Nannu replies: nanu, nanu
For much of my life, across the continents, on account of some resemblance to the late actor Robin Williams, which all but I see, I’ve been greeted with “Nanu, nanu”, made famous by Williams playing one of his signature characters, the alien anthropologist Mork.
Now, finally, my luck has changed. I face the prospect of spending the rest of my life being greeted with, “Nannu, nannu”.
It began some years ago, on the trams and buses of the politer reaches of Europe, when nose-ringed teenagers would get up to offer me a seat as soon as I boarded. I blamed my cap, which I threw away, but the miscreants persisted. I am one, they are legion; these days I accept the seat with what I’d like to think is an air of noblesse oblige.
And now it’s spread to many of my readers, who, seeing me say that the role of President of the Republic should not be a role like that of First Nanna, demand to know how I’d feel if I were called a Nannu.
I’m game. It is perfectly compatible with a columnist’s role. It just is not compatible with a president’s.
Beneath the question is a misunderstanding. Some of it is my fault, but not entirely. The gazelle in the room (normally, I’d say elephant, but I’ve learned my lesson) is not Myriam Spiteri Debono, the current incumbent, but our expectations of what she should do or not do as president.
Had I anticipated that the reference to First Nanna would be taken as a snide comment on age and gender, and distract from much else, I’d have not used it. For one thing, I’d have had my neck wrung and hair plucked by my octogenarian mother before the column even appeared. But she got the point at once.
It was never about grandmothers, as such. The point is about whether presidents should speak like a head of family, not head of State.
I made the argument 20 years ago with reference to a man. In 2004, the then new prime minister, Lawrence Gonzi, had suggested a Labour figure, George Abela (the current prime minister’s father), to the opposition’s representative, then deputy leader Charles Mangion.
Mangion blackballed Abela (who only became president five years later). The real reason was internal Labour politics. But Mangion gave the excuse that the president should be a “father figure”.
As I pointed out at the time, it was an odd thing to suggest that Abela, then aged 56 and with two grown-up children, was not a father figure. Lino Spiteri, a retired senior Labour politician and Abela’s supporter, fumed in his column about the invention of a new criterion.
My objection is principled and independent of age or gender. The president should not be paternal, maternal, avuncular, like an aunt or grandparent. Presidents speak as the voice of something whose existence precedes and outlives the lifespan of any family member: the State.
The criticism has little to do with the personal details of a president. We’ve had other grandparents as presidents, some of them rather older than Spiteri Debono. But their rhetoric was different.
Does it matter? Yes. Rhetoric frames the issues. It sets the tone. Its
euphemisms justify evasions, its questions direct or misdirect our attention. It shapes how we think about public affairs.
Obviously there is nothing wrong with presidents speaking of the importance of safeguarding the environment or probity in public affairs. The issue is whether to ground it in a constitutional framework or as homespun advice.
Now consider how Spiteri Debono framed matters. By speaking of personal greed, she framed corruption as individual vice, not system failure.
Well-governed countries have not necessarily reduced personal greed. But they have rules and enforcement that keep it in check and punish illegality. That’s where the core difference lies.
By framing the environmental crisis in terms of teaching children how to love the natural environment, the president misdirected attention. In fact, Maltese children and youth are among the most vociferous in insisting on better environmental protection. Our crisis springs not from insufficient education but from a lack of institutional restraint.
To point out the dangers of using the rhetoric of homespun wisdom is to show one has learned the first lessons taught by movements for workers’ and women’s rights. Historically, they have been very much alive to how framing issues as arising from “personal vices”, instead of system failures, helps perpetuate the problems.
Wittingly or unwittingly, the true character of the problem is disguised.
As a result, it helps perpetuate the status quo.
Of course, no president can address these issues as directly as I have. But the alternative cannot be to speak in misleading ways. Those who would like Spiteri Debono to continue dishing out homespun wisdom are setting her up to fail.
I want her to succeed. She will only do so if she makes the State visible in a country where it sometimes feels halfimaginary. She will fail if the State is obscured by making it seem no different from society and society not much different from a family.
To do that would be to misrepresent what she is. It’s to perpetuate one of the key problems we have as a polity: that personality trumps the rules and conventions of office. That’s a recipe for reducing authority to power.
Am I against the president “speaking up”? Of course not. We need such a president. But she should speak up on behalf of the constitution by declaiming its principles, freedoms and responsibilities.
The constitution is the one thing that truly unites our pluralistic society because it constitutes us as a political body. Let the president be an apostle of constitutional patriotism.
Mork calling Orson: It’s a quaint political planet when those calling for more presidential authority demand it’s shown in ways that undermine it.
Presidents speak as the voice of something whose existence precedes and outlives the lifespan of any family member: the State