Last Tuesday the President put on her gravest face – which is saying something – and made a speech that was quickly and universally lauded as a breath of fresh air, brave, historic, radical, game-changing, and so on till the kingdom of adjectives come.

I’m surprised at how susceptible people are to rhetoric. They are especially so to sanctimonious rhetoric, which happens to be a speciality of President Marie-Louise Coleiro-Preca’s. Even by her standards, the Republic Day speech was a tour de force.

But first, a word about the office. I have never quite understood the quinquennial ritual by which a politician (usually a government minister) is transformed, by means of some magical words about the Constitution and a round of hushed handshakes, into a kind of transfigured being who is above it all.

I mean no disrespect to the office. What I find hard to digest is the idea that a president is also some kind of moral compass or spiritual guru to the nation. It’s not as if presidents-elect meditate under a pipal tree for 49 days, mortify their flesh, or fast in the desert. It’s screaming, hustling and rewarding canvassers at the ministry one day, subdued voices, sagely looks, and lecturing the nation at the palace the next.

Take Coleiro Preca. She came into office carrying a baggage of party politics and experience as a government minister. That is not at all a bad thing, but it does disqualify her from any semblance of disinterested wisdom. Bluntly put, there is only one reason why she made it to the throne room to speak about mud-slinging and partisan bickering. It is that, in her time, she mud-slung and bickered better than most.

Had she parted with tradition, she would never have become a minister or a president. The point is not that Coleiro Preca is a wicked person. She isn’t, and in any case that’s irrelevant. It is that the post of president is not a departure from party politics, but rather its direct product. It follows that no president is in a position to suddenly hover above it all.

But try to hover and soar Coleiro Preca did, which leaves us with the speech itself. I’d say it was a pedestrian combination of the bleeding obvious, rhetoric, cliché and wrong thinking.

Sorry, Madame President, but if you were comfortable being a member of the Labour Party then, there is no reason why anyone should feel uncomfortable being so now

Take the point on the repatriation of African settlers, which the President described as people who “contribute to our prosperity” and who therefore should be allowed to stay. At face value a fine sentiment, and one I happen to share. Except there’s something fundamentally wrong and immoral about valuing people – migrants or otherwise – in terms of their contribution to our prosperity. Slaves, too, would contribute tremendously to our prosperity.

It’s called ‘cherry-picking’ (migrants), and in some of its forms is actually against EU law. It should be no more acceptable to cherry-pick migrants on account of their contribution to prosperity than it is to do so on account of the colour of their skin. I’m very surprised the President’s speech was held up as a fine specimen by people who work hard in migration NGOs. I should rather think of it as a model to avoid.

The President also told us that she was “concerned” (qed tinkwetani) about the behaviour of politicians, that there had been a deterioration in this respect, and that this would cause serious and upright people to increasingly shy away from politics.

At which point the shape of my eyebrows became such that people stopped and asked me for a Big Mac. How exactly is politics today a deterioration of what Coleiro Preca was part of 10, 20, 30 years ago? In what ways is Joseph Muscat’s behaviour worse than that of a certain politician she supported who donned a hard hat and made himself unwelcome at the Archbishop’s Curia? Why should upright people shy away from politics now, as opposed to then?

Sorry, Madame President, but if you were comfortable being a member of the Labour Party then, there is no reason why anyone should feel uncomfortable being so now. There is no deterioration, certainly not from where you’re standing.

 

■ On to the economy. The President said that it was a paragon of success, growing by the minute, and applauded by the credit-rating agencies, but also that it left chunks of the population in precarious jobs and difficult situations. The second bit she described as unacceptable.

I agree with her. The problem, as someone once put it, is in the conjunction ‘but’. It should actually be ‘and’, because an economic model that is obsessed with growth and credit ratings is extremely likely to thrive on an underclass of people in precarious jobs and such. It does not make sense to praise the first and be concerned about the second. Unless you believe in trickle-down, that is, which manifestly does not work. Wrong again, in other words.

The speech made predictable reference to bloggers and the untold damage some of them cause. “As a nation”, the President said, “we cannot accept this viciousness (‘oxxenitajiet’)”. I’m not exactly sure how the nation might exorcise bloggers, but I was amazed to see so many who yesterday were Charlie Hebdo warm up to what she said.

This fixation with bloggers has now become a national pastime and the mother of all goody-goody rhetoric. The one thing to do about blogs you don’t like is, don’t read them. I think it’s called freedom of speech, and it’s a notion that the Paris murderers never understood.

The post-mortem could go on and on. There was the usual tired and vacant reference to Malta’s vocation as a bridge and a space for intercultural dialogue and world peace (yawn). The President also said that she regularly meets children who are worried to death about noise pollution, traffic emissions and the deteriorating standards of political behaviour.

The penchant for rhetoric starts early, shall we say.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

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