As if the world is not bracing itself enough for the emerging onslaught from the Trump Administration in the United States, we are now awaiting the climax of a knightly condom pillow fight that has broken out in the Order of the Knights of Malta. I am not in the least surprised Pope Francis, in his wisdom and much-admired practicality, has given the order (pun intended) of the boot to the English Grand Master who had earlier dismissed one of his “ministers” for making the elastic contraceptive available to people in places like Myanmar and India.
In this Star Wars generation, when pictures from Jupiter and its moons come down to us as clear as this morning’s selfies, it is difficult to understand how a simple issue such as this should take up so much precious time of the knights’ boy-scout pursuits and, it needs to be said, their admirable charity work all over the world.
What is happening to the human psyche when previously horrendous ideas, such as building walls to stop humans from running away from misery, are not only condoned but also applauded by the very same people who in 1989 had danced wildly on the symbolic ruins of the Berlin Wall? Now we have the pompous knights getting into a pillow fight over a fellow knight’s decision to allow contraceptives to be distributed by the Order’s humanitarian arm, Malteser International!
Given the population crisis and the poverty overwhelming the world, I would have thought this was a wise and long overdue decision, particularly in those parts of the world where making daily babies still supersedes watching boring police series on television. The population has been exploding since the sixties when the first contraceptive controversies occurred.
Almost two decades into the 21st century, we are now dealing with the repercussions of that on-going explosion and, indeed, someone needs to do something about it. Obviously not in the developed world where politicians are actually offering financial bonuses to couples who have children and where the economies largely depend on the influx of workers from distant lands, including our minuscule labour environment.
My long-time favourite Spike Milligan was, until the very day he passed away, a vociferous advocate of population control. Way back in 1982 he was writing about “pressurised animals and people”. In his unique style, he commented: “All our causes will come to nought unless we have a parallel de-population programme world-wide. China got the message, but too bloody late. Even as they were taking the census, three million Chinese were being born, making the census out of date before it had been completed.”
It is confounding, to say the least, that a knight should be censored and garrotted out of the Order simply because he is highly aware of the problem of over-population that brings with it, as it has always done, hunger, suffering and injustice. I thought those were the things a chevalier was expected to fight against, on horseback or not.
Enter Pope Francis who must secretly see both the hilarity and silliness of the situation. He has promptly and rightly asked the Grand Master, Fra’ Matthew Festing, to step down, which he has obediently (hate the word when it has anything to do with a person’s beliefs) done. The issue of contraceptives has long been dead and buried within the Catholic Church, much to the annoyance of the ultra-conservatives in it, like Cardinal Raymond Burke, an outspoken critic of the present Pope and a willing ally in the farcical dismissal of Grand Chancellor Albrecht von Boeselager for having sanctioned, goodness me, the distribution of condoms.
It is a battle that has been won by the progressives, religious or not, and it would hardly make any sense to resuscitate it. After all, the world’s population is still growing alarmingly fast.
***
‘1984 and all that
Many of us remember with what gusto the spotlight was turned on George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 by describing and commenting on the local political situation at the beginning of the eighties. The 1981 election result, understandably, had triggered the whole “intellectual” debate, and more so the sad events that followed it. But who would have thought that, 37 years later, we’d be witnessing the same crescendo worldwide?
Donald Trump’s presidential win has resulted in a remarkable surge in sales of that very same novel, particularly since one of the new President’s advisers, Kellyanne Conway took quite a beating on social media. She was accused of resorting to Orwellian “doublespeak” after she used the phrase “alternative facts” to explain away why Trump’s media secretary chose to lie about the size of the crowd attending The Donald’s inauguration. The whole episode has been compared to Orwell’s reference in 1984 to a society in which the government lies to its citizens through “newspeak”, designed to limit freedom of thought, and advocating surveillance on dissenters.
The media pictures comparing the crowd attending Trump’s inauguration ceremony last week with that which had attended Barrack Obama’s in 2008 and 2012 again promptly took me back three decades when the Maltese political scene was at its hottest. Riding the news dragon at the national station at the time, I remember us being literally plastered with complaints from both major parties, almost on a daily basis, over seconds they insisted had been denied to them in our frantic coverage.
Even worse, they used a stopwatch to compare the duration of crowd pans during the news coverage of their political gatherings, then noisier than they have ever been since. You got the Broadcasting Authority official, like some Orwellian little dictator, telling you: “Hey, the PN or the MLP film was five seconds shorter!” or “why did you show the backside of that PN or MLP crowd, giving the impression the attendance was nothing to write home about?”
This may sound like science fiction to today’s neutral radio and TV people, but it actually happened. Now, incredibly, it’s unfolding – in digital format, of course – in the US.
***
Malicious society
If a politician, of whichever party, cannot be sick and spared the misery of untimely criticism, then we have certainly turned into a malicious society. There were times when partisan politics had a heart. Dom Mintoff once refused to allow publication, on his party’s media, of pictures of his great political adversary, George Borg Olivier, caught in an uncompromising position at Paceville in the late sixties. It was the decent thing to do.
Politicians are human beings, like you and me. They have their views and their private lives, and they also get sick, sadly sometimes very sick. It is at such moments that we need to show we are a caring and generous society, and not when the TV cameras are zooming in on the millions being raised during Christmas telethons.
Alfred Sant had to walk up that Calvary on the eve of a general election, as had Beppe Fenech Adami more recently, and now Mario de Marco. They needed our support, our thoughts and prayers, not our political bile.