Labour MP Adrian Vassallo is in the doghouse again, this time for saying that liberals are pigs. His leader Muscat and the rest of his party are keeping silent and refusing to say what they think about the matter (lots of them probably agree with him), but the Facebook army is up in...well, arms.
And here’s the pity: if only Vassallo had qualified his statement, and if only he had chosen a better comparison than a rather cute animal with comic loveability, he would have been right. But he is wrong in having made that a blanket statement. Just because some liberals are pigs – to use his choice of insult – it doesn’t follow that all liberals are. Nor is their piggishness, so to speak, the result of their being liberal, but all due to what they are in their very natures.
The Facebook army is led by Jeffrey Pullicino, the newly so-called independent member of parliament who, at 50, demonstrates that he has the communication preferences (and style) of somebody three and a half decades his junior - and that is not a compliment. He has decorated his Facebook wall with a photograph of a piglet, presumably to make sure that it is as cute as possible, hoping that some of its cuteness will brush off on him by default, and the grunt sounds “Oink oink”.
“Very grown up,” I thought when I saw it, “exactly what one expects of a mature and responsible representative of the people.”
It is exactly right that it is Pullicino (Orlando) who is the most vociferous about all this. He defines himself as a liberal, almost before he defines himself as a man – which is just as well, really. He is exactly the sort of person that Adrian Vassallo means when he says that liberals are pigs. Where Vassallo falls short is in failing to understand that it is not Pullicino’s self-professed liberalism that makes him a pig, but his absolute lack of ethics or even the most basic sense of honour and decency.
It is these very values, or rather, the absence of them, that informs Pullicino’s opinion about moral and ethical matters. He reaches his conclusions not on the basis of a considered assessment of right and wrong in the context of the freedom to choose, but through a hard, cold form of amoral pragmatism which he has repeatedly put on display over the last few years, but most particularly this year. The defining characteristic of liberals, in the British and not the American sense, is a tolerant and benign humanity of which Jeffrey Pullicino and others like him are conspicuously devoid.
Yes, I agree with Adrian Vassallo that people like this are pigs, except that, of course, I would not have called them that but something else entirely which is better suited to the sentiment he wishes to express. The reality is that Vassallo is a better and more decent person than Pullicino is, and the reason why this is so is the reason why Pullicino is not actually a liberal. He is a bitter and vengeful man, driven by resentment towards others. His entire forma mentis is that of a totalitarian despot, the polar opposite of liberal.
The fact remains, despite the Facebook army’s failure to understand this, that support for issues like divorce and gay marriage does not make a person liberal. Liberalism is a state of mind, a general attitude and outlook. No true liberal would behave like Jeffrey Pullicino has done. But plenty of totalitarians would have.
We saw the faux liberals, the muesli-haired lady vicars et al, out in force at Tonio Borg’s grilling session in Brussels the day before yesterday. They are the sort who make my blood boil, who arrive at the same views that I share but through an entirely different route which I haven’t shared at all.
My readers know by now what I think of the foreign minister’s views on certain matters, of how he handled that unsavoury business with the bossy, controlling men at Gift of Life. But that does not mean I think him unfit to be a European Commissioner, or that I believe he will use his position as European Commissioner to try to ban or restrict abortion across the European Union or outlaw homosexual relations or anything similarly atavistic. So what did his interrogators imagine, I wonder? What, exactly, were they suggesting: that he should not be permitted to hold the post of EU Commissioner because he doesn’t share their views? That’s their sense of tolerance for you. That’s not liberalism. That’s the opposite of it.
Tonio Borg is welcome to his views, as long as he does not try to impose them on the rest of us as he tried to do with abortion and the Maltese constitution. But in his role as EU Commissioner, he can’t do anything like that even if he wanted to, which he clearly does not, and he made this clear on Tuesday. So let him have his views, for heaven’s sake, and let Adrian Vassallo have his too. They are not the bad guys. Their views notwithstanding, they are basically good people, really quite good people.
It’s the bad people of whom we must beware, especially when they appropriate for themselves, entirely undeservedly, the badge of liberals.