I write this as nominations close for the Nationalist Party leadership election. I have no comment to make except that the election has turned into a joke, yet the outcome is going to be anything but funny.
***
One of things I find most disturbing about Maltese society is that the concept of consequences arising from choices and actions is largely alien. People seem unable to link chains of events to an initial choice, action or decision. Instead they think in terms of ‘mistakes’, to which the consequences are not linked, and which they do not even regard as consequences but merely as random events unconnected to others. This is the national disease of fatalism: when it is the Fates who decide, you are not responsible for the outcome, even if the choice was your own.
When the consequences of this particular leadership mess begin to unfold over the years, people – particularly those who are most heavily involved – will not see them as consequences at all, but instead regard them fatalistically as events that could not be avoided or for which others should be blamed instead. The consequences of a party leadership election do not unfold over a mere five years, but over the course of history. Those consequences bring other consequences, at a micro level affecting people’s lives in a way which changes their personal destiny, and at a macro level changing the course of history.
Why did Malta suffer such a tremendous brain drain that left it crippled for years, lose its status and funding as a British military base and wind up financially tied to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya? Because Dom Mintoff was elected Labour Party leader. Why is Malta in the European Union? Because Eddie FenechAdami won a leadership election. Why are Malta’s institutions, public service, army and the police currently being dismantled on a scale where the damage is going to be permanent? Because Joseph Muscat won a leadership election. Why has Malta been landed in the long term, with permanent consequences, with highly suspect contractual obligations in health, energy and other sectors? Because Muscat won that leadership election. Why are thousands of people being put permanently on the state payroll or promoted permanently and undeservedly, increasing the permanent cost to the taxpayer by many millions? Because Joseph Muscat won a leadership election.
Maltese people – I’ll qualify that: Maltese people in Malta – frighten me because in the main they cannot see beyond the next, looming thing, the immediate big decision. What is just the means to an end becomes, in so many minds, the very end in itself. Right now, that ‘end’ is the election of a party leader, forgetting that the role is actually not that of party leader but the great Constitutional role of Opposition leader. That done, the end will become ‘winning the general election’. But you never hear anyone point out that the end is actually ‘the government of the country and how this will be done to the greater good’.
Quite crazily, it is not discussed at all. Yet the whole point of electing Adrian Delia, or Chris Said, or Alex Perici Calascione, or Frank Portelli, is to have that man govern the country in five years. But nobody is asking those candidates what sort of prime minister they plan to be, and how they will run the country, what sort of policies they will implement. Instead, just as with general elections, the whole thing is being treated like a football match, where winning is the end in itself.
Decisions about who to choose as Opposition leader should start off from sound analysis of how we want the country to be governed in five years’ time, by when the damage caused by this government will be unquantifiable. That, however, requires a cultural mindset accustomed to thinking in terms of consequences and outcomes, of means to ends. Instead what we get is a mass of people with tunnel vision, looking at the leadership election in terms of a Miss World or Mr Universe contest, which somebody wins just for the sheer thrill of getting to wear that crown and sash.
Just as with the hackneyed old adage about marriage, the Nationalist Party’s leader is to be selected in haste, leaving plenty of time to repent at leisure. Except that nobody does repentance in this society. What people do instead is blame others for the entirely foreseeable or predictable consequences of their own choices and actions.
***
The painter Luciano Micallef has written anewspaper article about the increasing ugliness of Malta and his feeling of homesickness at home. I suppose this is a variation on a theme I sometimes write about: my own feeling of being a stranger in my own country. The visual and the intellectual are inextricably linked. An understanding of aesthetics does not come out of nowhere. With the exception of some pockets of visual harmony and interest, Malta has been highly offensive aesthetically for many years. I choose my words carefully here because people can become hysterical with misplaced fervour and take everything as a personal insult. To those, I can only say: “Let the scales fall from your eyes. Look around with the eyes of a stranger, rather than those of a loving beholder who sees beauty where there is none.”
Somebody I knew in Malta around 25 years ago recently got in touch. He hasn’t seen the islands since the early 1990s. What is it like now, he wanted to know: “Because I remember back then the place was completely covered in cranes and building sites.” I didn’t bother to tell him that the process never stopped, that it only got worse, that it is actually celebrated. The urban can be beautiful – I am, in fact, deeply enamoured of metropolises – but we have managed to mess that up horrifically. Yes, the apartment blocks could not possibly be uglier than they are, but even the most basic things are visually horrific, like a run of cafes and restaurants with ‘outside enclosures’ that cover the pavement in glass, aluminium and plastic sheeting. When you look at it from across the road, with those eyes of a stranger, you wonder where the earthquake was that requires an emergency food kitchen under plastic in what is supposed to be one of Malta’s most ‘prestigious’ neighbourhoods.
Some individuals, most of them young, others not so young, struggle valiantly to promote and maintain some European sense of aesthetics, but they are overwhelmed by the rising tide of Near Eastern (for want of a better metaphor) aesthetic choices. Malta isn’t turning into a European city. It’s turning into Tel Aviv. The fascinating thing is that the vast majority of people appear to be completely oblivious to the way things are so ugly, so poorly conceived, badly made and offensively decorated. The rest of us are strangers in our own land, or homesick, as Luciano Micallef put it, at home in Malta.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com