The Rajpal Abeynayake Column

The Rajpal Abeynayake Column By Rajpal Abeynayake

Tune into the sexually transmitted news
You know there is no election in Sri Lanka when editorialists start writing on the decidedly offbeat, such as the new research that shows artists have better sex lives. They have been going on about such things feverishly in the British papers and the Indian papers in a self-abusive way for a long time now. But not here in Sri Lanka where people have politics for sex also - - well, almost.

Editorialists are feeling pretty anti climactic these days, and are trying to eke out an orgasmic squeal -- editorially speaking -- from writing about sex rather than politics. But the Sri Lankan public is not buying. They want the real thing, which means more politics, because that's what all Sri Lankan's regularly get off on.

This is why we have the post mortem - - the post mortem on the elections, the post mortem on the Mahinda and the Prabhakaran chinthana and the post mortem on these post mortems. Some are writing Prabakaran off, and some are writing him on.

Either way he becomes centre stage, and we can almost see him grinning from ear to ear, as presidential elections are now over and he can move on to his rightful place regularly enjoyed for decades now as the central pivot on which the news industry in Sri Lanka revolves.
Tourism has increased due to Prabhakaran and the tsunami, and this isn't a creative construction of the mind, it has been a statement attributed to tourism wizard Udaya Nanayakkara's gab.

Every little fag-end of a problem or an issue in this country is ethnicized and politicised and this was evident to me when someone recently took off on the subject of airline trips to Jaffna from Colombo and back. He said that these flights were begun by Chandran Rutnam, and then went on to say that Chandran's father was James Rutnam - who as a Tamil historian and humanist had been largely ignored by the Sinhala-centric Sri Lankan intellectual community! Such declamations were aimed at me 80 miles per hour all the while we were on the subject of internal flights from Jaffna to Colombo and back.

Prabhakaran may be bluffing more than spoiling for a fight, and prognosticators may have got it all right on this one, because they have been used to having their antennas tuned to every frequency emanating from the Wanni direction for a long time now. But, it's not the politics of the Wanni or the politics of Colombo that really seem to define the direction of the country. What defines that is the sexual politics of the news.

Which means that the real issues are what are determined as '''sexy'' by the conflict driven media. It was Tony Blair's British government which first defined the sexuality of political news, with the label '''sexed up'' being invented to refer to some of Blair's political problems. "Sexed up'' was coined to refer to the exaggerated reports of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

All these suggestive-of-fornication "sexing up'' of the day’s happenings by the electronic and print media would have been well and good if it was aimed at you for a viagra-like arousal of your news appetite. But the problem is that this sexing-up is something that costs most countries their futures and their very existence.

When the news from the Wanni is sexed up its often the case that foreign news reporters go ecstatic about ''hardline presidents'' or the fact that "the Tamil tigers control over 75 per cent of the north east provinces of this country.''

All of which is a load of bollocks really, as we all know that the Tigers have essentially lost control over the east and do not have control over that province leave alone controlling 75 per cent of it. But what is the net result of it? There is a feverish hyper-ventilation of the news, resulting in such distortions that presidents and entire countries begin to define their politics by what are really non events and non issues.

Take for instance the recent Prabhakaran heroes’ day speech which has been analyzed elsewhere by a writer as a gross repetition of fact; Prabhkaran delivering himself of his usual bile packed with furiously threatened deadlines.

If that was not enough to get people's libidinous appetite for sexed up news on overdrive, there was the real news of the sexuality of the Tamil Tiger being buried and edited out in most news reports as a footnote, because this did not match up with the definitions of the world's news manufacturers.

News manufacturers specially from the wire services want the conflict sexed-up and this is not necessarily the same as talking about the sexuality of the Tanil Tigers, which is actually a downside - - - because the Tigers have been hyped up by the international media as sex forsaking human automatons whose only orgasm is the separate state.
Not so said Anton Balasingham last week -- with a leery speech that is said to have almost mocked the Puritanism of his cyanide carrying Tiger colleagues. He laid out the Tigers for scrutiny and de-romanticized them as matter-of-factly as if he was taking the wrapper off a commercially sold prophylactic.

He said that when he went up for negotiations with the Tamil Tiger team to Thailand the boys took off ''shopping'' in the Thai streets and back alleys, with most of the shopping being an excuse for escapades to check out the girls in the red light areas. The further news at least if reports are correct, is that this defilement of the romanticized Tiger legend has earned Balasingham a bad name from among the hierarchy, where he is now being regarded almost as a pariah of the proportions of a mafia don who has broken his pledge of omerta.

Poor Anton Stlanislaus, all that he did was say that the Tigers are not exactly non-human and he is being cut so much flack for it?? But that's because it interferes with the wavelength and frequency of the ''sexed up'' news, which is not served well by a story that the Tamil Tigers, yes, can sometimes in fact be sexy. The sexed up version in the international wire services is that the Tigers are decidedly un-sexy, and that they get off only on the separate state and the homeland. When that myth is shattered, wire service news manufacturers panic and suppress the news pronto as if they feel their own erogenous news zones are being grossly violated.

They feel news-robbed and news-raped, so they suppress this news about Balasingham's outpourings, and ratchet up the real sexed up-version of the events which is that Prabhakaran is about to get mad at the Sri Lankan government, and lose it altogether. Freak out.

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