The demimonde

This is a column I wrote for The Malta Independent on Sunday around five years ago. It was written three years before the general election but describes one of the major factors in Labour’s electoral victory. This network I describe below was the most influential Taghna Lkoll force of them all, and it worked and campaigned for the election of the Labour Party not because of ideological values but because like all illicit networks, they wanted to put their own people in power to work for their own ends. I didn’t know the term ‘Taghna Lkoll’ back then. It didn’t yet exist. But I had noticed that people just coming out of broken marriages and who were at a loss in this strange new single world were being pulled into a social network that was a cover for something else, and which functioned as a support group and ‘new home’ for these recruits who didn’t even know they were recruits.

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.