The country needs the rift within the PN to heal as it needs to find how to cope with the post-Muscat mess. Not only because Robert Abela is increasingly proving himself unable to do so, but also because the Covid pandemic – which according to the WHO might go on for two more years – will wreak untold havoc.
Post-Covid, post-Abela Malta will require a leader who can mediate between competing sectors in society, because all sectors will be justified in their competing needs. Mediation will be key to Malta’s post-Covid recovery.
For the good of the nation, the PN must heal. Hence Bernard Grech.
The spectre of Joseph Muscat
A spectre is haunting Malta — the spectre of Joseph Muscat. Some powers of old Malta entered into an alliance of sorts to exorcise this spectre: the Nationalists and the Church, the professionals and men of commerce, the free press and civil society, people of good will and intellectuals.
We have to analyse how the post-Muscat Labour Administration is dealing with Muscat’s stinking legacy.
It reminds me of that movie of 2017, The Death of Stalin, in which comedian Jeffrey Tambor plays Georgy Malenkov, the Communist grandee who, for a few days upon Stalin’s death, was the absolute leader of the Soviet Union. Tambor’s character keeps talking affectionately about what the departed Stalin liked, believed, wanted. Watch this movie to catch a glimpse of the psychological impasse Labour finds itself in.
Robert Abela’s Labour keeps behaving as if Muscat were still in power, very much like Tambor’s character behaves with respect to Stalin’s spectre.
Muscat is dead. Exorcise his spectre!
The Police
Whereas Muscat could be the ghost in the Labour machine, and truth hits everybody (sooner or later), it seems to me that the Police are doing a good job on the recent homicides that have shocked Malta.
It could be the influence of the new Police Commissioner who, I reckon, is a tough, no-nonsense guy with a strict sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, or else the Police are really engaging with the media, as Angelo Gafà himself promised upon his appointment, or both. It certainly isn’t too much information – it seems that the Police are building a well-calibrated, healthy relationship with the media.
But with every breath we take, there’s a homicide or some other crime, and this has to stop. Commissioner Gafà seems to have started off on the right foot. I sincerely hope his work won’t be hindered by a crooked darkness emanating from diabolical pacts. At times one wonders whether certain politicians have embarked on some secret journey with other politicians and “businessmen” who sell stuff at big parties or operate launderettes.
Frankly, I trust Commissioner Gafà. There are no indications so far that he’s changed from his no-nonsense self. Those I don’t trust are other people, who’re not in uniform but wear business suits and use their office to help their friends while restraining conscientious civil servants from doing their duty to the full.
I don’t want to be right on this. I hope and pray I’m wrong.
David Attard
Professor Attard was supervisor in two of the four theses I’ve written, so I admit I might have a conflict of interest here.
David Attard deserves to be congratulated not only on his latest career achievement – he has been unanimously re-elected to the UN’s International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea – but also for disproving the theory that all Maltese are incompetent. Yes, we do have a number of nincompoops who overestimate their abilities, but then we have others who’re capable and make us all proud. Needless to say, Professor Attard belongs to the latter category.
Last time I spoke to David Attard, we ended up discussing patriotism and asking how many real patriots inhabit these islands. Like another friend of mine, a certain Martin, who also treasures love of country, Professor Attard came up with an answer. But it wasn’t heartening, so I’d better leave it at that.
My path has unfortunately crossed that of a few individuals who’ve bad-mouthed Professor Attard. But it was easy to see through their words: squalid envy. Professor Attard is one of the few, if not the only, Maltese who’s had a monograph published by Clarendon Press. I think that is something. And it obviously engenders envy. Frankly, I don’t care much about envy. I either admire somebody, or utterly ignore them.
David Attard I admire. Not just for his intellect, but also for his success in gaining international recognition. Nineteen years ago, during a three-week intensive course in public international law at The Hague Academy of International Law, I was fortunate enough to meet world-renowned international lawyer Shabtai Rosenne, whose lectures were published three years later as the fascinating The Perplexities of Modern International Law. When I mentioned Professor Attard to him, he couldn’t stop praising him.
It was clear I wasn’t David Attard’s only admirer.
Maltese Quirks (3)
Some people define our country as bilingual: two languages co-exist as equals and people are fluent in both.
In reality, we live in a diglossia: a community with two languages, one of which is “high”, the other “low”, and real fluency in both isn’t as common as many are led to believe.
English, the “high” language, is treated deferentially if not even reverentially, its rules respected with servility. The Maltese don’t create new words in English, because it’s not theirs (even though they use it). They do, however, mishear, mispronounce, and genetically modify words, phrases, and expressions. But that’s probably more out of ignorance than creativity.
With the Maltese language, the Maltese behave like pigs in a pond of mud. Or like a fille de joie in a xalata. Or like Salvatore from The Name of the Rose.
Maltese-language “experts” insist on the descriptive linguistic approach. It’s democratic, they argue: language is how the “people” speak.
But there’s another approach, the prescriptive approach: a group of people with a higher level of education tell the “people” how the language should be.
Why do I support the prescriptive approach?
Because it’s petrol not petlor.
The Descriptive Brigade might retort, But we say artal not altar, arblu not albru. To which I’d answer, there are many reasons for that, including that those words entered the language when education was still not universal.
Democracy is based on the (fictional?) notion that the People are educated enough to understand the outlines of State mechanisms and international politics. Universal education is the justification for universal suffrage.
It follows that if there is universal education, then it’s petrol not petlor.
Then again, if the Descriptive Brigade argues that petrol and petlor are variants and therefore both valid, then we leave linguistics territory and venture into political philosophy, as an unsuspecting invalid proposition is elevated to variant of a valid proposition.
The variant theory would obviously be contradicted by the Descriptive Brigade’s decision to suppress “skond” as a variant of “skont”. But that would probably be too subtle a point to make.
My Personal Video Library (1)
This is the first of what I hope will be 100 features on movies and TV shows I like or find relevant to the moment’s political situation. My plan is to tackle both aesthetically relevant and ideologically loaded works.
I’ll be ignoring most pre-1960s movies, including classics like Hitchcock’s, say. My point of departure is that movies are the 20th century’s way of expressing, or at least interacting with, the dominant ideology, and that dominant ideologies shift. I think that Hitchcock’s anti-Communist McCarthyism is relevant for the history of cinema but irrelevant for a discussion on cinema’s influence on contemporary Maltese society.
My inspiration will be Slavoj ?i?ek’s documentaries on ideology in cinema, and my own tastes and sense of aesthetics.
However, despite ?i?ek’s penchant for Lacan and Freud, I’ll be ignoring the psychoanalytical aspect of movies. ?i?ek insists that most catastrophe movies, for instance, are an excuse to deal with family issues. I think he’s right, but not being a psychoanalyst myself, I’ll shun from such an approach.
The same will apply to ?i?ek’s class-struggle reading of movies. For instance, ?i?ek views Titanic as a metaphor for the exploitative upper middle class (represented by the girl) and the exploited working classes (represented by Leonardo di Caprio’s character). As I’m not a Marxist sociologist, I’ll shun from this approach too. I’m just a reasonably well-read man who takes a broad interest in culture, and tries to make out the patterns in contemporary thinking. Anything more than that and I’d be guilty of presumptuousness – something I’d rather leave to Malta Today’s Salvu Balzan and his pufferfish sidekick.
I’ll be basing this feature on a hunch: that Malta today is catching up with the progressive ideology propagated in 1970s movies, while it is oblivious to contemporary intellectual shifts toward conservative values.
In my last “Personal Library” feature – the hundredth – I wrote about Fantozzi, inviting readers to understand Fantozzi in the light of Jordan Peterson’s teachings on meaningless work and psychopathology in organisations.
I’ll kick off this new series – My Personal Video Library – by linking to that same theme: psychopathology in organisations.
Don Siegel’s 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood and Patrick McGoohan, tackles it by narrating the unprecedented escape from a top-security prison located on a small island in California’s San Francisco Bay.
Casting McGoohan in the role of Prison Warden (or Director) was a smart clin d’oeil. Twelve years earlier, McGoohan had played the protagonist in the sensational British series The Prisoner.
In a sense, Escape from Alcatraz is a study in organisational psychopathology. Consider this example. Eastwood plays a prisoner who’s attacked by another prisoner. Eastwood defends himself, but both aggressor and victim are punished because, according to one guard, the Director doesn’t like prisoners standing up for their rights.
On the surface, the power of this movie lies in its narration of a “heroic” escape from a high-security prison. But there are two deeper levels.
One, the feeling most employees share that if they’re harassed at work, there’s not much they can do, unless they want to go through hell a second time.
Two, the feeling all of us share – whether we’re employees or not – that, as had been predicted by numerous intellectuals, modern society has evolved/degenerated into a panopticon, a high-security-prison-like structure in which Big Brother knows what each and every one of us is doing.
Mobile phones, GPSs, credit cards: these help to track us down in a world that has seemingly accomplished Jeremy Bentham’s demented dream: one planetary prison-like society in which, to borrow a couple of verses from The Eagles’ 1976 Hotel California, “we are all prisoners of our own device... you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.