Exactly who’s mourning who?

Whenever a hoard of fireworks misbehaves and ends up in a bloodbath, the question is asked whether or not politicians – particularly high-profile ones who stand for the top establishment – should attend the funeral. Some seem to be of the opinion that they shouldn’t, that their straight faces are just hypocrisy made rubber and their attendance a shameless and cynical session of vote catching.

Let’s rule out the last two. I don’t believe politicians are any more hypocritical than the rest of us. Nor do I think there is anything wrong with vote catching; if anything, it’s the politicians who seldom catch any who are in the wrong business. In any case I dislike cynical arguments and prefer to go for more substantive ones.

The premise is that politicians would be justified in attending if there were anything of national importance about the funerals. The question therefore becomes: To what extent, if at all, are such occasions national?

I don’t mean this as in protocol or some other formal sense, but rather in terms of scope. For example, the President’s duties of office include attending official national events as head of state. But he may also choose to show up at less formal occasions out of a sense of solidarity with public sentiment at large. It is this second type of ‘national’ I mean.

The relation between these two types can be tricky. When Princess Diana died, people expected Buckingham Palace to fly the flag at half mast. Royal (state) protocol, however, ordained otherwise – no flutter at all, in fact, since the Queen was not in residence on the day. The result was ugly and took the Palace PR ages to half mend.

I’d argue that ‘fireworks funerals’ (for want of a less terrible term) may plausibly be considered ‘national’, on at least two counts. The trick is to think in context and place funerals along a chain of events.

Let us first consider time t=0, the big bang itself. On one hand, fireworks explosions tend to happen in fields somewhere between nowhere and goodbye. And yet they have a habit of transforming themselves into very public and tangible events, within seconds.

This by virtue both of their sheer power and the country’s size. The explosions are felt by people all over the island. They become a matter of ‘Where were you when JFK was shot?’ In other words, a coming to­gether of cataclysmic public mo­ment and intimate private lifeworld.

People talk of how their siesta was interrupted, how they almost fell off a ladder, and such. No corner is spared. Following last month’s explosion in Mosta, I was intrigued to see online readers’ pictures of the ‘mushroom cloud’ taken from pretty much every location in Malta.

So powerful is this sense of collective experience, that it becomes subversive to say you never felt a thing. Not feeling becomes a matter of distance, of aloofness from public events. A bit like not voting, or not knowing who lost the Eurovision.

In sum, we’re looking here at events that quite literally shake the whole country – physically as well as emotionally. This is re­levant, in the sense that the funerals are the end link of the chain. The minute the country shakes, it begins to mourn.

The second reason why one might argue for a ‘national’ element is less straightforward. Again, we must think in context. As the crowds of mourners themselves do, after all.

I was at the Mosta funeral on some fieldwork excuse, and I was very struck by the workings of the grief. At the basic level people appeared genuinely distraught at the loss of someone they knew well, one of the their own, so to say. But they also seemed to grieve for the loss of something that went beyond the individual. That something was the festa.

There was a moving moment when the coffin of Mario Dimech was held up to great applause, as a kind of burnt offering to the spirit of the festa. That’s the clue I’m looking for. Fireworks, and the funerals that persist in going with them, are seen simply as strands in the tissue of local devotions and part of the grand edifice that is festa. Madly enough, turning one’s back on funerals means negating festa.

We’re about halfway there. We now need to establish whether or not festa is ‘national’. In practice it’s quite the contrary – very localistic, and excluding all comers (the ‘ħadd ma jista’ għalina’ [everybody hates us] sort of thing). As a generic idea, however, one would be hard pressed to deny that festa means a lot to tens of thousands of Maltese.

I’d say festa is ‘national’ by popular, if hardly universal, demand. And that’s precisely where fireworks, and the happiness and grief that go with them, belong. That’s what dilettanti mean when they say that there’s no festa without fireworks.

So far it’s looking bad for our MPs’ diaries. There is, however, another question we might raise. In attending funerals, are politicians legiti-mising ‘irresponsible behaviour’?

Well, not necessarily. First, if anything at all it’s fireworks and festa they’re legitimising, not manufacture malpractice. And since both fireworks and festa are fully legitimate, their contribution must be small at best. Festa doesn’t need politicians to appear acceptable.

Secondly, even if fireworks were immoral, I’m not sure modern politics has anything to do with setting examples and high moral standards.

As I see it, the role of politicians – as opposed to dictators who pose as ‘fathers’ or ‘guides’ (German: Führer) – is simply to run the affairs of the country. I really don’t care about their values and ideologies, simply because I prefer to figure those for myself.

What I do expect politicians to have are feelings and a certain sensitivity to the emotions of the people they represent. Fireworks funerals are whole towns and villages united (as united as can be, at any rate) in their grief and despair that something they hold so dear – festa – has gone so badly wrong.

I’d be quite shocked if our politicians should turn their backs on that.

mafalzon@hotmail.com