Good people’s capacity to seek the good in bad people is infinite. Commenters overflowing with empathy were trying to excuse Joe Debono Grech’s utterances at a Labour Party campaign event. He’s senile. He was joking. He didn’t think it through. He wasn’t speaking for the party.
Joe Debono Grech is not some inexperienced guest endorser brought in from fashion, football or the theatre to glamourise a dreary political campaign. Joe Debono Grech is a veteran of politics who played the game for decades. He navigated government offices under Mintoff, Mifsud Bonnici, Sant, and Muscat. He has physically assaulted or threatened to assault MPs from both sides of the house on multiple occasions. He has bullied his way all his life, charming people with an inclination to admire that sort of thing. It is, frankly, ageist and unjustified to suggest that he can’t be held responsible for what he said.
He will have volunteered what he said on behalf of a political party who couldn’t find a better way of delivering a very important message. ‘We’ (the politicians) are corrupt. ‘You’ (the voters) are corrupt. It’s a political marriage forged in the fires of the dry docks all those boiler-suit-ridden years ago.
It wasn’t a very complicated message. Joe Debono Grech told the country all politicians are corrupt. He was speaking as someone who served (though God knows that’s the wrong verb) in Parliament for 50 years. He’s been a politician all his life and he’s worked for, with, and above politicians all his life. It is one thing for some hippy in imitation Rasta garb, or a frustrated shop-keeper to exclaim ‘all politicians are corrupt’. It’s altogether another for a politician to say it on a campaign platform.
All politicians are corrupt, Joe Debono Grech said. They’re all thieves. But Labour thieves are good thieves and thanks to them ‘we’ (the people) benefit. The ‘others’ (PN politicians) are bad thieves.
At the risk of sounding sanctimonious there’s no such thing as a good thief, though that should be obvious.
With his misguided Biblical analogy, Joe Debono Grech turned the logic of redemption upside down. Instead of lifting the bad people to meet the standards of the good, he lowered the good to drown in the muck of the bad.
It simply is not true at all that all politicians are thieves. The thieving politicians want you to believe that because they want the honest ones out of the picture. Honest politicians raise standards to levels the thieves can’t reach. Without the, if you like, ‘holier than thou’, it’s a free for all. Expectations are low and therefore never disappointed.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a dichotomy like Joe Debono Grech wants you to with good thieves on one side and bad ones on the other. It’s not just that not all politicians are thieves because some of them are not Labour. It’s that it isn’t true that all Labour politicians are thieves. Some are there because, struggle as we may to understand that, they think being Labour politicians is the best way for them to render a service to the public.
The thieves in the Labour Party want those good people out of politics as well because they too are a pain in the neck. Look what happened to Joseph Muscat. It wasn’t just the sanctimonious protesters and the hateful Nationalists that brought him down. Joseph Muscat also lost the support of the relatively honest politicians in the Labour Party.
Which leads me to the point I want to make. Joe Debono Grech wasn’t improvising or even speaking for the specific candidate who invited him to the campaign event. His message was the Labour Party’s message, addressed to a very specific portion of the electorate. It’s a message that in its explicitness, its depravity, its clarity, its utter lack of ambiguity, could not be delivered by Robert Abela or an election candidate or even the party TV station. They needed an old soldier with nothing to lose to say it for them.
It’s a message to those people who have been running scared of the PN for all its talk of honest politics, of the rule of law, and of restraining and punishing corruption. They are the people who were told to perceive the PN as negative which translates in this audience’s mind as a government that will shut the door on supplications to have the rules bent for them.
These are the voters who not only don’t really mind corruption. They admire it. They need their politicians to be thieves because they require their complicity when they steal public space with planning permits they should not be eligible to, when they steal public money with sinecures in useless public sector jobs, when they siphon tax money in phoney public contracts.
In other words, Labour made an explicit pitch for thieves to convince them they are the candidates they should choose because, you know, we vote for people we think are like us. The politician’s baby-kissing, każin-cheering image of a ‘man of the people’ (it’s the men who behave like this, not the few women there) only goes so far. There are many voters who don’t care about any of that. They want a politician they can get to, to help them swindle the country.
The bad people get it. The good people agonise over whether Joe Debono Grech was showing early onset dementia, poor man, and wonder if they should vote at all because Bernard Grech is boring.
As this country votes resoundingly to re-elect a political party that shamelessly proclaims that all politicians are thieves, we prove Joe Debono Grech right. Because in a democracy we get whom we choose. In a democracy we elect people like us.