And Labour’s trashification of Malta continues

Jason Micallef with Labour Party singer Mary Spiteri. His favourite book is a biography of Alex Ferguson, and the last play he watched was at the Oratorju, but he doesn’t remember what it was.

The Labour Party’s standards are still so very low that it is quite incredible to think that 40 years have not been sufficient to have that organisation climb out of the trash-cans.

Instead, it has spent the last five years busy filling its skip while recycling and repackaging trash so that it looks different to fools, the haplessly naive and the easily gulled, while trash it remains.

The Labour Party is also a reflection of a trash society which, worse than failing to demand and expect better of the Labour Party, instead mistakes trash for treasure and treasure for trash.

The Maltese electorate, in its terrible inability to assess value and standards, puts me in mind of those tribal natives who gave up vast expanses of land and rich seams of precious metals that could be mined, in return for a few chests of beads and bales of cloth, only to then find their way of life had gone for good.

Those tribal natives could at least be forgiven and excused – they had been sheltered from the value systems which made their land and its natural richness so inestimably precious. They had no way of knowing. But ignorance in Maltese people is culpable ignorance, wilful ignorance. It can neither be forgiven nor overlooked, more so when very many of the people who voted Labour last March think themselves so very clever in most other areas of their lives and won’t admit to their crass stupidity in this one.

That 36,000 more people voted for such trash last March says more about the trashy standards of Maltese society than it does anything else.

What brought this on? An interview with the Trash King of the Dump, Jason Micallef, a man so intellectually challenged (if I say this he won’t realise I’m calling him stupid), so uneducated, so uninformed, that he has been considered the perfect choice to chair matters for Valletta’s 2018 stint as European Capital of Culture.

The last book he read, he said (and probably the only one, unless he became momentarily interested in heterosexual activity and also read Fifty Shades of Grey) was a biography of Alex Ferguson. And the last play he watched was something at the ‘Oratorju’, but he can’t remember what it was about or what it was called.

This is the man, dear people, who deems himself, and who has been deemed by the prime minister and the trash Labour government, fit for purpose as chairman of Valletta 18, capital of culture.

Trash. Such trash.

And no, I do not mean that people who don’t read or go to the theatre, who are uninformed about culture, are necessarily trash. But when you put somebody so uneducated, so uncultured, in charge of Malta’s Capital of Culture initiative, then you are trashing that initiative, either deliberately or because your standards are so low that you really don’t know any better.

As I write this, I am away of the icon to the right of the screen, which tells me in red letters ‘Move to trash’. Oh, if only. How I wish it were that simple.