Chameleon Politics

It’s a good thing that the parties have gone ballistic with colours in their campaign – the obsession is second only to their quasi-fanatic devotion to the newfound toys in the social media sphere. You’d have a hard time catching up with the goings on all over the place between twitter, facebook, party websites, press releases, press reports, tv discussion programs, and more (more?) even if you were not a one man blog. The first few days of the campaign have given us a very interesting point to observe and that is the ongoing crisis between medium and message. I’ll elaborate after a little video break…

The Political Campaigns Hit Home (or just a Sony Bravia ad)

Like the Sony Bravia ad above, the two campaigns (only PLPN have the clout for massive haemorrhage of funds) are conceived as a colourful blitzkrieg on the senses. The main effect is intended to be obtained by a shock and awe interplay that would make Stormin’ Norman proud (may the Good Lord bless his soul and forgive him his failed incursion into Irak). Noise, colour, drama and catchwords form the core of the campaign and themes take a very secondary place in the whole affair. From Labour’s midnight launch to PN’s unsubtle appropriation of the MSNBC colours-of-the-rainbow variety label the main thrust is one that is meant to sweep you off your feet and leave your logical, questioning apparatus numbed for the first few days.

Once you do begin to dig beneath the catchphrases and the cloning of other campaigns you will discover a profound sort of emptiness that is capable of making very loud noises. The anaesthetised message projected by Muscat across the bastions is intentionally issue-neutral: Malta Taghna Lkoll (Malta is everybody’s – not Where’s Everybody). It is a tautology that is as big and as high as the magnificent restored bastions – an affirmation that you would always have hoped to be a given in ANY political party’s repertoire – bar Norman Lowell’s who had quite a clear idea about who owned Malta and who should not be here.

What does all this “Malta Taghna Lkoll” business really say? I for one cannot understand why the party that has spent the last four years treating every occurrence under the sun as a problem and blaming it on “GonziPN” (have you noticed how that too vanished from the vocab?) suddenly woke up and noticed that this is “divisive”. They’re deliberately confusing matters too – being divisive is not the same as disagreeing very much like having an opinion is not equivalent to being right. Labour has packaged relativism and is using it as a blunt force weapon to beat your brain into numb acquiescence. As things stand you cannot criticise anything Labour because you are immediately “divisive” and suddenly “part of a clique”. Trust me I have had my fair share of laughable accusations…

Par Condicio

Then you have the nationalist leaning readers of this blog who seem to find that I “make an effort” to include the PN in my criticism as a some sort of obligatory nod to “par condicio” (equal conditions). This twisted sort of reasoning is the same reasoning that underlines Labour’s Malta Taghna Lkoll reasoning. If you still cannot get what I mean just friend Musumeci on facebook and see how value-free relativism has been perfected as an art of the slimy buonisti – last I checked he was advocating for specialised technocrats to be in government, I suspect he has architects who are specialised in MEPA and “reading” a law degree in mind – but it’s only a suspicion.

Back to the PN. Simon Busuttil’s grocer taunt will return to haunt him throughout the campaign as he soldiers on with that cross between a smile that says “I’m nice” and that heavy frown that says “But I still mean business”. The sea of propaganda from the PN side is nauseatingly overdone with its hipstamatic/instagram effects that make Gonzi & Co look like some 70’s afterthought. Like the PL, the PN has thought of giving us a list of people who are intending to vote for their party – and why. As I pointed out in an earlier post this list is replete with what in other times would have been called “hbieb tal-hbieb” or “hbieb tal-klikka”. Both PL and PN have included what you could best describe as “minorities” in their visuals and lists – part of the ongoing all-inclusive effort. I am sure that if “gayness” was something visible we’d have the token gay or two in the list too… Unfortunately, since the revamp of the josephmuscat site, the woman with the hijab who was only visible if you (really) zoomed out is no longer visible.

 

 

 Manifestly Rushed

Sometimes satire says it best and Satiristan couldn’t have put it better when earlier today they posted this facebook update:

Illum f’xi ħin li jidhrilna, ser inħabbru l-karta tal-valuri ta’ Satiristan.  Warajha imbagħad ser inħabbru l-manifest ta’ Satiristan; u terġa’ u tgħid f’xi ħin ieħor ser nippubblikaw il-programm elettorali ta’ Satiristan; u jekk jifdal ħin anke a la Carte menu ta’ Satiristan. Biex nagħmluha ċara, l-erba’ dokumenti ser ikunu l-istess ħaġa b’heading differenti u konferenza stampa għal kull waħda. Imma għallinqas forsi jiġu tal-gazzetti għall-fingerfood. (Satiristan)

Often in the run up to the campaign we were forced to do a double take. The parties engaged in meeting upon meeting supposedly getting “closer to the people” and “listening” in order to formulate their positions. We got pre-guidelines (remember that famous list by Labour of 51 proposals?), proposals and groundwork ideas. Embedded in catchwords that would only impress a struggling FEMA (Faculty of Economics, Management and Accountancy for the infidels) undergrad were reams of emptiness or tautologies. Proposal 45: Importanza misthoqqa lill-biedja u s-sajd. As the other satirical page goes… Mulej Hudni.

The Nationalist party has published a manifesto that is about as detailed as Ryanair’s ticketing system. Like Ryanair’s ticketing system you have to read it very very carefully because in this campaign of colours and impressions you have to struggle with parties who say one thing but mean another. I started off by looking at how the parts regarding same-sex relationships are worded. You can easily evince that the PN has not budged on the issue and that “marriage” remains a no-no. They do leave space for doubt though by tiptoeing around the issue and dropping half promises about regulating relationships differently. You cannot blame them though.

What I do find weird is how given the record over the last two years the PN’s Manifesto fails to even refer to the field of Law & Justice. The word “justice” appears only twice in the manifesto and it refers to “social justice” and not to the courts and the law. No mention of the evident need of reform in the judiciary, no mention of the evident need to reform the police and their application of the law, no mention of the promised reforms in certain fields such as the “censorship” issues. The manifesto is poor in that respect and maybe the ghost of Franco still looms heavily on the PN team.

Labour’s courageous step into the dark when it came to concrete proposals was perforce related to the utility bills. Again, either I am slow, stupid or out of touch or the issue continues to morph out of our grasp. Maybe Anglu was not so wrong after all when he tried to differentiate between a cut in electricity tariffs and water tariffs. After seeing the proposals it is evident that Anglu had not studied the brief well and had almost let the cat out  of the bag. Now we know that Labour’s promise for a up to a 100,000 families is to reduce the electricity bill and as a consequence the price of water will also go down.

Aside from the choice of healthier fuel though the question of whose plan works best is still up for grabs. There are a lot of equivocal statements by Labour that can only be acceptable if you’ve already decided in their favour come what may. The questions dig straight into the question of “deliverability” especially since the actual time frame of Labour’s plan spans into the legislature after the next – unless of course they plan to ditch all the rules on tendering, planning etc. That Mizzi fellow tries to come across as an amiable fellow who can solve Malta’s energy problems and has sold the “clean energy” pitch to his party who are tweeting about it to their hearts’ content but somehow there seems to be a missing link in the economic puzzle that involves factoring, hedging and promising.

That chapter has not closed yet but I fear that the “distraction” on the energy issue will dominate much of the campaign to the detriment of a multiplicity of other issues that deserve attention and a commitment from either of the parties. The irony is that the social media weapon is not really being used to listen but rather to clobber and bang propaganda straight to the nearest mobile phone.

While, like chameleons, the parties will continue to change colour depending on what they think is “in” on a particular day, the voter needs to become more proactive and probe with questions that are relevant and difficult. The voter (and media like this one) should not allow the parties to dictate the agenda and the pace of how they reveal what they plan to do with the nation. They already dictate that to the Broadcasting Authority. The free media should remain so… and voters can only do that if they manage to throw away the shackles of dependency and the instinct to defend the gaffes of the parties who have pulled their strings for so long.

J’accuse is determined to become one of these open, questioning platforms. We are committed to uncover what lies beneath every shade of political propaganda… are you?