The heyday of Daphne’s column are long past and it can only that the impetus to reads the column nowadays is satisfaction of morbid curiosity rather than enlightenment.
Such was the case on 6 December. The feel-good Christmassy title, ‘Tis the season to whine’ was too tempting to resist. And, predictably, it was packed with lots of goodies – a confused torrent of cliché-ridden abuse aimed at us Maltese, lesser mortals whom Daphne dubs as an ignorant, petty, small-minded and thoroughly bigoted bunch of little people. More vitriol was directed specifically at those who offended her political and other sensitivities through having the effrontery to pontificate “confidently with scorn and contempt” on, among other things, the serious baldness of Malta’s roofless new theatre. These she called “inept artists and self-professed liberals with closed minds... with little or no imagination and delicate egos”. Marvellous!
It gets worse as one reads on. Daphne will have us believe that, having grown up ‘isolated in a box’, we Maltese have closed minds as a result of not having read ‘tons of magazines (sic) and London newspapers’ in the past dark ages before salvation by Telly and Internet. Remember the scorn heaped by Daphne some months ago upon a family which claimed to live without television? Well, now Daphne tells us that the new Big New Thing after Telly is the Internet! And, ominously, it is too late to do anything about this; there is no hope for us ignorant Maltese - even at 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70 because our minds have remained ‘completely closed, rock solid set’ which makes us incapable of ‘surviving anywhere outside our comfort zone of Malta’. Then there is the usual exalted patronizing psycho-babble about ‘life-changing events’ (whatever those are) ‘opening minds to bitterness’ and of ‘resentment and irrational thinking being the fruit of ignorance’ – or was it the other way round? – rather than ‘freeing up the person psychologically and in terms of the way he or she looks at things’. Wow!
Such remarks about her fellow countrymen typify the long past colonial, boot-licking feudal mindset which Daphne seems not to have outgrown. This leads her to have us believe that we would anyway not have had an “opera house” (well, erm, Gozo has one, or is it two?) if Malta had not been a British colony. She goes on to display disconnectedness by saying that this argument applies equally today as there are not enough "opera-goers” to sustain “operatic” performances and that, had we not been a British colony, there would anyway have been no money to build one. This is flatulent rot.
Daphne continues to suffer from a delusion that cultural performance is “opera”, whereas it encompasses literary drama, artistic and musical events - and more. She seems also not to have noticed that Malta has seen an unprecedented blossoming of culture and talent in the recent decades since independence. Today we may have more talented musicians per head of population than most other countries and, in case Daphne didn’t notice, correspondingly more well-attended cultural events – and not just ‘opera’. This has occurred in spite of (rather than because of) a past culture minister or two whose idea of culture did not extend beyond the European Song Festival. This recent burgeoning of culture in Malta seems to have bypassed Daphne who remains firmly stuck in a time warp lodged in Victorian times a the primitive obsession that culture is all ‘opera’. In any case, that opera was The Big Thing in the early 20th century, only attended by well-heeled Maltese cognoscenti of yore, is ridiculously irrelevant and out-dated. We have come a long way since then.
As to the roofless theatre, ‘roofless’ being the epithet it richly deserves, if our politicians managed to raise funds to build themselves a new parliament, then they might equally have afforded to give the Maltese people, who you insult so fulsomely in your loathsome article, something future generations - and our culture - deserve by restoring the opera house to its former glory so as to serve as a proper venue for cultural events as has been done in Venice and many other European cities.
Finally, Ms Caruana Galizia, insulting people with whom you disagree is not the way to go about expressing your disagreement; this merely betrays the fact that you have nothing informed or worthwhile to say on the subject.
G G Debono
Sliema