Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/501315
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 26 APRIL 2015 Opinion 23 the 'piece de resistance' of the great and the good. Just two years ago, that visage we now see – meticulously contorted into a suitable lock-jawed frown – was almost purple as its owner stamped and thundered from a podium, temple-veins popping, while threatening to illegally deport some 200 Eritrean immigrants unless the EU 'did something' about the situation. As for Simon Busuttil, he was last seen descending like a whirlwind onto the Ta' Qali counting hall, wearing an expression of delirious jubilation that might have been designed for him by Bill Henson of the Muppet Show. People looking at the photos on Facebook might have wondered what the heck he was on, and where they might get some for themselves. Well, luckily someone must have nudged him as he entered the funeral hall, and he remembered to whip off the muppet mask and replace it with one of wide-eyed, sombre piety. But that's all it was: a quick behind-the-scenes costume change. This is after all the same Simon Busuttil who (like Joseph Muscat) supported the former Italian government's automatic push-back policy until two years ago, and only changed opinion after that glaring human rights violation was denounced as such by the European Court of Human Rights. In that one, sudden metamorphosis you can almost see the puppet-strings as they jerk the limbs of any politician into motion. Attitudes, like facial expressions, are to be swapped and changed according to the demands of circumstance. If delirious happiness is needed for any strategic purpose, a backstage helper will fumble through the wardrobe and produce the appropriate mask. Ditto for policies: if a court ruling decrees that your old one was against the human rights convention, you simply whip out a new one that isn't, and assume that no one will ever notice. Unlike any Fellini movie, there is no discernible thread of commonality in this constant charade. And much the same could be said for all other representatives of the swelling political elite at that funeral (though not, I concede, the religious representatives: the bishops, imams and Gandalfs have all at least been consistent on this issue.) Commissioner Avramopoulos? The Commission he represents pursues an official policy to make the crossing as difficult as possible for asylum seekers. For years, the individual member states making up the EU have played a tireless game of 'pass the parcel': tweaking conventions like Dublin II here and there, to ensure that their own countries get saddled with as little of the resulting hassle as possible. They have refused to participate in life-saving operations, because it would act as a 'pull factor' for more migrants. They have pumped money into border-control operations, then failed to provide the military assets when requested. Time and again, Europe's leaders have collectively washed their hands of their own responsibility for large-scale human fatalities occurring right on their doorsteps, as a result of their own policies. Yet look at them now: 'visibly moved' by the sheer success of their immigration policies in the case of 24 out of 700 asylum seekers who drowned. Speaking of whom: it is these, the 24 dead people in those (almost) identical coffins, that complete the picture of Fellini-like surrealism. Looking from the living to the dead and back again, there is no question to my mind of which strikes the more 'human' chord. It's the dead, clearly. And this is in itself bizarre, given that the coffins are marked not with names, but with numbers. It is difficult to imagine a more thorough dehumanisation process, than to be reduced by life to a desperate fugitive, then reduced further in death to a faceless, nameless statistic. But even though their presence is conveyed only by a visual correlation – 23 brown caskets for the adults, one white one for the child – the image nonetheless captures aspirations and circumstances that are nothing if not human in their every aspect. The desire for a better life somewhere else. The desperation that would literally drive people literally into the jaws of death. It is a tragic motif as old as humanity itself. But the living? Costumes and masks, nothing more. A stage-managed display for the cameras, before the next change of circumstance necessitates another change of costume behind the scenes. Then it will be all delirious happiness and vein-popping brinkmanship again, depending on what the director's placard demands. And all along, the melancholy harps play on in the background… on…