The aesthetics of corruption – Jacques René Zammit

An HSBC manager who swindled home loan clients up to €1 million used the proceeds of his crime to fund his exotic bird hobby.

A contractor accused of VAT fraud was found to own lions, tigers and expensive cars.

It is the stuff of fiction, or at least it should be. Animals in cages seem to be the go-to for the criminally minded.

Meanwhile, our Prime Minister has just had a permit approved for the uprooting of 20 indigenous trees from one of his private properties.

A minister of the state is still in possession of heritage artefacts, used to decorate the pool area of his house.

This portal regularly reports abuses in tendering and employment by the ministers of state.

Persons of trust on double salaries paid from the public purse. Presumably, each has a lavish lifestyle and hobbies to fund. The villa, the car, the boat, the exotic animal.

It is all part of the aesthetics of corruption. Aesthetics that are unavoidably crass and ugly. They are degenerate and offensive.

On Labour Day the government, wearing its party hat, promised more monies to be sent to people’s homes. Once again, we may presume that the idea is to fund frivolous fantasies of well-being as Robert Abela pitches all his bets on a “feel-good” factor that is gradually fading away.

There are no plans for the future other than perpetrating the false redistribution of wealth (read a sinkhole of government debt). There is no politics behind corruption and the ugly façade of the twisted aesthetics of sick opulence is fast becoming a caricature of the growing national malaise.

Writing on World Press Freedom Day, and seeing the miserable results posted by Malta in this respect, I cannot help but wonder where we would be should the government succeed in its constant attempts to silence the critics who want to expose the ugliness behind the mask.

With what kind of face did Robert Abela reassure the EU Commissioner for Justice that we are learning our lessons?

Here’s an interesting lesson for Abela. Parliament’s standards committee has not been convened for the last six months. Keith Schembri’s shenanigans at Public Accounts Committee hearings are another interesting lesson we still have to draw conclusions out of.

There might be some rays of beauty in all this ugliness.

Xaghra Mayor Christian Zammit is the latest person to cry foul at the system that rewards ugly aesthetes.

The men and women on the ground are beginning to understand that they cannot play along to the tune of a sick and ugly system.

Like the Gzira mayor before him, Zammit rebelled against the automated system threatening perpetual ugliness.

Expect the counter-revolutionary spirit to come alive again. The system will always struggle to survive. It always has done.

The cheques in the mail are just the beginning of a desperate fight for continuity and a perverted conservatism.

We are being asked to remain content in our homes playing with our caged animals, our toy cars and our properties ever encroaching on the little green hope that was left.

What was that thing Churchill said about appeasers? Ah yes, an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping that it will eat him last.

Crocodiles. I wonder if any of our home-grown aesthetes keeps them at home.