For the remainder of the election campaign, I’ll be writing a running commentary and passing remarks on www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com. It’s not a blog or a forum, because I have enough to do without moderating the sort of obscene slander I have had to put up with from violently irrational Labour supporters over the last few days, and the police cyber-crime unit is busy enough as it is without my adding to its workload. So if you’re interested in knowing what I think about various electoral episodes and non-episodes, you’ll find it there – that’s all.
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This is the time to gather our thoughts about us and be vigilant. When you’re sitting comfortably, it’s easy to let vigilance slip, and when you’re not comfortable, it’s even easier to let the minor issues cloud over the larger ones. But this is the time for clear thinking, and for sharp and precise insight into the consequences of our actions, whatever those might be. It’s not a time for tomfoolery with our vote, because this is not a local council or MEP election. Nor is it a time for believing in half-formed fables about coalitions, for acting out of spite or with malicious intent, or for acting with what you believe to be positive intent, but then forgetting that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It is not a time for attempting to achieve our ends by taking a road that will lead us in the opposite direction. It is certainly not the time to have faith in those who are telling us that political instability caused by dissonance between votes and seats is something that Malta needs, just because a few individuals see this as the only means of saving their personal political careers. Alfred Sant isn’t the only party leader who has been there since 1992, and whose political survival depends on the outcome of this general election.
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The unreformed Labour Party appeals to the dark side of human nature: the vindictive, destructive, negative side that wishes to believe the worst rather than the best; the spiteful, nasty side that delights in Schadenfreude; the malicious side that is content to sacrifice the immediate future of the country to the desire to wreak personal vengeance; the envious side that would prefer to see others fare badly than to see the self fare well.
We all have this dark side in us; even saints struggle hard to overcome it. Even Savonarola of AD says that his dream is to hear no car-cades on 9 March, only the election results debated on television – because that will mean that neither the Labour Party nor the Nationalist Party knows whether it is in government, and he will sigh with relief. He imagines that the rest of us will be sighing with him, despite voting in our vast majority for a solid government that can hold fast for five years. But we won’t. Instead we will be wondering at the irresponsible vindictiveness of those who are prepared to sacrifice the national interest to their own limited interest – indeed, those who dress up their narrow desire as the national interest and insist on it against the will of 300,000 others.
When common sense rages against injured pride, hurt emotions, or deep-rooted envious rage, the battle is a titanic one. It is impossible to think clearly when gripped by hateful emotion or simmering contempt. Standing on the outside in the aftermath, we cannot understand why an abandoned woman sets fire to her husband’s possessions, even though it will do nothing to make him return or love her more, why a jealous husband jumps from a balcony with his children in his arms to punish his wife, why a child destroys the beautiful picture he has just painted because his father wasn’t fulsome enough in his praise, why somebody with everything to gain from the continued stability of this government will vote in such a way as to prejudice everything.
It’s human nature. We find it hard to understand why perversity plays such a great part in our reactions to adverse situations. We say we can’t control our feelings, but control them we must, not because we have been told that it is in the national interest to do so, but because we know deep down that it is in our own interest. A period of quiet calm and clear thinking can help us see that.
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We didn’t need Lawrence Gonzi to tell us that the two main parties contesting this election – the only two that can form a government – are as different to each other as night is from day. We can see that ourselves, if we strip our thinking of all its traditional prejudice, its biased obsessions, its petty hatreds. I disagree with his choice of simile, for night and day are both beautiful and harmonious in their own way. The fact that they are completely different does not imply that one is good and the other is not. Yet that is the case with the difference between the present government and the ones hammering down the door.
The contrast between Alfred Sant and Lawrence Gonzi is great. The contrast between their respective parties is enormous. Even leaving aside personalities and policies, we are speaking here about a huge party machine that can’t organise a straightforward election campaign, that can’t even fit a print-out to an upended container, that has prepared absolutely no advertising which explains to electors what it intends to do when in government, and instead fills the English language newspapers with childish and inane images of ministers and copy straight out of a fifth-form newsletter.
We are speaking here about a political party machine that has had five years to produce an electoral programme, but when the elephant finally gives birth, it is to a mouse full of plans for things that have happened already, described as misprints and blamed on a computer malfunction. Meanwhile, the party leader tours the land in a kowc tal-bidla with Jason, the Lion of Change and Charlie ‘DNA’ Mangion, telling clutches of supporters what a liar gonzipn is, how corrupt, flinging excrement around until it hits the fan and comes flying back at him, saying nothing of what he plans to do when in government and how he plans to do it. Sant is so busy telling people why they shouldn’t vote for his foe gonzipn that he has forgotten to tell us why we should vote for him.
Not having come from a Nationalist family and having reached my decision to support the Nationalist Party purely on the basis of its record achievements and my agreement with it on major policy issues, I often fall prey to the error of assuming that what is clear to me is also clear to others. It isn’t. Thousands of people head for the polling booth burdened by a hundred misconceptions, plagued by a thousand doubts, weighed down by tradition, or subsumed into bitterness that overshadows all sensible thinking. Still others allow tall stories to obscure the facts, or think nothing of making a single issue the reason for helping throw government into the lap of a party that will do nothing to resolve their difficulty – so that they are left with the personal problem and many greater ones besides.
I try hard to understand, and sometimes I get there. But I still hold that the best way to decide who to choose as Prime Minister, Lawrence Gonzi or Alfred Sant, is not the eeny-meeny-miney-mo of grudges, hatred or indifference, but the drawing up of a short-list of plus-points and negatives, based on the track record of both and the future expectations we have of each. I ask myself another question, too: if both of them applied to me for the job of running any sizeable operation, which one would I choose? To my mind, a sensible CEO (and you would have to be sensible to end up as CEO of most operations) would go for Gonzi. Quite frankly, I think Sant manifests the single most undesirable element in any corporation, possibly even more undesirable than a predilection for unsound decisions: the inability to function as part of a team or to consider any opinion other than his own.
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I’ve noticed that a lot of people get tangled up in their thinking and end up being unable to extricate themselves. Arguing with others and inside their own head (we all do it, and if we get too involved, we find we’re even muttering under our breath) they come out with a whole list of complaints about Lawrence Gonzi and his shortcomings. In this situation, I realise that it’s futile to stack up his achievements as evidence – for what price full employment, a growing economy, a deficit down to almost nothing, billions of euros in foreign direct investment, and entry into the eurozone against the perverse delight of luxuriating in the petty bribery of transport officials, or the ineptitude of a minister who is going to be axed anyway?
I sit without talking and privately think that it’s like throwing out a caring and decent spouse for his or her signal failure to put dirty underwear in the laundry basket, or sacking a hardworking and competent employee for taking too long a lunch-break once in a while. Boiled down to its essence, it doesn’t make sense. You don’t throw out the functional to bring in the dysfunctional.
Those who are ready with a litany of complaints about this government, and a list of reasons why they won’t vote for it, are curiously at odds to come up with the parallel requirement, which is a litany of praise for Alfred Sant and a list of reasons why they will vote for him. Unless they are die-hard Labour, when I ask the anti-government people for this list, they react with startled perplexity: “What do you mean?” “Well,” I say, pausing to draw breath as I prepare to launch for the zillionth time into an explanation that involves a little arithmetic and a lot of common sense. “If you don’t want Dr Gonzi as Prime Minister, you want Dr Sant, then.”
A horrified reaction ensues: “Of course I don’t want Sant! The man can’t even organise a visit to Maghtab and get it right!” At this point I am tempted to leave for a cup of tea and a nice, numbing couple of hours with the Eastenders Omnibus edition. But I stick around and reason things out, seeing it as a form of national service. Perhaps I will get my reward in heaven because I’m certainly not going to get it on this earth. “Ok, so you don’t want Sant. That means you do want Gonzi, after all.” “No, I don’t! I don’t want either of them!”
Tea and Eastenders beckon even more compellingly than before. “I hope you realise that the absence of a Prime Minister is not an option. So you might as well choose which one you prefer. It does seem the most sensible approach.” And here comes the bit that I know now to expect, the bit which has, sadly over the last few weeks, forced me to re-evaluate my opinion of some individuals: “I don’t care who’s Prime Minister! What do I care! It makes no difference to me! How bad can Sant be, after all? If I don’t vote PN and Sant becomes Prime Minister, it’s not my fault!”
By now, the trials of Dot and her curlers and Peggy Mitchell and her pub are exerting an irresistible pull. But I continue to sit there trying to read the mind of somebody who actually thinks it is a sensible choice to throw out something that works for something that he knows won’t work anywhere near as well, just for the sheer hell of it, the thrill of derailing the train, the pleasure of putting a knife through a canvas-painting. I know that it’s a bad case of self-sabotage, but he sees it only as sabotaging others, and the negative satisfaction he will get from doing it. Then there are those who actually believe they are on a heroic mission to save Malta from the deep perils of a stable five-year government, voting AD like a mad shot in the dark at something they imagine will be a coalition, saying that they don’t care who becomes Prime Minister because a seat in the house for AD is much more important than who’s running the country. I wonder at the sheer irresponsibility of this line of thinking, but say nothing to avoid permanent rupture.
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As somebody who has the outlook on life of a boringly practical worker-ant (despite having the highly inaccurate public persona of a queen-bee), I find it extremely difficult to understand why people agonise over the most straightforward decisions and seek to create complications where there are, so blissfully and rarely in the human experience, none to contend with. It took this worker-ant a split second to decide who to vote for. Given that the essential choice we are being asked to make is between Lawrence Gonzi and Alfred Sant as Prime Minister, I took a quick look, not that I needed one to remind me, made up my mind and then moved on to the next of my worker-antsy activities.
Meanwhile, I note to my astonishment that some people are still tying themselves up in knots, agonising over coalitions, the potential for derailing governments over golf courses, seats for AD, distrusting Sant but feeling too cool and hip to go for Gonzi (even though the absolutely coolest and hippest 20-year-olds are behind him all the way, the 30-somethings are paralysed by concern for their image), and what-have-you. What, exactly, is the point of all this? The only conclusion I can draw is that election-time divides the worker-ants from the queen-bees, the practical people from the ones who enjoy creating problems for themselves and for the rest of the country, the boring Joes and Janes from the prima donnas who seem hell-bent on making their vote a matter of national concern, the people who can read the facts and absorb them from the ones who insist on building a fantasy world and trying to live in it.
Where is the sense in taking something functional and hoping to make it even more functional still by choosing a dysfunctional option? I have one golden rule in my humdrum worker-ant life: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
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Apparently, we need Sant to lead us because Malta has fallen into stagnation under the corrupt and incompetent Nationalist government. It is, or so I gather, a government riddled with misprints and computer malfunctions, saddled with people who, as Sant memorably explained on Bondiplus, are like “dud fil-gobon” or worms in cheese. I don’t know where he gets his inspiration for similes like this one, but I certainly wouldn’t want to explore his kitchen.
The Internet is rife with forums made up of people who are living in a parallel universe, and who use pseudonyms that indicate they have created a “computer games” world for themselves, a virtual world in which they are the dark version of superheroes, plotting global domination from the safety of their underground bunkers, emerging only to buy supplies in their Batmobile with wings.
I’m beginning to think that Labour’s leader is one of these, though he doesn’t understand computers and thinks that things slip out of them and into electoral manifestos. He seems truly convinced of what he is saying and very irritated at the fact that his intellectual inferiors – a group that takes in the entire country – fail to see what he sees.
In his parallel world, Malta is in the throes of economic stagnation and the government is as corrupt as the worst South American dictatorship. In this he is at one with the unsmiling Savonarola and his army of dull Puritans at AD, with their deadening chants about “single-party rule” and “single-party dictatorship”, used as references to a government which is democratically elected every five years. Each shows about as much respect as the other for the democratically expressed will of the people – AD refuses to accept or acknowledge a democratically-elected government; the MLP refuses to accept or acknowledge the verdict of the people in a referendum.
In Sant’s parallel world, the Maltese are starving in their homes, begging on street corners and losing their jobs left, right and centre. They are illiterate and without prospects. The hospital malfunctions (like Labour’s computer), the university is full of fascists and hamalli, people are sleeping in bus-shelters because of rising house prices, and a four-year-old memo on health services, rejected by the Prime Minister with the words “Over my dead body” is leaked by a mole hoping for promotion under Labour and whipped out like a dead rabbit.
Only Sant can save us now. He said so, so it must be true – unless it was a misprint, of course. So here we have Sant as a sort of anti-Batman, with his malfunctioning computer and his electoral programme of misprints, with Jason Micallef as Robin at his side and the Lion of Change waddling along bringing up the rear.
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They rushed in formation to Maghtab and demanded to be let in. Wearing suits, ties and formal coats to inspect a landfill site, they took offence when the official on duty said that no one is allowed in without prior clearance – not because there is something to hide, but because those are the rules.
And so the question hangs in the air: did Robin and the Lion of Change not know this before they dragged Batman down to Maghtab? Or did they know it and assume, as Labour leaders are wont to do, that they are entitled to special treatment by dint of their political status?
Where were Sant’s advisers, somebody asked in one of the many Internet discussions about this State visit to an ex-dump. His advisers are the Lion of Change and Jason Micallef, I replied. So what do you expect? The one doesn’t understand protocol and the other only seems to care that the camera gets him from the best possible angle.
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I’ve noticed from my incessant viewing of political television at the moment that Jason ‘Robin’ Micallef likes to match his shoes to his tie, rather than to his trousers. I spent a very painful 20 minutes watching him in conversation with one of the Misses Dalli, legs crossed, dark suit, dark socks (fortunately not white) and light brown walking-shoes toning with his light brown tie. Hideous.
Daphne Caruana Galizia also writes a column for The Malta Independent on Thursday www.independent.com.mt