The madman and the Moonie

I would have been Norman Lowell if I hadn’t been born in sub-Saharan Africa.

Apparently, entering Maltese politics in anything other than the Nationalist Party is not permissible unless you are the 21st-century equivalent of a 19th-century fairground attraction like a bearded lady or elephant man (oh dear).

Bondiplus was decorated with two such specimens the night before last: the madman and the Moonie, a strange duo if ever there was one, and more so because each runs a different ‘political party’ and stands for election on a competing ticket. Emmy Bezzina is Mr Alpha Party, remember.

Norman Lowell is indisputably one sandwich short of a picnic, and seems to have served no purpose on the show other than that of a circus act, with Bondi speaking in careful tones as though to somebody insane and in possession of a loaded weapon.

Then there was that Emmy Bezzina, repeatedly saying that he was on the show as Lowell’s legal adviser – as though it is the norm for studio guests to take their lawyers along, just in case they’re served with a writ while on camera.

I’m not going to bother discussing all that Lowell said. We’ve been there before, ad nauseam, and not much could be picked up between all those long bleeps to wipe out his swear-words and obscenities, in any case.

And there’s another man who wears his watch over his sleeve, and he’s not Gianni Agnelli back from the dead, either. What a pair they make.

Now Lowell has appealed against the decision of the court which gave him a two-year prison sentence suspended for four years. He tells us that he is going to save Malta from disaster and return the island (Gozo is the realm of peasants and sheep, not of the elite) to the paradise in the Mediterranean that it was in the 1800s.

Truly, he’s bonkers. Malta was anything but paradise in the 1800s. It was hell on earth for everyone but the wealthy or comfortably-off few. It was a place of starvation, disease, misery and gross hardship, with an average of 50 babies and children under five dying EVERY WEEK – and this when the population was so much smaller than it is now. Thousands of other children languished in orphanages, people begged on the streets and lived in the gutter, and Lowell himself may have had antenati in just such dire straits, though of course he wishes us to believe that he comes from the lineage of demi-gods.

I wish all these freaks and weirdos would go away and leave room for some normal people to get into politics. I’m beginning to wonder about the words of the geneticist interviewed on Bondiplus in any case: that inbreeding is bad for the gene-pool because it brings faulty genes to the fore. No wonder there are so many cranks in the country, with the rest of us accepting them as part and parcel of public life, rather than seeing them for the cranks that they are and wondering how on earth they got to be in the public eye.