“They crucified Christ too”

I watched Xarabank last night and couldn’t get out of my head the famous words of Marshall McLuhan: “the medium is the message” and “a point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding”.

Xarabank is absolutely the wrong medium for discussing issues of serious importance, like government corruption, precisely because it is a shallow and ridiculous medium geared at people for whom a point of view is a dangerous luxury because they have no insight and understanding. Issues of serious importance are therefore trivialised to the level of entertainment, with politicians as the cabaret to be booed or cheered, because the medium (shallowness aimed at a stupid and uneducated audience) is the message.

This would not be so bad if there were more serious television programmes in which the subject of government corruption could be debated and analysed and politicians grilled in a professional manner. But there aren’t. There have been efforts in that direction, some of them commendable, but none of them quite cut it, which is a great shame. Out here, we are the losers.

Because there is nothing else, people with a sound education, for whom a point of view is not a dangerous luxury because they have insight and understanding, found themselves watching Xarabank as the only place where they could see Michael Falzon speak about his experience, and the line-up of other politicians talk about corruption. And it was hopeless.

The man ‘interviewing’ Michael Falzon was complete and utter rubbish – it was as clear as day that he was in position only to act as a prompt and facilitator, because putting Falzon under the lights and allowing him to run on at length as he pleased, alone, would have looked odd.

The result was that Falzon made several absurd and even disturbing statements that were completely unchallenged. He said that he has been crucified (“They crucified Christ, too”) to cheers from the intellectually challenged audience and a smile of approval from his ‘interviewer’, who was more interested in the cheers and the melodrama than in getting right in there with a comeback.

And he even said – and here I could not believe my ears – that these last three years the Opposition’s deputy leader, Beppe Fenech Adami, “was allowed to work at the Bank of Valletta and was given work and I even facilitated his work there”. Again, the stupid and useless interviewer let this go past. The Bank of Valletta is a private bank, not a state-owned bank. The government does not, or should not, have a say or a veto on which lawyers get to do work there. Michael Falzon was an employee of the bank and not one of its directors, and these last three years he wasn’t working at the bank at all, because he was a parliamentary secretary, and so should not have had any information at all about the bank’s work and decisions, let alone the facility to aid, abet or veto lawyers who worked there. Also, he himself worked at the bank’s legal department, and was promoted heavily, for the 25 years the Nationalists were in government. But the dumb interviewer with his ridiculous hair let that go too.

Owen Bonnici was in the line-up of politicians that provided the rest of the cabaret, but unbelievably, nobody raised the subject of his ongoing trials and tribulations, which have now become ragingly public, with the Law Commissioner. Joe Azzopardi, who makes a point of coming across as stupid, uneducated and inarticulate as his audience of hamalli, didn’t raise it, and the politicians from the rival party didn’t raise it either.

Full marks have to go to Beppe Fenech Adami who, fully aware that the format of the show presents politicians as a sideshow or circus act with an audience of criecer, didn’t even try to have a reasoned debate and instead used the advantage of his particular voice-timbre (his father had the same advantage in public speaking) to drum out the line: “This is the most corrupt government ever in the history of Malta”. And it worked like a charm.

So what of the non-criecer sitting at home and watching on television? Simple: they admired his skill in handling an audience of criecer and drumming that message home uninterrupted. In short, he nailed it – he’s nailed how to handle Xarabank. The others have not. Oh, and Robert Musumeci was ridiculous. Is he now wearing false teeth or what? It looks to me like he’s gearing up to stand on the Labour Party ticket in 2018 with a view to being made Minister for Lands.