Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1337056
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 7 FEBRUARY 2021 Raphael Vassallo OPINION Some things (literally) never change… ONE of the advantages of spending a year in COVID-induced solitude, is that it al- lows plenty of time to catch up on a little reading. And because I have developed an interest in archetypal literature – driven, in part, by a belief that human nature has not really changed all that much, in literally thousands of years – much of that time has been spent re-discovering some of the old- est narratives known to man. Right now, I am roughly half-way through Homer's 'The Iliad' – written around 750BC, but based on events that are sup- posed to have occurred some 500 years ear- lier – and though it might have something to do with the translation, there are mo- ments where it feels uncannily as though it might have been written just yesterday. This, for example, is an excerpt from one of the many quarrels between Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, and his wife Hera: HERA: Which god has been hatching plots with you this time, you arch-deceiver? How like you it is to wait till my back is turned, and then cook up some secret schemes, on your own […] ZEUS: Remarkable! You can never stop 'supposing'. I can keep no secrets from you, can I? But there is nothing you can do about it […] so shut up and obey me, or it will be worse for you… And… well, there you have it, I suppose. A lot of things may have changed, in the three-thousand or so years that separate us from the classical age of Gods and Heroes; but the way husbands and wives tend to ar- gue, it seems, is certainly not one of them… Same goes for the things they tend to ar- gue about. Perhaps unsurprisingly - given that the Olympian gods were invented by mortals, in their own image and likeness – this tiff happens to be a reflection of a real (and much more plausible) argument taking place among the Greek army, en- camped before the walls of Troy. Not to drag up that ancient dispute again, all these centuries later: but here, too, there is something remarkably contemporary about the tone of the exchange. Consider, for instance, how the Greek champion Achilles reacted to King Agam- emnon's decision to relieve him of one of his (female) Trojan captors… prompting him to 'throw a strop', and withdraw from the fighting altogether: "You drunkard, you, with your eyes of a dog and the heart of a doe! You never have the courage to arm yourself and go into bat- tle with your men… you'd sooner die!" Yikes! Once again, it has all the flavour of an angry Facebook comment, typed out in the heat of an online argument (with the difference, I suppose, that Homer didn't have a Caps-Lock button, back then; and at least, he knew how to actually spell his insults…) But it's not just the tone of what is being said in those lines: it's also the context. At this point, the Trojan war had already been dragged out for a full nine years… and the Greeks were no closer to breaching those walls, than when they had first arrived. Today – with the benefit of roughly three millennia's worth of hindsight – the rea- son seems obvious enough. They were too busy arguing among themselves (and even then, over trivialities), to remember the tee- nie-weenie detail of who their enemy actu- ally was; and why they were actually at war with them in the first place. So it fell to old, wise Nestor to diplomati- cally remind them (in a way that they would both, naturally, go on to ignore): "What can I say? This is indeed enough to make Greece weep! How happy Priam and his sons would be, how all the Trojans would rejoice, if they could hear you at each oth- er's throats: you, the two best Greeks, when it comes to fighting and giving advice…" OK, at this point you might have realised where all this is leading up to. I'll admit that it might be slightly facetious – if not down- right blasphemous – to draw parallels be- tween Malta's contemporary political situa- tion, and an archetypal war that has literally resonated across three thousand years of Western cultural history… … but the similarities are undeniably there; and Nestor's advice holds just as true for today's circumstances, as it did for the Bronze Age. Briefly put: an army cannot expect to win a war, if its generals invest all their energies in bickering among them- selves. Likewise, a political party cannot expect to win an election, if… well, you can work out the rest for yourselves. And yet, I'll be struck by a thunder-bolt from Olympus, if that's not exactly what's happening among the rank and file of the Nationalist Party today. Take, for instance, the latest internal PN tiff to spill out into the open: this time, over a sectional committee election that was supposed to take place in Sliema this weekend… in other words, the sort of internal party matter that is so mundane and inconsequential, it normally doesn't even get reported at all. On this occasion, however, the election was overshadowed by a call – made on the PN's official Sliema committee page, no less – for a block-vote against candidates perceived to be from the 'pro-Adrian Delia' (and therefore 'anti-Bernard Grech') fac- tion. "Those who are pleased at the rapid rate of progress the party is making under Ber- nard Grech's leadership should elect to its sectional committees those members who were at the forefront of electing him and welcoming him with open arms," the mes- sage read. And in case the intention wasn't made clear enough the first time: this was fol- lowed up by a 'private' WhatsApp message, which – like most private WhatsApp mes- sages these days, it seems – ended up plas- tered all over the world-wide web: "Trust you are well. I am writing to alert you that Tony Galea, John Pillow, An- ton Debono etc. have cast their candida- ture in the Sliema committee to oust the pro-Bernard Grech committee. They are anti-Daphne etc and they still call Adrian Delia their leader…" The upshot was that those nine 'pro-De- lia' candidates all withdrew from the elec- tion (which, as a result, will not take place at all)… and meanwhile, over on the other side of the Grand Harbour, the PN's en- tire Bormla committee resigned en masse, in solidarity with their counterparts from Sliema. Taking into consideration the sheer sym- bolic undertones of those two localities – Sliema being a traditional PN stronghold, and Bormla being the very opposite – it seems that the Nationalist Party has chosen a path that could only ever weaken itself, in the two areas it most needs to shore up support. Much more damningly, however: it also seems that - not content with having oust- ed Adrian Delia himself, in an acrimonious leadership contest last October – the pro- Grech faction is now intent on weeding out the last vestiges of the former leader's fan- base across the entire party… forgetting, in the process, that these still represent a tidy 31% of the PN's support as a whole, accord- ing to the results of that same election. Exactly what they were hoping to achieve, as a result of this dog-eyed, doe-hearted scheme, I something not even the wily Od- ysseus could possibly figure out. What they did achieve, on the other hand, is some- thing remarkably similar to the impasse the Greek army found itself in, as a result of Ag- amemnon's foolish decision to antagonise Achilles. As one of the nine thwarted Sliema can- didates put it himself, in an aggrieved Face- book post: "It is very disheartening to read personal attacks […] Such communications only send a very negative message that can only lead to individuals taking their dis- tance even more from the Party. […] At this stage, given the level of divisiveness in the campaign, we feel that it will be impossible for us to achieve the level of unity, engage- ment and positive energy we wanted in or- der to drive the Party's agenda forward in our locality"… It might be a little more diplomatic than Achilles' furious outburst, above; but the ef- fect is still more or less the same. A not-in- significant slice of the Nationalist Party's Sliema (and Bormla) support-base will now – just like the Greek champion, 3,000 years