A news vaccination against the future
The IRA is laying down arms. Mahinda Rajapakse has been resurrected. The UN names the LTTE as the most prominent violator in recruitment of child soldiers.

What next?? The sun rises from the direction of Mt Lavina? Or you could see it setting from Arugam Bay?
In reality it should have been a week of heartening good news as opposed to unsettling reality. The LTTE being showed the finger by the world’s most respected international body was a good thing. Ten years ago if someone told me that the IRA is laying down arms, I would have called the cops and said there is a lunatic on the loose.

Last week, if someone said Rajapakse is going to be made presidential candidate -- even as he is bleeding like a stigmata from the assault that has been aimed at him by the opposition and the private media -- it would have been obvious that there was not only a lunatic in our midst, but that he was also hallucinating like a stoned hippie.

But, not only was Rajapakse nominated, he was kissed and sent his way by Anura Bandaranaike, who everyone thought was one bad Billy Bunter…

But, even though the news was supposed to be good, this was one hell of a case of information overload. If this was the good news -- the ostensible good tidings -- then take the bad news.

A famine in Niger was raging in part because the global community has ignored the warning by international aid agencies. A Brazilian electrician in London was shot dead in a London train, and as it turned out, he was completely innocent. But the British newspapers behaved as if it was the man’s fault that he had to get in the way of the sober cops for whom distinguishing between a Brazilin electrician and a Muslim suicide bomber was the least of their problems.

Expressing any sense of sincerely felt shock about the death of a totally innocent man was the last thing on the collective British mind.
In the week of information overload, the good news has a stink to it also, like a perfume that is meant to attract, but is in fact reeking and coming out through people’s ears.

If Rajapakse was clean enough to be nominated a Presidential candidate, who floated the theory that he was helping Hambanthota with one hand in the till - - and the other in his pocket?? Or if he was called a crook, then does it mean that to call somebody by that epithet and nominate him the next day for the post of the country’s most powerful person is all in a day’s work?

It seemed the core -- the kernel of sanity in newscasting -- has been consumed last week in the deluge of stories that beat upon our senses.
All that was left was for the wiseacres and wisecracks to come up with a few one-liners, and give the news landscape that ultimately surreal quality that it deserves in a week of such unwieldy information overload.
So, along came Wickramabahu Karunaratne, and made a crack that could make him the undisputed imp of our television times. Bahu told a television panelist from the ultra Buddhist JHU last week that the party should believe in Karuna – of the metta karuna and mudhita variety that’s been expounded in Buddhist teachings.

But instead, the party is paying its obeisance to a different Karuna, a Karuna in the Eastern jungles who used to wear flak jackets. “By far -- the wrong Karuna become important to you,’’ he said, hollering at a JHU man who blushed a deep beetroot.

Making an issue of this information overload is tough. Can anyone karunakarala please tell us what the contours of the state are going to be in the near future, never mind the wisecracks?

One notion that’s currency in water-hole milieu is that Ranil Wickremesinghe has the potential of being one of the worst dictators this country will ever see if he is elected president. Wickremesinghe has earned those stripes, because he is aloof, and he has the Batalanda torture-house thing rightly or wrongly appended to his name.

But, instead of cleaning up his stubborn aloof boy image, he is going on a campaign of sanctimony in which he says that he is of the purest rays-serene. (Take his book on Buddhism, and his image as a player who goes by the letter of the constitution.)What we are being told while this goes on, is that Wickremesinghe has the potential of being a Jayewardene in redux.

But in the context of the information overload, this is a difficult political riddle to resolve. But this was not just the week of the information overload, this was the week of information insanity. Piled upon IRA , Rajapakse and the subway shooting story and all of that was the story of Mervyn Silva. It put the cap on the ongoing tale of high tragi-comedy that’s becoming the regular breakfast in the smorgasbord of Sri Lankan politics.

It’s difficult to fit these pieces together in the jigsaw. One can justifiably ask what has the famine in Niger to do with the unbundling of Mervyn Silva’s bile on a television screen?

It’s simply that both stories were worrying, and part and parcel of a wicked lather that seemed to lubricate the information overload in our news channels, and acres of newspaper analysis.

The ultimate test is that one can watch all this news and still remain sane. All is not lost because this is like an inoculation against what may come. It may be Ranil Wickremesinghe, and it may be that he might or might not become the dictator that some people fear him to be.. Worse things may come to pass, such as another tsunami. But after last week’s inoculation from an overloaded news cycle, I feel I am sufficiently vaccinated against anyone and anything.

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