The system is completely fucked. The people revolting in Egypt are completely going around politicians, around the United States, around the ‘international community’, around Human Rights Watch, around Amnesty, because those are all part of the system. The people who are revolting were born as Mubarak’s regime began and they are breaking the system by simply ignoring and going around it. What’s most exposed here is both the paucity and the value of hypocrisy. The US and international media and international orgs have not really practiced what they preached, but young people have listened anyways. They’ve listened to the language and freedom of democracy and ignored the compromises that adults have made to maintain stability. This is, in many ways, youth remaking their society in the Middle East. It is them applying their hypocritical education, to uncertain results.

This is a short story. It’s not really edited or insanely thought out. I’ve been following the rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt with interest and hope. I’ve long thought of what would happen if a person could maintain (the illusion of) an online presence after they died, and how that could affect events if that person’s death was prominent. This is those ideas together. It’s called ‘The Blogger Who Died’ – There once was a blogger who died. After three days, he rose again on Twitter and Facebook, unleashing a flurry of posts, seemingly everywhere at once, even appearing in photographs, haunting, chastising the government until it crumbled in the face of an illusion more real than itself. And like that, he was gone.

The road from Trinco to Batti is really fucking bad, and then it ends. The flood has washed everything away and it’s like evolving backwards. First you start in a van from Trinco, except a tire blows near Eachchilampattu. The van limps along until it gets to town, but this is really Jeep territory. From there it’s shoes. Then the road is flooded, so it’s bare feet. Then the road is a river, so it’s either boat or swim. By the time you get to Batti, I presume you’d be crawling naked through the jungle. After the rains, entire parts of Sri Lanka have been washed off the map.

To I think uniform ‘WTF?’ within Sri Lanka, RSF and Arundhati Roy have called for a boycott of the Galle Literary Festival. Apparently they want to express solidarity with writers by… preventing writers from speaking. This is honestly an ignorant joke. I have appeared at the GLF and criticized the government, the government media guy has come and gotten liberally yelled at, it’s generally a free space. Whatever these people are doing has to do with their own agendas, nothing to do with free speech or writing in Sri Lanka.

I went to Polonnaruwa today to check out the flood damage. On the way up I had a strange, beautiful dream, I saw three elephants climbing a tea steppe, one with bandaged legs. I also had a dream about Batticaloa as some fanciful Tamil wonderland and I woke up expecting to be there. I was a bit disappointed to find myself in Polonnaruwa. That is, to a degree, the district’s place in flood coverage.

US diplomacy has always been at odds with its stated values. This was always an unknown known, but with WikiLeaks it’s become a known known. So what? The argument is that countries will not have (internally) candid diplomacy anymore. To Julian Assange, this is OK because a nation that communicates less can do less, thus essentially starving the beast. To people from that country (or supporters of) who do want to further that country’s interests, this is somewhat unacceptable. The question is something broader, I think. Without hypocrisy, will there be chaos? Will it all become a naked lunch?

This is a poem. It may seem kinda long because poems cheat with the spacing, but it’s really not. I was reading Galileo on Dante’s Inferno, then bits of Dante’s inferno, then finally Wikipedia, which was a level I could finally stomach. I think that my scholarly sloth would place me in the first level of hell. I somehow got from there to reading about Sheol, the Old Testament concept of afterlife, which sounds eminently reasonable. It is, basically, nothing. I have also long wondered what could theoretically be reconstructed from information. If everything transmits information which is connected to a source, could that source be reconstructed. That is, could one raise the dead. This is a poem about those subjects, and reality TV, and Facebook, and Oprah.

David Brooks has written an intense and slightly strange article in The New Yorker. It begins ‘brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy’ and then proceeds, somewhat lyrically, through the life and love of a middle class American and their discovery of deeper forces and meaning. He continues, ‘Many members of this class, like many Americans generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own.’

The flooding in Batti has gotten very bad and seems to be getting worse. By government estimates there are around 1 million people affected and thousands of homes and farms destroyed. Floods are a creeping disaster and don’t kill as many as, say, the tsunami. Thus they get less attention while still causing severe damage. Pakistan’s floods, for example, and now Australia and Sri Lanka. The tragic thing about the Sri Lankan flood is that its ongoing, relief can’t reach the affected, and people will continue to suffer for months. All without the attention and support a rapid disaster like a tsunami would bring.

The first time I met Lasantha Wickremetunge he was already dead. Like many important people in my life – Kurt Cobain, for example – I discovered him after he was dead. I first saw Lasantha in a coffin, turning the corner from Kirimandala Mawatha onto a crowded Baseline Road. I saw future MP Harsha de Silva walking near the railing and we walked together for a while, exchanging the spoken version of a dejected shrug. I remember the crowd at Kanatte Cemetary. It stretched round the block. Last Saturday, I went to his gravesite again, unfashionably late, this time as a Sunday Leader employee. I saw MP Eran Wickramaratne walking out, and the young editorial staff still around the grave. It wasn’t a massive turnout like before. I know that Lasantha is lost. Sometimes I wonder if he lost.