Somebody should tell Joseph Muscat to stop selling himself as ‘young’. It would be bad enough in English, but in Maltese it just doesn’t wash because both the word and the concept don’t translate in any way except to make him sound utterly ridiculous.
A person who is still young, properly young, is usually described in Maltese as being still zghir, which also means small. It is most often used in contexts where the implication is that the person is too young for something, like “ghadni zghira wisq biex nizzewweg” (“I’m too young to marry”) or “zghir wisq biex isiefer wahdu” (“he’s too young to go abroad alone”) – that kind of thing. But I can’t see Joseph Muscat, or any other man for that matter, describing himself as ‘zghir’. The other meaning – small – is too painfully close. Maltese is a funny language in that way.
So which word does Muscat deploy repeatedly instead to describe himself as young? ‘Zaghzugh’. He speaks to reporters, several of whom are almost a generation his junior, and says: “Zaghzugh bhali” or “Peress li jien zaghzugh.” He did it on his way in to his ‘reply to the budget’ speech, or his post-reply-to-the-budget-speech press conference. I forget which, given that all those self-congratulatory remarks blur into one after a while.
Zaghzugh indeed – though people who are desperate to clutch onto their rapidly fading days of milk and honey like to use this term to mean ‘young’, what it actually means is ‘youth’. Youths, and in English the term is used only for young men and never for young women, are those who are on the cusp between the teenage years and fully-fledged manhood. They are just about beginning to shave and to sprout facial hair. They are not artfully gelling the remaining tufts on their scalp to cover the rapid advance of male pattern baldness. The more I hear Joseph Muscat bang on about how young he is, the more I suspect just how panicked he is by what he sees in the mirror every morning. Some people find the changes wrought by the passing years so terribly hard to accept, and fight them all the way instead of embracing every stage in life for what it is.
Youths end somewhere around the age of 21, which is roughly where men begin. There are no youths in their mid-30s, balding and with the thickening frame of approaching middle age, with wives and twins, homes and swimming pools, big Italian cars and all the trappings of the sedate, bourgeois middle years. That’s why those who are truly young laugh when they hear Muscat, balding in his suit (if they bother to listen to him at all, that is, given how so many of them are buzzing around living their EU citizen lives), living his ultra-conventional life, describe himself as a zaghzugh.
When is he going to stop doing it? He’s at least 15 years older than real youths.
Now let’s get to his performance last Monday. I missed most of it because on Monday evenings I watch Eastenders first and then Joanna Lumley in Sensitive Skin (I love it). It was really hard flicking from Ms Lumley’s perfect delivery to the Leader of the Opposition on TVM, but in the interest of public service, I had to do it. And my first thought was: “Is this person getting training in public speaking, or is he getting lessons from a children’s theatre group like Stagecoach?”
I was put in mind of those acting classes where people with nothing better to do, and who are never going to become Joanna Lumley, take it in turns to pretend to be Man Having Argument or Woman Chastising Child. Here on TVM we had Man Delivers Speech, closely followed by Man Gives Press Conference But Doesn’t Take Questions In Case He Doesn’t Know The Answers Or Screws Up.
I don’t think Muscat quite understands this, but instead of coming across as young, he’s coming across as psychologically retarded and rather too pleased with himself in that way that the emotionally and intellectually undeveloped quite often are. It’s all down to a complete lack of self-awareness. He can’t see how others see him, because he still sees himself through the besotted eyes of those who raised him and the no doubt equally besotted eyes of the one who married him. When he takes to the podium, the overall impression is invariably that of Clever Dick Being Much Admired By Nanna.
And so, rather than coming across as smart in Monday’s performance, he came across as smug (at one point, the man was actually swaggering). Rather than coming across as convinced of what he was saying, he came across as somebody struggling to remember what he had rehearsed in his Stagecoach sessions (my apologies to Stagecoach; I know it isn’t you but you’re the ones everyone knows about).
Who knows? Life is strange and perhaps Muscat will come along, metamorphose into a real man instead of one of those tedious braggarts you just want to pour your drink over in a bar as he drones on about his Escort armata or the I’ve-come-up-in-the-world equivalent. But somehow, I don’t think so. By the age of 35, people are ‘fixed’. They are what they’re going to be for the rest of their lives. There’ll be a little mellowing, a bit of easing off of the rough edges, but character, personality and psychology are there to stay. The men I knew who were total asses at 35 are still total asses at 45 and 55 and even at 65. They were probably total asses at 25. So it looks very much like we’re going to have an arani, ma prime minister.
If in Joseph Muscat’s mind his biggest selling-point is the fact that he is a zaghzugh, I’m curious to know how he’s going to handle the moment when he looks in the mirror and confronts the fact that he is a grown-up now and not an only child admired by the grown-ups who people his world and on whose approval he depends.
His insistence that he is a zaghzugh might be the reason why his advisers, such as they are, keep him well away from gatherings of the real thing. There are few things more likely to make people in their mid-30s look and feel their age than standing next to a 20-year-old – unless it’s having that 20-year-old tell you, with that special voice reserved for communicating with grown-ups, “You must know my father.”
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