Parliament and other monkey business
A political commentator or at least a satirist looks for exaggerated deeds to make fun of -- the same way cartoonists look for long noses or exaggerated chins to draw caricatures. George W. Bush therefore was a cartoonist's dream with ears that tended to stick out - and Tony Blair too had a pixy manner.

But to lampoon, those who are lampooned must stand out from the rest of the strait-and-narrow pack. But, this is not happening in Sri Lanka and this places satirists and cartoonists in a great deal of trouble. You cannot caricature or lampoon a political system in which everybody is stark raving mad. There is not much sense for a cartoonist to draw somebody like a monkey for instance, if everybody around the place also look like monkeys.

Or to draw someone's nose like a bald Eagle's beak if every nose around the place looks like a bald Eagle's beak also. Then, try and imagine the predicament of the satirist in a country in which all politicians and public personalities are equally mad. When the JVP tries to burn down the temples, somebody else tries to burn down the churches and all those who promise to change the system end up looking as mad as hatters - - the satirists are in real trouble. Lampooning loses its rationale.

You end up trying to pick the maddest hatter among the mad hatters, and then end up realizing that there are no relative merits when everybody is acting the goat. This condition was best exemplified in Parliament at those opening sessions.

But at least it would have been thought that those such as Mahindananda Aluthgamage were indulging in rowdy behavior because they had missed their school big matches due to the long election campaigns.

But then, there came the campaigns of terror that originated in all media, with Aluthgamage and his like continuing their big match behavior on television, in posters -- in fact, it was as if a whole Cecile. B. De Mille epic of grossing out the public had been cooked upby the producers of propaganda in the Alliance ranks. This was like a Hollywood scare story ten times exaggerated, like the day after Atomic Armageddon. Only, it was the day after Parliament. The day after electing a Speaker.

So lampooning as a craft suffers. There is nothing to lampoon any more, because if Aluthgamage behaves like an overgrown schoolboy, the whole parliament does the same, and there is not much fun when you cannot pick on a particular Billy Bunter among a pack of schoolboys.

Of course suffice to say that even among this pack of political bozos, Sripathi Sooriarachchi stands out as the joker - at least by a wee little bit. On television, he says that there were no missiles thrown by the UPFA front and backbenchers at the Hela Urumaya monks at the opening sessions of the 13th parliament. He says he does not remember any such thing happening.

Maybe he was all excited - - a tyro in parliament - - like a kid on a first day at school or a virgin on a first tryst. But, for a novice in parliament, he was a very loud novice. So loud that he might have knocked dead all his faculties. He was almost as loud as the shirt he wears to the talk shows.

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