Oh golly gumdrops, the oracle has spoken

After a suitably lengthy period of gestation during which Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar consulted unnamed experts – or so they said – and cogitated at their Tower-Road-flat war-rooms (a concrete-and-aluminium structure built on the site of a graceful old house) in between long debates at Teeny Beach and some watercolour painting en plein air to raise funds for libel suits, the oracle has spoken at last.

The oracle has told us, too, that a further three thrilling installments await us, Friday’s having been but the first.

Either the gestation is taking longer than expected in between bouts of beachside rummy, or FAA believe that The People don’t have the necessary mental rigour to digest their Great Thoughts in a single sitting.

Forgive me if I sound scathing, but it is impossible for me to take these people seriously. I know them, you see.

I know their foibles, their shortcomings, their biases and prejudices, their motivation, their superiority complex and their innate belief that they are the ruling class.

And above all, I know their risible, ludicrous inability to distinguish between environmental issues and matters of aesthetics, their deep, abiding ignorance of rural matters and their habitual belief that ‘fields’ are somewhere one might take an occasional winter stroll or maintain a retreat for Saturdays and Sundays, but certainly not somewhere one might actually, God forbid, live, because it is ‘too far’ and geckos might breach the apertures.

Back in the days when people thought clearly and spoke proper English – the 1960s? – there was something called an Aesthetics Board.

Now Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar, a bunch of urban dwellers who huddle for protection from nature red in tooth and claw in their concrete flats in a concrete jungle and who wouldn’t know a Bahrija freshwater crab if it leaped out and nipped them in the jolly goolies, insist on calling themselves ‘environmentalists’.

Struggle as I might, I can’t think of a single environmental issue they’ve taken up.

Their big battles have been not about the depleted water-table or the use of poisonous chemicals by farmers, which have decimated the insect population. They are not about the pollution of the sea or air.

No, the big battles fought by our urban warriors have been about matters of cultural preference: a cathedral museum and now, about whether we should have a parliament house or not and whether the new theatre should be open or closed.

If those are environmental issues then I am an endangered panda.

“The public wanted a theatre and the reconstruction of the City Gate area. It never asked for a new parliament,” the FAA told us in the first of its four installments.

Nothing new there: Astrid Vella preempted her own press statement by means of a quasi verbatim column in Malta Today last Sunday – surprise – with a note that “Miriam Cremona also contributed to this article”.

What the FAA press statement fails to tell us is how Astrid Vella, Miriam Cremona and George Debono know what the public wants, given that they sent out the alms-basket for a libel fund rather than a nationwide survey of public opinion.

Their arrogance, if I may borrow a word from their preferred lexicon, is nothing but the 19th-century belief that the English/Italian-speaking bourgeoisie are the natural rulers of this tin-pot island and that they know what everyone else should want whether they want it or not.

Well, a giant raspberry to them.

“Aspects of the plans,” they said, with the patronising ignorance in which those who live in that sort of cliquey, narrow-minded bubble specialise (which is one of the reasons they annoy me so), “are worthy of merit.”

I could hear the champagne being cracked open in Renzo Piano’s Paris studio all the way from where I sat at the time in a factory office in Treviso.

There was more ignorance with the demand that the government put “the brief” on display so that The People might see “the limitations imposed on the architect and what the government requested of him”.

Again I am going to say it: there are few people who irritate me more than those raised with a superiority complex and no education bar that achieved within the narrow and rigid confines of a Maltese private school and – at a stretch – university in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Their absolute lack of self-doubt, self-awareness and insight is infuriating. They make me want to lie down and weep, throw furniture about, or leave the room.

Yes, I know I am intolerant of other people’s foibles but having lived half my life already I’m damned if I am going to live the other half being polite to insufferable fools. That’s no epitaph to which anyone might reasonably aspire: “She was polite to unutterable idiots.”

Worse than their half-baked opinions is the sheer, confident ‘ruling class’ conviction with which they spout them. Were they to make it clear, even to themselves, that these are their own personal views, then all well and good. Some of us do it for a living.

It’s when they claim to speak on behalf of The People or The Public, using the Royal We and confusing themselves with ‘civil society’ (which includes, lest Astrid Vella not know it, the Cactus Association and the Jiu Jitsu Society and all those other organisations to which Tonio Borg wrote trying to get them to support Gift of Life) that one wishes to line them up against a wall and – well, not shoot them exactly, but certainly pelt them with some eggs that have been left out in the summer sun for three months.

Their equation of Renzo Piano with the sort of junior architect they might engage to restructure the interior of their home (“Look, I want a bathroom there, a door here, and a new kitchen by the terrace.”) beggars belief.

A brief? What brief could Piano possibly have been given beyond ‘Do something about that space and please try to fit in a parliament house because we have never had one and it’s a bleeding disgrace’?

People of that calibre are not told what to do. They are not given ‘briefs’. If you want to dictate to an architect, you do not pick one of the world’s leading lights in architecture.

This business of ‘it’s not the architect but the brief’ has been brewing for some time. I can’t imagine why it took so long for FAA to spit it out in the first of four installments. It began to crop up immediately the project went on display and it dawned on FAA’s plastic army that perhaps running down Renzo Piano’s work wasn’t such a brilliant idea because it would make them – ahem – look like architecturally illiterate backwoods bunnies.

So they formed a scintillating Plan B: it’s not the architect; it’s the brief.

Of course, they are unable to see the close correlation between this and the old but true chestnut that a poor worker blames his tools.

The sort of architect who Astrid Vella or George Debono might engage to sort out their bathroom might blame their brief for his result, but Renzo Piano is never going to do that and he is going to dismiss out of hand any suggestion that his work has shortcomings because his brief was inadequate.

Architects (like other professionals) of that calibre do not take up briefs which they find inadequate. They don’t need to, they cannot afford the damage to their reputation, and to suggest otherwise as Astrid Vella and her plastic army are doing is not just profoundly stupid.

It is insulting.

Perhaps the silliest assertion which Astrid Vella has made is the one which links projects of this dimension to the popular vote.

It doesn’t follow that because people have the right to choose who governs them every five years, and the right to choose whether they want to live in the European Union or not, they should choose something that is purely within the realms of architectural competence.

The views expressed on the internet and in letters to the newspapers by those whom she is encouraging in their hysteria should make her deeply fearful of, rather than keen on, a popular vote on a major architectural project in the capital city.

These are not matters for democracy. The fact cannot have passed Astrid Vella by that the public commentary in favour of Renzo Piano’s project has been largely literate and informed, while the public commentary against the project has been largely the inverse, at times to a frightening extent.

The leaders of Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar have overstepped the limits of their competence, such as it is, with this one.

It is only their self-confident ruling-class arrogance and dearth of self-doubt which prevent them from seeing what is so very obvious to others.

If Astrid Vella, Miriam Cremona, George Debono et al wish to treat us to what are no more than their personal opinions, they should do what I do and find somebody who will pay them to write a newspaper column.

Ganging up together and claiming that they speak for the nation is a public demonstration of private self-delusion.

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