?When people are in politics they sometimes get caught in their own way of looking at things. But what is an intensely important issue to me, might not be at all important to others, and vice-versa. For instance, the state of a pavement is not at all important to me, but to an old lady, it could be the difference between life and death.?Above all, he argues, politicians would be wise to extricate themselves from a media morass they sometimes get drawn into.?
I trust the electorate a lot,? he says. ?But there were others who complained about the election result. Somebody wrote on a blog somewhere about the ?bastard electorate?. There was another comment calling the people ?ignorant?. But the people do not just absorb everything they hear and read. They are influenced, certainly, but they are also reflective.?Curiously subverting Marx?s famous views on religion, Briguglio insists that the media are not ?a syringe that drugs people.?
?There is a tendency to assume they vote how they do because they are told to. But this only underestimates people?s intelligence.?On another level, Michael Briguglio also expresses impatience with the sheer polarity of viewpoints. Drawing from his professional work as a sociology lecturer at the University of Malta, he explains that conservatism and liberalism are not necessarily as opposite as they may appear. ?The sociologist Anthony Giddens talks of ?parallel fusion?: a co-existence of the modern with the traditional. In a local context, (Dutch anthropologist) Jeremy Boissevain refers to ?amoral familism?. I don?t see this as a contradiction. It is perfectly possible to be conservative and liberal at the same time. Look at Britain: one of the world?s most advanced countries, and it still has the Monarchy??
http://mikes-beat.blogspot.com/2008/04/long-march-of-new-left.html
