Can I kick it? Yelkouan!

For such a small country with such a deep-rooted reputation as being immutable and set in its ways, Malta has a habit of constantly surprising you with tales of the utterly unexpected.

This week, for instance, Birdlife Malta released a video showing a pair of brooding Yelkouan Shearwaters fighting off a solitary intruder from their subterranean nesting site, somewhere on the cliffs of Majjistral Park. Perhaps it is an indication of precisely how boring this election campaign has been, but I personally found this distraction to be among the most fascinating things I have seen in years.

OK I know what you’re thinking. Yelker WHAT? Wasn’t that a dance floor sensation sung by Mory Kante in the 1990s? But wait, it sounds more like that song by A Tribe Called Quest: “Can I kick it? Yelkouan!”

There: one sure-fire way to both memorise the name, and also to start uncontrollably tapping your foot to one of the most irritating tunes in dance music history, played endlessly on a loop in the iPod of your subconscious. 

But back to the video, in which two Yelkouan shearwaters can be seen taking turns to incubate a single egg: their only offspring of the entire year. Yelkouans, by the way, are rare birds by any standard; Malta possesses one of the largest single colonies in the Mediterranean, and while I don’t know the exact population the numbers are certainly not astronomical.

Of course, the birds in the video don’t actually know any of that. But like most other living things, they approach the responsibility of parenthood for all the world as if they were the only breeding pair left on earth. Given the treatment of birds and other animals by the island’s largest and most numerous predator – Man the Destroyer – I would say that is a wise strategy on the Yelkouans’ part.

But the challenge in the video does not come from humans. It comes from a fellow Yelkouan shearwater who – by accident or design (most likely by accident) – stumbles upon their underground nest, and is greeted by a truly ferocious display of territorial aggression.

OK, it’s not exactly a charging rhinoceros, or a cheetah at full sprint; but the sight (and especially the sound) of an infuriated pair of Yelkouans, fighting for the survival of their own genetic information in a fiercely competitive world, is nonetheless a spectacle to behold. I for one will certainly think twice before ever disturbing Mama and Papa Yelkouan again in future. I have no doubt the hapless intruder will feel the same way as he preens, defeated, at his peck-wounds.

But it is not so much the individual struggle that impresses the viewer; it is the underlying tableau that is also represents. To suddenly discover that the earth one treads upon so thoughtlessly each day also conceals a little-known underworld of rich biodiversity in its own right – a battlefield on which the timeless struggle for survival relentlessly plays itself out on a loop of its own – is a little like unexpectedly striking oil in your own backyard.

There I was, marvelling at the sight of polar bears in the Arctic, or reindeer migrating through the untold expanse of the Tundra, on documentaries such as David Attenborough’s Life on Earth… only to suddenly realise that the exact same epochal struggles also take place each day, invisibly, just a few metres beneath my own feet.

I don’t know about you, but armed with this knowledge I find it increasingly difficult to take seriously the ongoing political struggles we are invited to participate in each day ourselves. How can one truly empathise with emotional appeals to help a party win an extra seat in a largely irrelevant European parliament, when one has just witnessed an impassioned, visceral struggle for the very survival of one’s entire species in the theatre of life?

And this brings me to a second reason why I thought the video was not only intensely fascinating, but also very timely. I couldn’t help finding it all vaguely familiar. Two little dickie-birds take turns to sit on an egg. Along comes a third little dickie-bird, innocently enquiring whether he can join in the fun… and, WHACK! SQUACK! SCREECH! SQUAWK!... the poor little bugger is literally pecked and harried out of the picture, to a noise that sounds suspiciously like an army of babies wailing in the distance.

Hm. Now where have I seen this sort of behaviour before? Why, on billboards at every street corner, every five years (now, with local and European elections thrown into the mix, every other year) for the past… oh, forever. It is in fact almost indistinguishable from the ongoing and entirely territorial dispute that Malta’s endemic political struggle has now become. And as the election campaign that fizzled out last Friday so emphatically illustrated, it is a struggle that is also becoming shriller and more hysterical with each passing election. 

More dishonest, too. It transpires, for instance, that door-to-door campaigners from the lesser parties in this election still encounter the same old lie that cross-party voting automatically invalidates one’s vote. I don’t know what disturbs me more about this: the fact that the Nationalist and Labour Parties still resort to blatantly lying about the electoral system, in a bid to fight off rival birds of a different feather; or the fact that people are still bird-brained enough to actually believe such an easily falsifiable statement.

Either way, this practice adds one more article to the overwhelming body of evidence that the two main political parties in this country – just like the Yelkouans in that video – consider Malta’s assets to be their own private egg, to be incubated for their own private benefit. And they believe this blatant falsehood very earnestly, too.

Both Nationalist and Labour parties are deeply immersed in their own childish mythology to the extent that they themselves – alone and single-handedly – actually built this country out of nothing. So their attitude towards it is every bit as aggressively territorial as a pair of threatened boobies.

At times, to be fair, the same misplaced territoriality can also be amusing. This time it fell to the PN to produce the only memorable publicity stunt in an otherwise crashingly boring campaign… the Panini sticker album of Joseph Muscat’s dream team, with its collectible stickers of party apparatchiks plugged into the machinery of the State.

As gimmicks go, this one leapt right to the heart of a purely local (and, it must be said, predominantly male) culture with which we can all more or less relate... our equally childish and territorial attitude towards football, just weeks away from the World Cup. So all in all: a great idea, highly entertaining, much fun, etc. Until you look a little more closely at the stickers themselves.

Among the list of people who are (in Beppe Fenech Adami’s words) guzzling away at the government’s trough are Renee Laiviera, current chairperson of the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality, as well as a member of the Commission against Domestic Violence. The blurb accompanying her entry informs us that she is the daughter of the late Labour MP Nestu Laiviera.

In actual fact, she is his daughter-in-law: a fact that should have been self-evident, given that her son, also surnamed Laiviera, is on the same list. But then again, who cares about being accurate? This is just satire… which means you’re entitled to simply lie about people and get away with it.

What the blurb doesn’t mention, however, is that Renee Laiviera was also chairperson of the Malta Confederation of Women’s Associations for years… and that, in March 2012, she became the first Maltese woman to be elected to the executive council European Woman’s Lobby. So obviously, her appointment to two commissions dealing specifically with women’s issues can ONLY be attributed to her tenuous connection to a distant, shadowy Labour figure… a connection which turns out under scrutiny to be misrepresented anyway.

Another of the PN’s blacklist of evil spongers is Cher Engerer, who specialises in child psychology and has often been quoted by newspapers in that capacity. She has been appointed as a member of the National Commission for the Family. No prizes for guessing the political connection here. Cher is, as the album reminds us, a cousin of former Labour MEP Cyrus Engerer.

Curiously, however, no mention is made of the fact that Cyrus Engerer had himself for years been a promising PN candidate (at one point the Nationalist deputy mayor of Sliema: the most quintessentially Nationalist town on the island) – which means that his cousin technically comes from a PN, not a Labour background. Nor does it mention the fact that Cher Engerer is a qualified child psychologist in her own right, which makes her eminently eligible for the post at hand.

But why bother with such trivialities? The only important thing is that Cher Engerer happens to be distantly related to someone who is now (but only now) militating within Labour. Everything else – including the personal capacities and qualifications of a human being, in a country where human beings are the only real resource – is simply chased out of the nest in a flurry of feathers.

Similarly, umbrage was taken at the appointment of Mario Salerno, the former Labour mayor of St Paul’s Bay, as chairman of the National Organic Agriculture Commission (no, I didn’t we had one either). Salerno’s grave crime, according to the Panini code, is that he is a Labourite. The fact that he is also president of the Malta Organic Agriculture Movement is naturally neither here nor there.

In his case, it transpires that the satire misfired for another reason. Contrary to the widespread perception of all such appointees as leeches sucking the country’s lifeblood dry, it turns out that the chairmanship of the NOAC is actually occupied on a pro bono basis. Salerno does not receive a government salary at all.

Again, this is just sloppiness. As with Renee Laiviera’s family connections, a very easily verifiable detail went unverified. But the real trouble is another. Sift through the entire sticker album and weigh the implications, and the simple truth that emerges is that anyone who occupies any form of public position can now be tarnished and impugned with all sorts of malicious intentions… simply on account of not being a good Nationalist.

The only possible conclusion from that exercise is that the Nationalist Party somehow views all those supposed ‘national’ positions as its own inviolable territory… and therefore will come squawking screeching and creating a big flap, if any other bird makes the mistakes of assuming it can simply waddle into ‘their’ nest and sit on ‘their’ golden egg.

Of course, it doesn’t help much to remember that the Labour Party behaved the same way when it wasn’t their turn to sit on that egg. Then as now, the party machinery systematically attacked any individual who accepted a public nomination… thus confirming that the PL likewise considers Malta to be nothing more than its own personal nest, to be feathered with its own regurgitations.

There is, however, a difference between the two scenarios. Unlike the Yelkouan shearwaters’ very real and very threatening dilemma, this same consistent drive to oust political intruders from the nest of power – with equally babyish background noises – lacks any sense of legitimacy. The Yelkouans have every right to be aggressive and uncompromising; that’s their own goddamn egg they’re defending.

The same cannot really be said for the pair of political parties which behave exactly the same way when threatened in their own caves. The egg that they take turns to sit upon – and fight so viscerally to control – is not actually theirs at all. ‘Intruding’ political parties have every right to stake a claim to it, as do all citizens who accept offers to serve on public commissions and boards.

We were, after all, hatched from the same egg ourselves. And this cave is belongs as much to us as to any political party, no matter how loudly they screech, squawk and flap.