The Arrogant Army

The Arrogant Army has intensified its operations over the last few weeks, filling the newspapers and airwaves with the word ‘arrogant’ and claiming to speak on behalf of The People.

We are never told who The People are, and those of us who do not feel the same way are left with the niggling sensation that perhaps we are not people too. Perhaps we are Stepford Wives, or things that have crawled out of a bog and have yet to evolve limbs.

The Arrogant Army began with people from my old hometown and social group, who remain its loudest, most persistent and increasingly tiresome members. They hardly fit what comes first to mind when speaking of The People.

I imagine that they reciprocate the sentiment and find me loud, persistent and increasingly tiresome too, but unlike them I confine myself to two newspaper columns, because I am paid to do so, and to a website, which is an investment, and do not spread myself liberally like loose jam over the print and broadcast media, there to grind my axes for the sheer hell of it. If you want to avoid me, you can.

The ranks of the Arrogant Army have since been bolstered by Joseph Muscat and his Collation of Change. This is the new movement about which he speaks. It is a strange movement, one which is made up of people who have absolutely nothing in common except the belief that everyone is arrogant except themselves.

Whenever I read the tirades of those who would have us believe that they speak for The People, I am left with the oddest feeling that what really gets their goat is not the thing which they seem on the face of it to be criticising, but the fact that they are not the ones making the decisions or among the expert few who are being consulted.

That is why I find it important to mention their social group and background: these are people brought up with a sense of entitlement and the belief that they know better than the inferior classes.

In their eyes, the government is made up almost exclusively of members of those inferior classes who are at the same time too close for comfort socially.

Yes, they now have a Labour Party they feel comfortable with, but not in the way that you would at first think. It is a Labour Party which allows them to feel comfortably superior without being revolted or frightened, and which acknowledges – overtly or otherwise – their social superiority and surpassing knowledge in most things, something the Nationalist Party does not do, and rightly so in this democratic age.

‘New’ Labour allows the closed-minded colonels of the Arrogant Army to feel open-minded while, as they see it without wishing to admit to it, slumming in what they think of as a hip way by patronising their social inferiors.

They will hate me for saying it even more than they do already – class traitor that I am – but so what? You know what they say: it takes one to know one, which is why I can read them like a book while at the same time running a mile so as not to have any part of it.

I find their attitude completely insufferable, silly, shallow and deeply boring. They come across as the bunch of kids who believe they have been left out in the cold too long, and who are now planning The Revenge of the Nerds – or perhaps that should be Revenge on the Nerds.

Though ‘arrogant’ has become the favourite insult of the chattering classes, were they to stop and think for a moment they would see that they are the ones who are truly arrogant in their assumption that they speak for others and not just for themselves. They should not claim to speak on behalf of The People because they do not know what the people think.

They appear to believe that society hasn’t changed in the last 100 years, and that peasants and the working-classes need the good ladies and gentlemen of ‘Sliema’ – that’s a cypher, because nowadays many live elsewhere – to do prissy and useless battle on their behalf in between games of cards, rounds of gossip and scandal-mongering and the next tea party.

As a columnist for the last 19 years, I have made it clear that my opinion is my own. I have never sought to back it up by referring to The People, even when I have known – through surveys rather than mere haphazard guesswork – that tens of thousands of people think exactly as I do, but silently.

Indeed, I have no doubt that the only reason I am still writing a column today, when so many other columnists have come and gone and been forgotten, is precisely because mine are common views. Yet they remain my views, and I never attempt to bolster them by claiming to speak on behalf of anyone else.

Those who are now referring to The People in their protests and their objections to the Piano plan do so for one reason alone: they lack the guts to own their opinions. They must bring in backing in the form of The People, like those children in the playground drawing reinforcements for a stand-off.

By hiding behind their organisations and The People, the foot-soldiers and officers of the Arrogant Army reveal themselves to be perfectly gutless. Maltese social culture is very much prone to cliquey and ‘group’ behaviour and fears the individual – more so the prominent individual, and nowhere is this more apparent at present than in this obsessive reference to The People.

And then, of course, there is the logical fallacy in their argument: if enough people say something, then it must be right, and Renzo Piano or the prime minister must listen. There is no such thing as intrinsic truth or value.

Hence, if The People and their chattering-class colonels think that Piano is just another architect and his plans are ‘the emperor’s new clothes’, then this is the truth which the prime minister and his chosen architect must heed.

For all their pretensions to high culture, the Arrogant Army don’t seem to understand the fatal flaw in their reasoning. It is akin to saying that if The People decree one of those Hamrun paintings of a boy in a red velvet suit to be much better than a Paul Klee, then our museum, given a choice between the two, should acquire the Hamrun painting of a boy in a red velvet suit and not the Paul Klee – because The People are paying for it and so they must decide.

Over the last 25 years, these islands have gone from almost no democracy to what appears to be the opposite extreme in which Joe Borg’s views on architecture are as valid and significant as those of Renzo Piano. It is this which offends me and not any opposition to the project as such.

It seems to be democracy, but it is its polar opposite. It is a variation on the totalitarian communist theme that one person is as good and as entirely dispensable as another, hence surgeons and street-sweepers should have equal pay. And this is why I am not surprised that this argument is being put forward mainly by those with a totalitarian disposition, masquerading as liberals because they are gay and so favour gay rights or because they are divorced/wish to be divorced and favour divorce legislation.

They are the sort of people who would be happy to turn the clock back a century and be the ones giving the orders, while The People they claim to champion beaver away in the scullery.

Rather than causing me to perceive the government as arrogant, its choice of one of the greatest architects of all time for the Valletta project has reminded me why, given a choice between Nationalist and Labour, I find the former so very much more attractive. The Nationalist Party chooses Renzo Piano and builds its vision with a view to the long term. Meanwhile, the Labour Party talks about listening to The People and tailor-making a project according to The People’s inane suggestions.

What can I say? Thank heavens the Valletta project isn’t in the hands of Joseph Muscat, Anglu Farrugia, Toni Abela (who wrote in L-orizzont that the government should have saved money by using a Maltese architect who would be just as good) and Jason Micallef, because it would be an essay in hopeless, hapless tbazwir and hamallagni.

All the smart chatterers who are currently whining about the project (and who “voted for Louis Grech and not for Labour” in the EP election) know this, even though they would rather choke on their torta tal-lampuki than admit it.

I watched Joseph Muscat’s face on the screen during the unveiling of the plans last Saturday, and his gobsmacked expression said one thing: “My god, these boys really know how to do things. How am I going to steal back the thunder after this?”

Let him make merry with his collation for change. The only place it’s going to drive him is smack into a dead-end alley, like Sant before him. It’s pointless getting into government when you’re surrounded by a freak-show of crass ineptitude – and yes, one in the eye for the disapproving Sliema chatterers – really bad taste and crimped horizons.

Now maybe the Sliema chatterers can begin to understand why Labour’s hamallagni and aspirational kitsch are relevant to any discussion about politics: because that kind of politician is never going to understand the mammoth and far-reaching difference between a Renzo Piano project and a ‘tijatru’ designed by Mr Nobody at a discount on the basis of The People’s comments posted on timesofmalta.com and voted on in The People’s referendum.

I rather suspect that the reason the prime minister is so keen to wrap up the Valletta project within four years has only partly to do with electoral kudos, but mainly to do with fear that the incoming bunglers will faff it up and turn it into Toni Abela’s idea of what The People want. I’m with him on this, and unlike the Arrogant Army, I’m not drawing in The People to back me up.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.