I find myself in full agreement with the Prime Minister. Like him, I too think that if David Casa and Roberta Metsola can’t stand the heat, they might wish to get out of the kitchen.
What’s stoking this particular fire is Tony Zarb’s reaction to what Casa and Metsola said and did in Strasbourg two weeks ago. It seems that Zarb deemed it an act of high treason against the nation, and encouraged people to do likewise. Sufficiently aroused, some of his online readers suggested greeting the MEPs at the airport with eggs and tomatoes.
I think two things about Zarb. First, he is a compassionate man. Historically, remedies for treason have included disembowelment, impalement and other savagery. Even today, many countries deem it a capital offence. By any standards, a bit of egg down the collar is an exceptionally lenient punishment.
Second, he is an oafish rabble-rouser who thinks of the European Parliament as a foreign land (‘barra’), irrespective of the fact that it includes members elected directly by Maltese voters. Zarb probably imagines that multi-level governance is something that has to do with parking and lifts. Besides, if people like him had their way, there would be a shortage of eggs, tomatoes and Nobel peace prize winners. Mandela and the Dalai Lama, for example, both damaged their country’s reputation abroad.
Be that as it may, I was not in the least shocked at Zarb’s reaction, or its aftermath. Archbishop Charles Scicluna has said it was an exercise in hate speech, character assassination and intimidation.
Except the Archbishop’s take was in turn an exercise in hyperbole. Neither Casa nor Metsola looked terribly assassinated or intimidated to me, and the number of people who hate them now is exactly the same as the number of people who hated them three weeks ago. No harm done, then.
Several hugs and Maltese flags down the line, there was more love in the Labour Party than in San Francisco in 1967
The point, however, is not this non-incident specifically. It is that a type of rhetorical squeamishness exists that sees hate speech, scandal and horror in everything that’s said which is not about positive energy and universal love.
Italians call it perbenismo. The best Maltese word I can think of is djuq. It’s a kind of half put-on, half Pavlovian strait-laced respectability that tries to confine public discourse to what’s acceptable by the standards of the day. I betray my sympathy, which is with Zarb all the way.
The djuq I have in mind is a rhetorical formula that works as follows: First, there is the act that sparks it all off; in this case, the act was Casa’s and Metsola’s imagined misdeeds in Strasbourg. The act is followed by a counter-offensive that usually takes place on the battlefields of Facebook or Twitter, as Zarb’s was. This in turn invites a moral, and moralising, scolding by whichever champion of djuq happens to be looking. The sparring may, and often does, go on till it does.
There are two things about this formula. First, it must be one of the great contradictions of the age. On the one hand, we think that open-mindedness, freedom of expression, freedom to vilify religion, freedom from censorship, and so on, are gifts of the gods. On the other, we think that what Zarb said was unacceptable.
Second, none of this is naïve. Take Joseph Muscat’s comment on kitchens and heat. At first glance it looked like a defence of Zarb’s freedom of expression. Except Muscat added that he “would never use that (Zarb’s, that is) terminology”. Rather cleverly, Muscat located himself both within and outside Zarb’s attack. The reason why he did so is telling.
It turns out that Muscat is the main architect of the djuq formula. It is part of the arsenal he used to rout the PN twice in four years. One of Muscat’s projects when he took over the PL in 2008 was to transform the party into an aspirational one. A crucial part of it would be down to language. Muscat crafted and peddled a discourse of tolerance and what he called pożittività (positivity). Several hugs and Maltese flags down the line, there was more love in the Labour Party than in San Francisco in 1967.
The idea has caught on. Anything that departs from the love formula is open to the accusation of negattività, and invites sermonising. In an address to the nation two weeks ago, the President said that the values of “compassion, solidarity and community” had been “lost” in the election campaign.
The President was careful not to take sides. Thing is, negattività, ‘venom’, ‘hate speech’, and such, tend to be associated with the PN. It is an association manufactured and maintained by Labour generally and Muscat in particular. Muscat must have smoked a cigar when Salvu Mallia was taken on as a candidate by the PN. Even as they attack it, people like Mallia nourish the djuq formula and play into the hands of the new respectability.
What of Zarb, then? Fossil dinosaurs have never bitten anyone. Besides, the Prime Minister would never have used that terminology.
mafalzon@hotmail.com