The well-known doctor Josie Muscat has set up a fourth political party. The more, the merrier. Now that the big issues are past, we can expect some form of fragmentation in the political mammoths that fought those battles. There has certainly been a great deal of fragmentation among their support.
What a pity, though, that this new movement should have a strong whiff of the more unpleasant aspects of the Right about it. The desirable aspects of right-wing politics are a better business environment, a respect for capitalism which creates wealth for the whole of society, law and order, and everything moving smartish and sharpish. The undesirable aspects are xenophobia, fear of foreigners and of imminent invasion by illegal immigrants who will take our jobs, the mixing up of religion with politics, the over-zealous promotion of religion and family, the wish to keep the nation and its values “pure”, and an overweening sense of nationalism. I don’t like any of that. It’s horrid. Social control and the repression of individuality can never be a good thing. I know that there are lots of people around who are nostalgic for life in Malta in the 1950s, but I shudder at the ghastly thought.
Dr Muscat gave a newspaper interview to speak about his news. I read it with interest, having already read some of his quoted comments on the issue of illegal immigration, in one of the international newspapers some time ago. I didn’t like those comments. I didn’t like some of what he had to say in the interview, either. One of his main political platforms will be illegal immigration. I wonder what he plans to do that the government isn’t already doing, I thought. Improve conditions at the detention camps? Speed up the checking process for refugee status? But no. None of that. Fortunately, he does not suggest shooting them at sea, letting them drown, or giving them directions to Sicily, either. We have other political movements working on that.
It appears he has no solutions. He only has a problem to get angry about, and hopes that his party will serve as a useful and vote-gathering conduit for all that other anger out there already. He told the journalist from The Times: “The high number of illegal immigrants coming over – and I’m not just referring to the ones coming by sea because we have large numbers coming by air who stay here – is a threat to our society, our culture, our community. And the ones coming by air are, perhaps, more dangerous because most of them are men and they will be mixing with the locals, which will make our society unbalanced.”
Mixing, eh? That’s just another way of saying breeding. It’s funny how nasty foreign men “mixing” with pure Maltese women is seen to be a problem, but nasty foreign women “mixing” with pure Maltese men is not. I don’t have a research degree in the subject, but from what I can see about me, there are more immigrant women mixing with Maltese men than there are immigrant men mixing with Maltese women. I suspect that this is rather like the vociferous men of the anti-abortion lobby: it’s all about the control of women. Maltese men want to keep Maltese women for themselves. But they also want more: foreign women. So foreign men are bad, but foreign women are good. They increase the variety of the available pool. Foreign men, on the other hand, are competition. It all looks like politics on paper, but when you get a closer look, it’s a whole lot more primitive than that.
Preserving our culture is the second biggest bugbear after preserving our women for ourselves. I always wonder what culture it is these people are referring to. The culture of talking as though we are shouting across Grand Canyon? The culture of rudeness? The culture of never having heard of manners? The culture of talking with our mouths full while our children crawl under restaurant tables and run around? The culture of training our children not to have enquiring or analytical minds, so that they don’t grow up to challenge the established order or to question the antics of religion and government? I don’t know what part of that culture is worth preserving. My peregrinations tell me that we only stand to learn and gain from exposure to other cultures, many of which are more sophisticated and desirable than our own. Two days ago I was in an Italian fishing port photographing some fishermen as they boxed up their catch. One of them entered the cabin and re-emerged with two tiny espressos (how civilised) – one for himself and another for his mate. No, the mate said, offer it to the signora first. Maybe she would like one. So the signora got her coffee with plenty of courteous remarks.
Back home, when I dispatched a photographer to take some shots of the lampuki haul last autumn, she returned in a bate. Her first attempt provoked the reaction: “Haqq..., ghandna bzonn min jixtri u mhux min jiehu r-ritratti! Zul minn hemm!” And it went downhill after that. Oddly enough, the most strident complaint that immigrants to Malta have – whether they are legal or illegal – is about the sheer lack of courtesy in our society.
Practically every society except the industrial underclass has strict or general rules of manners or courtesy that are adhered to so as to make life with others more tolerable than it would otherwise be. Those rules have passed Malta by altogether. Immigrants of whatever shape, colour, form or religion are amazed at our rudeness, our abrupt way of speaking, our lack of the polite form in addressing others, and our general indifference to any kind of courtesy. The other day I met a friend who is gigantically pregnant. She had just been on a tour of the maternity ward at St Luke’s Hospital. What did she think, I asked? It’s fabulous compared to what it was when I popped mine out 20 years ago. Yes, she said, but the problem is some of the staff. They don’t mean to be rude, but they don’t know any better. While she was there, a nursing aide shrieked across the ward and into the hall: “Ejja, hija! Il-klandestina trid tmur it-toilet!” The woman in question was right next to her, lying in bed. She has a name, like the rest of us, and she almost certainly comes from a culture where it is considered absolutely horrendous to announce one’s bodily functions to all and sundry.
On one of the few cold days last winter, I was with an Argentinean-American friend of a respectable age, at a hotel café near the sea. It was bucketing down and blowing a gale and we were sitting by the door. A herd of youngsters marched in, and left the door swinging open. “Will you please close that door?” my friend asked. “No,” one of them replied. “My friends are coming.” “Really?” she said. “Well, why don’t you close it, and then when your friends arrive, they can open it again to get in, just like you did.” “Close it yourself, you f***ing stupid old bitch!” he replied. “You want it closed, you close it, haqq il-...” Then they all went off laughing at their impressive smartness, and discussing the Ingliza who dared ask them to close the door.
This kind of thing is normal, and it’s not a culture we should be preserving. It’s a culture that needs to be changed, because it is disgusting. If families aren’t teaching common courtesy, then common courtesy has to be taught in schools. We can’t carry on blaming ignorance and lack of education. We live right next door to a country where even the rubbish-collectors address passers-by with a polite “buon giorno”. We live in a country where even those with the benefit of money and education behave like what the Italians call maleducati.
Dr Muscat told The Times that we should work out “how many immigrants our country can take so as not to upset our way of life and culture”. He and others who think like him miss the point entirely. Our way of life and culture are in dire need of being upset, yet they imagine that they are somehow worth preserving. How and in what way? All the problems we have are caused by our culture; they aren’t caused by its disturbance by foreigners. They are the result of our vicious envy of those who do well, our spiteful gossip that is the result of several intertwined microcosmic social groups, the apathy and lack of initiative, the small-mindedness, the closed thinking, the inability to analyse situations, the fear of change – shall I go on?
Will your party embrace right-wing groups, the journalist asked, without mentioning the names of the unmentionable? Yes, they will accept anyone who agrees with their manifesto and philosophy. Now I like this new party even less, though I have no doubt it will be a magnet for the insecure in our midst. Won’t you be accused of racism, the journalist asked this time? “I don’t think that’s racist,” the doctor said. “Racism is maltreating these people (my italics). What I’m saying is that this country can’t accept more illegal immigrants – whatever their colour – than it can handle”.
What I am saying, on the other hand, is that this country cannot get by with any more rudeness, vulgarity, coarseness, hamallagni, indifference to courtesy and to how more civilised people behave, and with its conviction that life in this bubble is all there is. It isn’t. Maltese people need to get out more, literally and figuratively. Despite our obsessive by-rote learning, private lessons, and studying, we are among the most uneducated people in Europe, and I mean that in all senses of the word. Our young people don’t know how to speak and think. Our older people have minds the size of a peanut. Nobody appears to have any imagination at all. It’s disturbing, but only if you can see it.
And as for the good doctor’s definition of racism, he’s wrong. Racism is belief in the superiority of a particular race, and any prejudice based on this assumption. It is antagonism towards other races, and the theory that human abilities and other qualities are determined by race, rather than by other factors like upbringing, genetic inheritance, society, education, and so on.
I have had occasion to say it before, but it bears repeating now. It is not race or even the country’s culture that people have in common with each other, but upbringing, education and social background. This is why two people from the diametrically opposite cultures of Denmark and Malta, but with a similar family upbringing, social background and education, are able to live a long and happy married life together, but two Maltese people from different social and educational backgrounds will never even survive a first date. People are naturally attracted to mates from the same kind of family, social and educational background, and these might be from any country or “culture”. The shared qualities are not the qualities of the country or “culture” but those of the home and of education.