You’ve got to love elections, though. If you ask me, they’re the closest thing we have to a national moment of truth.
Just as Christmas is a time for giving, elections are a time for backstabbing, posturing for the cameras and lying through one’s teeth. But in a perverse kind of way, they also serve to bring out the hypocrite in all of us. This is a time when hidden agendas suddenly step out of their hiding places for all to see; when supposedly unbiased commentators turn out to be nothing more than cogs in a well-oiled propaganda machine; and it is roughly now that individual candidates, in various degrees of panic and desperation, suddenly remember that there are these things called “constituents” out there, who have to be kept happy by any means necessary… OR ELSE.
One small example out of several million. Many moons ago I signed up to this online network called Facebook.com. Never a dull moment, let me tell you. Ever since joining in July, I have been bitten by vampires and waylaid by werewolves; ambushed by pirates and abducted by ninjas; challenged to pillow-fights; defeated in duels; invited to join the Gonzipn Supporters’ Group (by people who really ought to know better)… most bizarre of all, I have had food of every conceivable description thrown at me: the most recent example being, of all things, a Knickerbocker Glory.
Oh, and naturally, I’ve also made loads of friends.
This is where the beauty of election time becomes manifest. Like I said, I’ve been on Facebook since early summer… that’s roughly seven months. But it is only in the last week that “certain” people – who also happen to be electoral candidates contesting the ninth district on behalf of the Nationalist Party – suddenly expressed an interest in befriending me.
All very nice and friendly of them, don’t get me wrong. But I can’t help but wonder… why now? Why didn’t they want to be friends with me before, when there was no election in the offing, and when friendship with yours truly was of absolutely no profit or value to their electoral campaigns?
Ah, yes. Nothing like the prospect of losing one’s seat in Parliament to make one suddenly rediscover the true meaning of friendship. But you know what? Stuff the hypocrisy: I accepted their requests anyway.
This way, at least I can throw food at them without being arrested.
Under the tent downtown
Hypocrisy is not the only quality to come to the fore during election campaigns. Sycophancy tends to get flushed out into the open, too.
The other day I settled back in my armchair to watch a “taht it-tinda” meeting with Gonzipn in person, and… you know that statue of St Peter in the Vatican? The one whose feet have been caressed and kissed so many times over the centuries, that the marble has literally smoothed away to nothing by the friction of a million hands and the combined saliva of a million tongues?
Well, that image came forcefully to mind as I watched; only, it wasn’t the Glorious Leader’s feet I saw being slowly massaged and kissed away to nothing by an army of obsequious devotees; it was another part of his anatomy which needn’t be specified here (although I believe the technical term for the activity is “culo-lingus”.)
But what is a “taht it-tinda” meeting, I hear you ask? A fair question, seeing as the practice was phased out in Europe as long ago as the early Middle Ages.
Literally, the term means “underneath (or inside) the tent”: a practice inspired by Islamic demagogues such as Suleiman the Magnificent – or more recently Muammar Al-Gaddafi – whose faithful acolytes would be herded into a tent in the desert, where they would take turns to try and outdo each other in lavish praise and flattery of the Glorious Leader...often as not on pain of instant decapitation.
There are admittedly a few differences in our home-grown version of this unsightly spectacle. For instance: in Islamic tradition, the tent is strategically sited to face Mecca (in Malta, it usually faces Herbert Ganado Street in Pieta’). And as decapitation is no longer a feasible option, today’s failed backside-lickers are punished by ostracism and/or permanent banishment from the lucrative realm of government contracts. Last but not least, the local equivalents still don’t provide free parking for camels, despite several promises by the Wazir.
Otherwise, the “taht it-tinda” meetings shown every day on NET TV are indistinguishable in every detail from their dictatorial equivalents all over the Maghreb and the Persian Gulf. Looks like we got more than just Lm100 million in investment from Austin Gatt’s business partners in Dubai: we also picked up a few lessons in Caliphate-building from the land of sheikhs, rattle and roll.
Lesson number one: democracy is an excellent political system, but only if translates into absolute power for yourself and your buddies.
Lesson number two: the party itself is not really important - it is the Leader alone who counts.
On a more serious note, I have to say this is all very disappointing for those of us who were brought up to believe that the Nationalist party was slightly better than that. But at the same time I can’t really claim to be disappointed; if nothing else, because my expectations of Gonzipn were never very high to begin with.
The most I had hoped for was that, with Eddie Fenech Adami booted upstairs to the presidency, and all the Old World political dinosaurs now firmly out of the picture, Malta would gradually progress towards a more modern, less “mexxej”-oriented way of doing politics. Foolishly, I even imagined that the former Catholic Action president himself would be the prime catalyst for such a change: not without good reason, for on the few occasions I encountered the Prime Minister, he always struck me as a low-key, modest, decent sort of chap.
But first impressions can be misleading. For with his latest campaign strategy, Gonzipn has now blurred all distinction between party and leader, as his newly refashioned name so graphically illustrates. In fact, Gonzipn’s entire election campaign strategy seems hell-bent, not on winning support for the Nationalist Party, but on building his own personality cult up to unsustainable proportions. And now I am beginning to wonder whether the strategists in charge of the PN’s campaign have actually factored the overall implications into their pre-electoral calculations.
Elsewhere I have had occasion to comment on the possible pitfalls of such a daring – some would say suicidal – strategy. If Gonzipn wins, he undeniably wins big. Having religiously excluded his cabinet colleagues from the campaign, a Nationalist victory would be attributable only to himself. This would automatically elevate his stature to the same level of idolatry enjoyed by his predecessor, greatly augmenting his own power and influence on the party and the country alike. (Conversely, it would also mark a regression to very kind of politics Gonzipn himself promised he would change in 2004, but like I said earlier: elections lay bare our private hypocrisies for all to see.)
On the flipside: if the Nationalists lose the election on March 8, their defeat can and will be interpreted as a direct vote of no confidence in Gonzipn himself. True, he might cling onto the leadership regardless, as Sant has successfully done for all these years; but having been rejected by the entire nation in a democratic vote, his would be a considerably weakened grip on the reins of the party leadership. In all honesty, I just can’t see Gonzipn realistically surviving for long in such a scenario; just as I can’t imagine Sant remaining Opposition leader in the event of a PN win.
Anyway. I will leave Gonzipn and his army of culo-linguists to worry in private about the possible consequences of electoral defeat. More worrying for the rest of us is what this inauspicious style of electioneering says about the ruling party’s attitude towards power.
Let’s face it: this is not the imagery and rhetoric one associates with the modern, forward-looking Christian Democratic party that took us into Europe five years ago. Quite the contrary: leadership cults of the variety now cultivated by Gonzipn’s spin doctors are the hallmarks of dictatorships that gave us Francisco Franco, Josef Tito, Nikolai Ceaucesco and Benito Mussolini.
With one significant difference. Demagoguery suited the above leaders to “T”. But Gonzipn? A Great Dictator?
Come on, Lawrence, surely you can do better than that.
