re-hashing long ago events and picking at hurtful things that happened years ago, the same way someone picks at a scab.

Sometimes it’s because of a failed marriage or because they were passed over for a promotion, but sometimes it’s over petty things like imagined slights and rejections which stretch all the way back to their school years. People like this quickly become labelled bores and are studiously avoided. Gradually, their friends, although initially supportive, become rather tired of hearing the constant moaning and whining and drop them quietly, and when guest lists are being drawn up for a party or a get together, it is generally agreed that so-and-so should not be invited. No one likes a party pooper.

From what I’ve seen recently, Net news and, by extension, the Nationalist Party, is rapidly turning into the type of boring, carping friend that everyone shuns.

Take the Net news bulletins of this past week – one day I was zapping when all of a sudden I came across this vintage footage of a vibrant Dom Mintoff from the early 1970s. I got up to check the date on my calendar to make sure I had not been transported back in time, but no, it still said 2011.

This obsession to keep harping back to the Labour administrations of the 70s and 80s is such an old worn-out theme that I am genuinely surprised that the PN election campaign is going to be hinged on this. Either their PR gurus have completely lost touch with what people really care about today, or else it is a last ditch attempt to use what has always worked before, that is, to scare voters off from voting Labour by regurgitating the images which make people instinctively recoil.

Granted, the tactic might work occasionally. Heck, even I get a slight twitch at the sight of the hysterical Mintoff mass meetings, but then all mass meetings make me nervous and uncomfortable. Thousands of people screaming their lungs off in adulation for a man (or woman) is a sight which is only really acceptable when the person on the stage is a famous rock or pop star. Musically gifted and incredibly talented people who have the ability to make your spirit soar do deserve wild cheering and applause. On the other hand, robotic chanting in hero worship of a politician is verging too close to Hitler-style brainwashing for my liking. I mean I greatly admire Obama, but I would never in a million years grovel at his feet like some kind of servile nincompoop. I don’t do grovelling.

The problem with this strategy of repeatedly trying to push people’s buttons by showing them visuals of times gone by is that less and less people actually care. Not only are their buttons not being pushed, but it is also they who are pushing the buttons on their remote to switch channels because it has become downright boring. Now, this is a fact the PN finds particularly hard to stomach. How can it be, it frets, that there are those who simply cannot be bothered about what past Labour governments did? I notice the Nationalist Party gets particularly agitated when it realises that there are at least two generations who do not know anything about Malta’s recent political history, with special reference to the Mintoff/KMB years. Well, you can blame our educational system if you like for that one, and the fact that (as far as I know and I stand to be corrected) no history teacher would dare touch such a politically sensitive issue in a classroom for fear of student (and parental) uproar. Because let’s face it: which version of history is this teacher going to teach? The one that glorifies Mintoff as Malta’s saviour, or the one which portrays Mintoff as the devil incarnate? Too tricky – best leave that one alone for now, but maybe it can be re-visited and placed on the syllabus in 40 years’ time when passions have cooled.

There is another aspect to this whole business that makes the Nationalist Party break out into a cold sweat. It is when someone uses the phrase, ‘let’s move on’.

‘Move on’ – a handy little expression which can be used in a multitude of situations. We use it with a girlfriend who is inconsolable after her husband splits, we use it with a work colleague who is bitter about the way he has been treated at the office, and we use it with children who did not get the part they wanted in the annual school play. There are a whole range of expressions that can equally apply to these and other scenarios: ‘Chin up’, ‘make the best of it’, ‘let it go’, ‘it wasn’t meant to be’, ‘something better will come along’.

But the expression ‘move on’ is particularly irking to the PN because, dear voter, that is exactly what they don’t want you to do. Move on? Are you kidding me? No, no, we can’t have any of this ‘moving on’ business. Stay right there where you are, stuck in the mud and stuck in a time warp where you keep replaying scenes of Mintoff over and over like an old newsreel in your head which just won’t go away. Inexplicably, some people actually enjoy these blasts from the past in a masochistic kind of way, getting little frissons of agitated excitement as they mouth horrified pleas of “Oh my God, when I remember those dark horrible years, I just cannot take it!”

And, if there is a chance that people’s recollections are becoming fuzzy and they are just too preoccupied with their own lives to nitpick and remember every single little detail of the Mintoff era, then Net news will oblige by flicking through its substantial (and meticulously organised) archive footage just in time for the evening news.

In my mind’s eye I picture this clean, clinical back room, carefully indexed and painstakingly cross-referenced, where rows and rows of Beta tapes, VHS cassettes and DVDs have been stored to be used at a moment’s notice. A slim, elegant woman with hair scrapped back in a severe bun wearing no nonsense black-rimmed glasses is in charge of the whole operation, and with a few taps of a beautifully manicured finger on her keyboard she guides the Net newsroom to the exact location of the footage they require: Section 1, Row D, Shelf 34 – Mintoff welcoming Gaddafi to Malta. Cue tape and roll it.

This would be excellent material to have at your fingertips, of course, had it to be used to produce a well-researched (and objective) documentary of the last 50 years of Maltese history. In fact, I believe Malta is in dire need of this sort of production in order to fill in what are obvious gaps in the minds of a lot of supporters from both sides of the divide.

The problem is that there is hardly anyone who has a real interest in showing both sides of the equation.

Giving voters the whole picture does not really fit in with a highly charged election campaign after all. Maybe, like Jack Nicholson, both political parties are inwardly sneering at us with contempt, “the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

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