Bad news burn-out

Even at the best of times, most of the news is bad and we all develop strategies to deal with it. The most obvious ploy is to avoid the news media completely in the spirit of old proverbs like ‘no news is good news’ and ‘ignorance is bliss’.

To me, however, ignorance is not so much blissful as boring, and no news, far from seeming like good news, gives me a creepy feeling that I’m groping in the dark.

There’s only one kind of news worse than no news at all, as far as I’m concerned, and that’s non-news: that pernicious mix of lies, spin, bias, omission and suppression that so many governments around the world employ to keep their subject people quiet.

But even when I trust the news, sometimes I find myself wishing it wasn’t quite so bad. As in the black week we’ve just been through with the killer bushfires in Australia and the Barisan Nasional (BN) coup in Perak.

I have no idea how the BN-sponsored print and air media are reporting and interpreting events in Perak, as I can’t bring myself to look at them. But from what I can see on the Net, it’s not only a disastrous setback for Pakatan Rakyat and all reform-minded Malaysians, but also utterly incomprehensible.

Is BN, as it appears, upping the ante from its traditional buying of voters to outright purchase of elected members? And if so, who’s going to investigate and remedy the situation?

Thanks to 50+ years of money politics and other forms of creeping corruption, BN dominates and in fact literally ‘owns’ the police, the armed forces, the judiciary, the treasury, the civil service and most of the conventional media.

So, as I went on about at length in my previous column, BN appears well-equipped for getting away with even more murder than ever.

Murder is very much in the news in Australia, too. As Prime Minister Kevin Rudd rightly stated a couple of days ago, the arsonists suspected of starting some of the disastrous fires in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria are, in effect, mass murderers.

But the possible apprehension, prosecution and punishment of culprits will come as small consolation to the hundreds of families who’ve lost loved ones, homes and everything else they owned to the most ferocious fires in the nation’s history.

This disaster was tiny in global terms, of course, and pales almost to insignificance compared with the toll in lives and property taken elsewhere by tsunamis, earthquakes, cyclones and man-made catastrophes like war and terrorism.

And, apart from burning down a shed on a farm that one of my sisters part-owns and recently left, it didn’t affect my family directly.

Futile fire-fighting

I find that I’ve taken it personally, however, as, just as it has contributed to my present bad news burn-out, it has reminded me what a burned-out old fogey I’ve become.

There’s a proud tradition in Australia of volunteering to fight bushfires. And thousands of volunteers from all over the country are out there giving their all as we speak.

Many times in the past I’ve been with them. The first time, I recall, was way back when I was 16. My best mate Dick Mack and I were hanging around at my place one hot day in the school summer holidays when the call for firefighters came through on the radio.

We told my father we were off to volunteer, and he informed us in no uncertain terms that, no, we were too young, and should have more bloody sense. So we waited til he drove off somewhere and hitch-hiked to the volunteer assembly point at Box Hill police station.

The sergeant on the front desk took one look at us and said “thanks, boys, but we don’t need any more right now”. But Dick and I, undaunted as adolescents tend to be, waited til nobody was looking, climbed on the back of one of the convoy of trucks waiting to haul bulldozers up to the fire area, hid ourselves under one of the dozers and eventually arrived at the action.

There were no fire-bombing planes and other fancy equipment back in those days. But after two days and nights of beating-out grass fires with wet wheat-bags, watching helplessly from a safe distance as fireballs engulfed houses, and even, at one stage, taking refuge in a waterhole when the fire roared around and above us in the treetops, we were totally hooked on the thrill and camaraderie of volunteering.

And I’ve done it many times since. But now, far too many years later, as fired up as I get at the prospect or at least the fantasy of getting out there again, I’m afraid I’m not the young hotshot I was. And though I may still blaze away on the keyboard, I’ve long resigned myself to the fact that I’m no longer fire-crew material.

So these days, on top of being very bad news indeed in the shocking toll of life and property they can take, bushfires are a burning reminder to me of my growing age, infirmity and futility.

I also feel pretty futile in the face of Malaysia’s leading source of bad news, BN. However hot under the collar we would-be reformers get about BN corruption, nepotism, incompetence and criminality, the news only keeps getting worse.

And criticism that’s judged too inflammatory or incendiary, like the Bersih, Hindraf and other rallies and Raja Petra’s writings, are extinguished with fire-hoses and a steady stream of sedition charges.

Despite the best efforts of a growing band of journalists and bloggers devoted to fighting fire with fire, BN sometimes seems destined to remain bad news forever. Unless, like even the most hellish bushfire inevitably does, it runs out of fuel or, in BN’s case, hot money - and finally burns itself out.