Jason never die

When I was a kid, the legend ‘Elvis never die’ was painted on public walls and etched out in sticker-letters on buses. Now it’s Jason Micallef who seems to be immortal, and it won’t be long before the spray-cans are out and ‘Jason never die’ is emblazoned on the walls of the headquarters up at Mile End.

Come on, did any of you have doubts that he would be re-elected? Somebody like that doesn’t go for the job unless he’s got a 99.99 per cent chance of winning it. Micallef doesn’t strike me as being a ‘let the best man win’ kind of person, but more of an ‘I won’t play unless I’m going to win for sure’ sort. If you thought he might lose, then you haven’t been reading the clues since March 9. The man has been speaking and behaving with the cocky, self-assured confidence of somebody who knows that his is a safe seat. He knew that he was going nowhere fast. His only period of barely perceptible anxiety was between the Sunday after polling-day and the night his buddy Joseph Muscat was elected party leader. Once Muscat made it, Micallef was home and dry. Had George Abela been elected instead, Micallef would now be scanning the ‘situations vacant’ ads in the newspapers, hoping for a position folding jumpers in a boutique.

He has glued himself to Joseph Muscat’s right hip, making the leadership look like some kind of two-headed hydra with a particularly large pair of double grins. He hasn’t been hanging around with Muscat with theslightly desperate air of somebody who knows he’s on a losing ticket. No. He’s been hanging around with him as an equal, a crony, somebody’s who’s right in the game, on the inside. That alone would have sent out a strong message to the more intellectually challenged among the party delegates: Joseph, he’s my mate. We’re a team.

Some people are saying that it’s a shock to Joseph Muscat to see Jason Micallef re-elected as secretary-general. Really? You could have fooled me. If Muscat didn’t want him to be re-elected, then he wouldn’t have encouraged him to hang around with him, to appear with him – stuck to his hip, and with such relaxed body language – so often, and he wouldn’t have gone out to dinner with him and both wives in tow, either. The two are friends, not just political colleagues. It’s a sign of Muscat’s utter and total political immaturity that he thinks he can get anywhere fast with a line-up of sidekicks composed of Jason Micallef, Anglu Farrugia and Toni Abela. The new reformed Labour Party line-up is actually a whole lot worse than the old one. The fact that Joseph Muscat smiles a lot and isn’t nuts doesn’t make up for the fact that when it comes to policies, he’s a swinger. One minute he’s rabidly anti-EU. The next minute he’s the most European person in Malta. One minute he’s performing the Charlon Gouder role on Super One television and radio, harassing politicians on the campaign trail. The next minute he’s the glorious freedom-of-speech democrat who’s going to rewrite the press code of ethics for the free world. Give me a break.

All I can say is that it’s one hell of a line-up. When they appear in public all together, and they are going to do with increasing frequency once the hot weather is past, they’ll look like a circus act: Joseph, Jason, Toni and Anglu – and let’s hope the last of the lot leaves his Indian friend the elephant behind along with his conspiracy theories about a PN fund to buy votes off Labour junkies. Oh, and will the deputy leader Toni Abela be back on our screens this winter, with another amusing series like Otello or Robin Hood?

Some other people are wondering out loud what made so many delegates vote for Micallef. That must be a rhetorical question. The political judgment of anyone who voted Labour in the last three general elections – I’ll stick to those, even though I feel the same way about the previous six – is by definition questionable, given the chaos of the 1996 government and the unhinged policies and behaviour of the party’s leader. When you are a party delegate, you suffer from even greater tunnel vision than the average partisan voter, and end up completely cut off from reality. The problem is then compounded by low levels of intelligence and general education among the delegates – not all, of course, given that those who voted for Jason Micallef were by far in the minority, but enough to make a difference, as we have seen.

One thing is for sure: we won’t be hearing much of the ‘this government is a minority government’ argument from the Labour Party any more. By the same token, Jason Micallef is a minority secretary-general: far more delegates voted against him than for him.

I always grit my teeth when I hear the expression ‘the good die young’, used in relation to the death of a child or young adult. That’s a distortion of the ancient (and utterly pagan) belief that the gods plucked first those whom they loved most. The most recent meaning of ‘the good die young’ is something else entirely. It comes from William Wordsworth’s The Excursion: “The good die first,/And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust/Burn to the socket.” In other words, the harder your heart is, and the more selfish you are, the longer you live.

Good people tend to worry more about their responsibilities and the consequences of their actions. They are plagued by their conscience. This is a source of stress. Their sense of morality does not allow them to seek benefit for themselves at the expense of others, to trample over others to get what they want, or to forge ahead guided by the motto that all is fair in love and war, or for that matter, any other sphere of human activity. Those ‘whose hearts are dry as summer dust’, on the other hand, feel no such compunction. Their only source of worry or concern is themselves. The only troubles that plague them are concerned with their own personal advancement. They feel no compunction in using and abusing others and the system to get what they want for themselves. Untroubled by worry or feelings of guilt, they tend to fizz on to a ripe old age, oblivious to the harm they are doing, as long as no harm comes to them. Boiled down to its essence, ‘the good die young’ means that worry and stress are major killers, usually of those who have a conscience and a strong sense of duty and responsibility.

That’s what the good die young means, and it’s also a fairly good explanation of what has been happening in the uppermost echelons of the Labour Party over the last 40 years or so. The good die (politically) first, while those whose hearts are dry as summer dust burn to the socket.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.