The Demimonde
Make hay while the sun shines.
Over the last 10 years or so, Malta has seen the growth of an obvious, clear-cut social group – a demimonde or alternative society of those who would have been social pariahs in previous generations.
Today, they are no less déclassé than they would have been a generation or two earlier, but because there are now so many, whereas before there would have been merely a scattered smattering, they have been able to form a society within a society – an alternative group which has begun to turn wheels within wheels.
The people within this social network – for that is precisely what it has become, a network – fail to understand that they are alternative, déclassé, or to use the English colloquialism, downright naff. They think they are the sine qua non of high society, the bees’ knees, the ne plus ultra of social aspiration.
We need not be bothered with the sordid shenanigans of this particular network were it not for the fact that it has come to function as a sort of cross-party, pan-socio-economic-group mazunerija.
The people within this network have just one thing in common: they are all cheap, they are all after money and status, and they are all on the make. Put them together at a social event, and the atmosphere is sordid, tacky, seedy and naff. But the protagonists don’t notice it.
Most of them have come out of nowhere, but now they think they have arrived, that they are the apex of society, busy pulling strings and climbing, climbing, climbing to nowhere in particular, boasting about their Manolo shoes and their trips to the Far East, wearing clothes intended for people half their age and always moving, moving, talking, talking, meeting, meeting, because they are terrified of spending time alone and being quiet.
This network of people merits further study not just because they are fascinating in their conviction that they are stylish, glamorous and the focus of popular desire, but because they represent a threat to democracy in the true sense of the word.
Sucked into a tight mafia by the commonality of their pariah status vis-à-vis respectable society, they function like a parochial freemasons group, pulling strings in each other’s interests, protecting their own, manipulating the system in their favour and ganging up when one of theirs is under threat.
The system they operate crosses both political parties, though it grows essentially out of the Labour Party and encapsulates Labour values, such as they are, infiltrates the police and the judiciary, has links to the seedier elements of business, and knows no boundaries because in this parochial world, where integrity is just a word in the dictionary, everything that you can get away with is just fine and everything that is legal is acceptable.
In Britain, they would be known as chavs with money who are on the make. In Malta, they remain unaware that this is essentially what they are. Having accumulated the trappings of consumerism during their speedy exit from nowhere, they have convinced themselves, or have been convinced by others, that they are somehow glamorous and stylish, the party people of 21st-century Malta.
They have no idea of just how sleazy and tacky they look to everyone else.
Interestingly, what seems to have brought this group together, at least initially, is a common history of broken marriages. Left on the outside of established society by shattered marriages and sudden single or ‘second relationship’ status, people who would otherwise have had nothing on earth in common except a bit of money and some kind of influence in the judiciary, politics or business have pulled together to find strength, reassurance and succour in numbers.
Starting off as social ‘outlaws’, for want of a better word, their numbers and their influence has grown to the extent that they are able to manipulate a well-connected network in their favour.
The network feeds on itself and grows, attempting to suck in, most times successfully, every newly single and bewildered lost soul who ‘comes on the market’ and who finds a social home in this group which rescues him or her from the loneliness that hits hard in the wake of marital breakdown.
When you are separated from your spouse, married couples tend to exclude you from social events, or you exclude yourself because you no longer have anything in common, and so you end up, inadvertently, in an alternative society that pulls you in.
The throwing together of large numbers of people in their 30s, 40s and 50s whose marriages have broken down and who have never really developed mentally, socially or intellectually has resulted in a very peculiar form of mixing it up, in which middle-aged people are seen attempting to return to the days when they were 16 and trying to get off with each other at Sliema Pitch and Neptunes, or Fortizza or Reno’s or Club 47, or whatever the equivalent was for people who didn’t move in those restricted circles in 1980.
I sometimes wonder where it will all end, or how it will develop, whether the situation will implode under the very pressures of its own incestuous nature.
For really, how many times can a middle-aged person go round the block in Malta, dating the same people, partying with the same network, pulling the same strings behind the scenes and across party lines so as to consolidate power and influence and buy more consumer goods?
I have the oddest feeling that the death-knell for this alternative society, this demimonde of naff people mixing it up and pulling strings while labouring under the delusion that they are cool, hip and progressive, the envy of all, will be divorce.
Strange as it may sound, divorce will force the middle-aged teenagers of Malta to grow up. They will no longer be able to pretend that the matter is out of their hands, and they will be forced to take a decision – an adult decision.
They take their current inability to remarry as licence to behave like idiots – and let’s face it, whatever the views of the more conservative elements, about divorce, it is undeniable that remarriage conveys a degree of respectability on unions that the present musical chairs scenario sorely lacks.
In the absence of divorce, what we have now is a large and steadily growing adult play-group of men who play the field with the excuse that they are not free to remarry, and women who will sleep with anything that moves because they are desperate to find yet another ‘other half’.
When they run out of options in this very limited scenario, they turn to people who are still married and target them in search of fresh meat, though how anyone who you have been looking at for 20, 30, 40 years can ever be considered fresh is beyond me – and this applies to both men and women.
The hunt for fresh meat puts even more marriages under pressure, so that they go down like skittles. And when that happens, and the ‘victims’ come from a background that might prove useful to the mazunerija, they are sucked right into it and are released only after a mighty struggle.
The women who want to get out of the endless rounds of partying, getting drunk and one-night-stands with men they didn’t even fancy at 20 are accused – in what is a perversion of normality – of being crazy and ‘not normal’. The men are egged on to greater and greater excesses.
Cheating, lying and manipulating the system become normalised, and life becomes a sick nightmare.
You’re either with them, or they see you as being against them and a threat to their network. This is Malta in 2010. It’s far from lovely.
This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.
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A brilliant article. I especially agree with “The system they operate crosses both political parties”, for this is where the biggest danger lies. Nobody will cast the first stone, if any stone at all.
“In the absence of divorce what we have now is a large steadily growing adult play-group of men who play the field with excuse that they are not free to remarry, and women who will sleep with any thing that moves because they are desperate to find yet another `other half`.”
Ghalkemm jien ma naqbilx ma divorzju, dan il-paragrafu qed igalni nirrefletti sewwa fuq l-hsieb tieghi.
Your mummy never told you to shut up if you have nothing nice to say?
Thank you, Daphne! Spot on, as usual. The Russian tourist suddenly seems normal compared to these inadequate inbreds.
I totally agree, but wish to add something.
This situation has also infected people who belonged to what used to be the higher end of society, people with whom you and I used to hang around when we were eighteen, and whose families were supposed to be exemplary.
It does not only involve separated people. A number of people who are still married, fearing that one of the couple will find the situation you describe more delectable than their marriage, which after 20-odd years has become a drag, stray and join the “chav” crowd with disastrous results.
Another problem is that the Maltese still use class as a distinction. They use their clothes, the language they communicate with, the car they drive, where they live as a “class” benchmark. Most of this has nothing to do with class at all.
In other countries, they refer to high/average/low income earners. That’s a much simpler and straightforward distinction. Class has nothing to do with possessions.
[Daphne – Nor does it have anything to do with income, which is why the high/average/low income earners distinction is valuable only for consumer market surveys and electoral opinion polls, and not for assessing what sort of social background a person comes from.]
I clearly remember the nuns at school telling us that it was “impolite” to speak Maltese.
[Daphne – I don’t remember that at all. In fact, it was people who tried hard to be something they were not who insisted on NOT speaking Maltese and who regarded it as an embarrassment. Both my parents grew up in Maltese-speaking households and so did I. I don’t remember the adults in my childhood world ever speaking English to each other.]
We were blessed with a second language, thanks to the British, but for heaven’s sake, that’s all it is – a second language not a social marker.
I think it would be much more dignified to speak Maltese if you feel more comfortable expressing yourself in Maltese. The purpose of any language is to communicate not to distinguish and flaunt your “class”.
Pretending not to speak Maltese, and to speak bad English instead is bad – not to mention that anybody who’s my age and who does not speak Maltese well is just plain stupid not classy. T
here is no way that anybody can live somewhere all their life and not learn the language. On the other hand, I also cannot understand Maltese journalists who write in ‘thesaurus’ English. The kind of English used by some Maltese journalists is alien to the London newspapers – I find it hilarious.
Instead on concentrating on the language best suited to convey their thoughts and opinions, they concentrate on showing off their linguistic prowess, with the result that the reader either falls asleep or gets migraine trying to decipher the message or line of thinking.
Funny really, and I hope you are right about the eventual implosion because I can’t stand it anymore, and luckily I don’t have to live with it every day because I don’t live in Malta.
Din min hi din l-antipatika?
Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying. Even I grew up speaking Maltese, at home. I still do actually. But how many people of our generation pretend they can’t speak Maltese – so they appear “high class”?
@Dominic Fenech – I am assuming you totally misunderstood me.
Very powerful and very true. Good luck with your court cases. I hope justice will prevail.
An excellent description of the sorry present situation.
Prosit – ma stajtx kif tolqot fil-laham il-haj f`dak l-artiklu.
“Se jsir affidavit mill-ġurnalisti tal-Mediatoday dwar dan il-każ. Taħt ġurament, il-ġurnalisti kollha se jgiddbu l-istorja vvintata tal-artikolista Caruana Galizia.”
Hemm wiehed fuq il-Monti jbiegh il-guramenti u l-affidavit bis-sold erba’.
[Daphne – It’s their word against the Police Commissioner’s, and there’s no doubt who the court will believe.]
Another interesting article, Daphne.
If I may add, this network is a result of the affluence created by sound economic policy adopted by successive PN governments, which, had these people had their way, would never have happened.
As you say, they are only after power and money as ends in themselves, forgetting that both can be used to do good to others in society around them. They know no values. So they cling to the party, the judiciary, the police, the unions, the banking system, the building permit systems. We experienced something similar to this back in the 70s and 80s.
Whereas I am in favour of a responsible law on divorce, I am not sure that this is the solution to what you call the demimonde, nor that broken marriages are its cause.
Most of the people you describe come from the Labour camp, or if not they have been vortexed into it. I suspect that the phenomenon is rooted in the frustrations of long years in opposition. Denied the opportunity of real power in the top echelons of our country, they are now inventing their own power systems, underground or above it.
As long as they keep moving, talking, meeting, and then moving, talking and meeting again because they cannot stay quiet, it’s okay with me, as long as they do not disturb the others, like me, who do not have their same habits.
However, carrying forward from your article, it is not just divorce that will solve their problems. Some need LGBT – and you seem to have identified a few.
Yes, history repeats itself, like it used to be in the times of Carol Peralta and his membership in a masonic lodge.
Are these chavs moderate, progressive, or just Laburisti?
Desolation Row.
If this very good contribution was divided in part A and part B in my opinion it would deserve 100 per cent for part A and 90 for part B. Yes your guess is right!
I’m glad to read – finally – that all the events described in your columns subscribe to a new, albeit warped masonic entity. This is no news at all, and such activities have been going on for years.
The common bloke, although possibly aware of such happenings, has shown little interest in the side effects of ‘wheels within wheels’. We are watching a movie. We are gullible and will refrain from asking questions. Persons like yourself are paving the way for others to understand that society has been taken over.
Prosit, Daphne – ezempju car ta’ dan li ktibt huwa l-Imhallef Lino Farrugia Sacco.
I don’t think it’s just a Labour phenomenon, or even that it’s mostly a Labour phenomenon. The prototypes of the demimonde in Malta were the proverbial kuntratturi (“b’dik iz-zaqq hara”), who have always curried favour with everyone, and made shitloads of money under any government.
What has changed in the past 10 years is that the demimonde has sucked in a lot of loudmouthed opinion-makers, a lot of whom make policy AND influence public opinion. It’s the Xarabank syndrome come to bite us in the behind. The “kullhadd ghandu dritt ghall-opinjoni tieghu” fallacy, coupled with the rise of a celebrity culture in Malta.
Whichever way you read it, it doesn’t bode well. Decades of struggle for democracy have come to naught, and we’re back to a system of castes and social classes. I think it is less likely for me to accede to the higher rungs of the social ladder – and by “social” I mean that mix of power, influence and money, for want of a better word – than it was for my grandparents.
Your observations are essentially true, but I cannot see how divorce will force people who do not want to grow up to actually do so.
Your obsession with this ‘denimonde’ business almost gives one the impression that this a kind of conspiracy theory. I rather believe that it is yet another manifestation of ‘herd instinct’ — jew kif nghidu bil-Malti — kulhadd jaghmel bhal moghoz. That people involved in this mayhem – ‘kawlata’ – end up being used by others or indeed by organisations for their own ends is a logical consequence.
Frank, this is far from an obsession. You wouldn’t beleive how deep rooted this is and how far these people go to protect each other. Here we are talking about computers being hacked, GPS’s on cars, movements being traced, etc. Yes, it crosses party lines and even different levels of society. These people now believe they are the new untouchables……wheels within wheels.
“These people now believe they are the new untouchables……wheels within wheels.”
As opposed to the old untouchables who all were upright gentlemen, god-fearing chaps all of them?
This stuff happened in those days as well, it just wasn’t publicised and in your face as today, that’s all. To believe otherwise means that you think this current crop introduced all the bad thngs in Malta!
” has links to the seedier elements of business ”
Could you please amplify on this?
Just log onto adultfinder.com and see how many of them you can find…. shouldn’t be to difficult….
More details, please.
So true Daphne, but please don’t generalise – there are still separated people in Malta who not interested in carrying on as you say above. There are still some of us who have commonsense.
Just brilliant, erut you leave out a very important element. A good number of these people are philanderers who have made money and party away whilst leaving the wife and kids behind.
“Both my parents grew up in Maltese-speaking households and so did I. I don’t remember the adults in my childhood world ever speaking English to each other.”
Funny that you mention it. My wife and I were discussing this only last week. I grew up in a Maltese speaking household in that my parents almost invariably spoke/speak to each other in Maltese. My grandparents never spoke to each other in English, and my paternal grandparents were more likely to use Italian then English. It’s the same with my wife.
However we are the first generation of both families who speak almost exclusively in English at home. It’s the same with our friends.
One of the finest articles ever written about our present day sick society, pervading all classes. We all know it, we experience it daily but are afraid to admit it, let alone fight it. Well said, D.
@David Buttigieg
My own linguistic situation somewhat mirrors yours with the exception that I’m single. My profession and hence my career depend wholly on the English language. Maltese is totally inadequate in medical terminology and let’s face reality – it will not become an international business language anytime soon.
Factor in a multinational as my employer, and I find that English is much easier to use on a continuous basis while it slowly but surely replaced my parents’ mother tongue.
I wonder how many have succumbed to this global trend in linguistics.
@Daphne – Although, I cannot claim a (recent at least) background from the “elite” classes, I’m pretty much in agreement with what you have written.
However, I am also well aware that this behaviour has infected a certain “high class” demographic. Look around and you will see that this is true of the “high class” which has lost its money and assets over the last two generations. I concede that the numbers aren’t prevalent but that pertinent phrase comes to mind “over enough time, money is the great equalizer”.
A landmark article, prosit