We want fights, not projects

The announcement of more public spending on capital projects is supposed to jolly things along, liven up the atmosphere, put a little bit of zing into the economy and the merest spring into the step of people who should be thinking positive for all our sakes rather than saying of a recession ‘Bring it on.’

Instead, those capital projects have been fallen on like fresh carcasses by starved hyenas. It’s not capital projects that we want, but capital projects to fight about. Whether they materialise or not is irrelevant, just so long as we have something to get worked up about to lift us out of the tedium of daily life in a confined space where you see the same people every day and it’s just like being in a glorified village, but with drugs and violence thrown in.

Why am I left with the lingering impression that some people are getting a kick out of their campaigns, that it’s the process of lobbying, of drumming up opinion, of fighting for a cause that interests them more than the end result? To challenge government action – or private commercial action with public consequences – when you understand that there is just cause to do so, and when you truly believe in the opposition that you are putting up, rather than making opposition an end in itself, is admirable. But when individuals and organisations begin spreading themselves thin, objecting to this and that, north, south, east, west, high and low, under and over, speaking with self-assumed importance and arrogating to themselves the voice of authority over matters of which they know little or nothing, it dawns on me that it’s not so much about the project but about the battle. And that is precisely why there is so much grand-standing, so many petitions, so many God-awful ‘Facebook groups’, and so many people who are quite obviously adoring every minute of every day that they have something to get worked up about.

One imagines that the government could have foreseen what would happen when it announced the new Renzo Piano project, that the St John’s Co-Cathedral Foundation might have envisioned the same when it gave word of its plans for an underground museum. People don’t want something to get excited about. They want something to get angry about. Anger is a far more satisfying sensation, particularly when it involves that deeply rewarding element of Resisting The Machine that has been missing from our lives since – oh, roughly 1987. We all need to feel we’re doing our Che Guevara bit sometimes, even if in sedate middle-age it no longer involves manning the barricades and throwing stones at the police who threw them first.

The projects are useful only inasmuch as one can’t very well bicker and grand-stand about nothing. One needs a reason. Apart from that, they might have been anything. They just happen to be two big – and rather interesting, if you’re taking time out from apoplectic rage or barely controlled hysteria – projects in Valletta, a place in which every man and his dog appears to have a stakeholder’s interest.
So of course, there have been weeks of unparalleled fun, with seemingly every day bringing forth fresh suggestions as to where ‘the government’ can house ‘its’ parliament (preferably up its back-alley, one would imagine), which leaves me wondering how many people actually grasp the notion of what a parliament actually is, and its direct link to democracy. The other day I found myself reminding somebody or other, who was up on her high horse about the government building a Piano palace to house its representatives (how dare it), that actually, parliament houses the representatives of the people, including the MP for whom she voted so as to represent her interests in any future ‘Piano palace’.

I find it odd, really, that we dedicate so much time and effort to brainwashing children about our 2000-year ‘history of oppression and colonisation’, then when we get to run our own show, with our own little democracy and our very own dinky parliament, everyone comes howling out of the woodwork demanding that this very thing we have supposedly been longing for throughout a couple of millennia of being stomped upon by il-hakem be housed in some palazzo basement or at the ars
e-end of Valletta, where it cannot be seen nor heard, in a fort hastily converted for the purpose, preferably by Rachel Vella of Tista Tkun Int.

At last, I understand why the Valletta bomb-site has remained a bomb-site for more than 60 years, while architectural competitions are held, drawing-boards are returned to, grand architects are commissioned, public exhibitions held, and big announcements made. The Valletta bomb-site serves a crucial purpose: that of drawing us together in division. Is it a paradox? No, it isn’t. Fighting about what should become of the bomb-site is something we share. By fighting about it, by beating each other over the head with our conflicting views, what we are saying is that we belong, that we are involved in this thing we share. The arguments over what should be done with the bomb-site have come down through three generations. The way things are going with the current attempt to do something about it, there may well be another three. At this stage, the only thing that it seems appropriate to build on the site is a memorial to the projects that fell through because everyone had an opinion and no two opinions were the same.

Now let me throw in a wild card. I think that many of those who are most vociferous in objecting to a parliament house on the bomb-site don’t really want an opera house, or even a theatre. They just don’t want a parliament house. The idea of politicians ‘getting something’ offends them. It offends them particularly because so many of them, at least going by what I have read and heard, seem not to know what parliament actually is. They believe it to be an office for lots of people they don’t like. In that case, I am not surprised at their fury and their objection, and I can’t say I blame them. I would feel the same way if I believed a national theatre or an opera house to be the private demesne of a bunch of squalling amateur actors who fake American accents badly, and for whom I have no time and even less patience.

But that is not why I believe a national theatre or an opera house to be wholly inappropriate. It’s because both of those things are the legacy of a bygone era. Those whose national theatres and opera houses were built in another age continue to use them, yes – but nobody is building national theatres and opera houses now. They are building other things, things more in keeping with the 21st century. Maltese theatre audiences are shrinking, not growing, despite the best efforts of several theatre groups which have worked hard to raise the standards. It’s always the same few hundred people who go along. As for opera, it would be a mistake to judge potential regular opera house audiences on the basis of the turn-out for annual or bi-annual open-air performances by Joseph Calleja or, once in a blue moon, Miriam Gauci.

Given that nobody seems content to let the others get away with a parliament house, a museum of modern art, an opera house, a national theatre, and now even a public library, we run the risk of being left with the one thing that will offend no one: nothing. We will be able to carry on joyously bickering about what to do with the place until we are lying in our graves, and then our children can carry the torch. The only good thing about this is that by the time their turn comes round to fight and nag about the site, an opera house will be even more irrelevant than it is now. So with that eliminated from the equation, and with parliament housed safely out of sight in the cannibalised rooms of some poor sod’s requisitioned palazzo (with parliamentarians having to cross the road to use the lavatory at Café Frans after Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar has objected to interior alterations on the grounds that politicians have enough privileges and don’t need washrooms too, whatever next), our descendants will have to find new reasons to divide them. And I’m quite sure they will.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.