It’s been a rum week, with all sorts of non-events, anti-climaxes, missed appointments and the like. Following the highpoint that was the beginning of the European Capital of Culture, this was a sort of anti-climax, showing that the entire shindig was just a manufactured event with no depth at all.
Otherwise, it was business as usual, with the parties at each other’s throats.
Then new stimuli started to emerge. A Valletta Capital City of Culture sub-section populated Valletta with all sorts of monuments ostensibly to illustrate Maltese proverbs or sayings leading to all sorts of memes and double entendres (which may be are somehow derived from the proverbs or sayings themselves in earthiness).
The Daphne Caruana Galizia cohort continued to signal its persistence and inventiveness with pithy slogans broadcast on Castile’s baroque façade (angering Jason Micallef with their gross lèse majesté).
Government and the various European Parliament committees continued to battle it out with statement after statement leaving none the wiser. The European Central Bank was reported to have been invited by some EP committee or other to investigate the Pilatus Bank which has also been accused of indulging in SLAPP activities against other media, not just the Maltese one.
In the health sector, Stewards Healthcare, the new contractor to run the Gozo Hospital and two other hospitals in Malta, who Minister Konrad Mizzi promised would come on Monday, does not seem to have turned up.
Industrial action by doctors and nurses at the three hospitals was threatened all through last week but averted by the nurses at the last minute, leaving only the doctors hanging on till the last minute with a strike threatened for Tuesday.
Back to Daphne Caruana Galizia. Another week has passed and not one of the many court cases involving her has been decided. Nor did any of the many magisterial inquiries in her regard reach any conclusion. Her impromptu shrine in Great Siege Square continues to attract flowers and candles despite an attack by a lone woman.
Everyone is treading water, it seems, in expectation of a development which will lead to the unravelling of the national skein.
Even the Prime Minister, last Sunday, apart from the usual positive feel message, found nothing better to say except to chastise road work contractors for delays in road works in Zejtun (they were still in a shambles when the week ended), and to explain, again, to Zejtun farmers why it was thought necessary to extend the Bulebel Industrial Estate, which would mean gobbling up entire fields and even a valley to build factories.
Onward and upward seemed to be his message to a future economy made up of more cranes and development, thus more and more foreigners and also more betting companies, disregarding the fact that the biggest betting company in Malta (the same he had visited days after the re-election) had shed some 120 workers and other unrelated companies had shed workers too.
If the government was not smiling, nor was the Opposition. It has now become normal to learn of summary executions by the Delia gatekeepers, the last victim being Claudette Buttigieg, she of Desire fame.
The new Shadow Cabinet, unveiled as I write, is not much different from the previous one created by Simon Busuttil who, this time round, has a Shadow Cabinet post. But then, to have a really new Shadow Cabinet, one would have had to remove anyone who had any post in the last Gonzi administration.
At the end of the week, the only things left to excite the people of these islands were the twin annual and traditional excitements of Eurovision and Carnival. Panem et circenses indeed. No gear changes at all.
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