30 March 2003

Information Fatigue

I was on edge all day yesterday, and I'm pretty sure I know why. It is the media coverage I turned to the TV last night to channel 57. I was tired, suffering from vicarious combat fatigue, and later, basketball overload. There is too much information. The last time it was like this was at the height of the sniper attacks here in Washington, when we began to claw for information of the latest sighting of the white van, and the most immediate information on the wounded and the dead. I needed to back away from the information stream The prime cable movie was The Lion in Winter, an excellent old film with Kate Hepburn still radiant and Peter O'Toole at the height of the power he spent so dissolutely thorugh the rest of the century. I watched for a while, hoping to see my favorite line, when Kate is sprawled on the paving stones of an ancient castle, and looks deep into the camera:

"Every family has its problems," she says.

When I first saw it in the theatrical release a couple decades ago, the line brought down the house.

I didn't make it. I turned off the media just about nine and walked back to the bedroom. The shirts I had purchased that afternoon were carefully moved from the bed to a neat pile on the floor. I looked up into the darkness and the next thing I knew it was four in the morning. I felt good, relaxed, rested. I luxuriated in how good it felt to have slept. I remember not sleeping for a week at a time, catnaps only, nerves sandpapered by fatigue as all the kids in the Gulf are feeling now. If they aren't moving they are asleep. In HumVees and in ditches and on gravel. I am not sure I could do it any more, not without the treacherous cocktail of coffee and the adrenaline of fear.

By contrast I am now living the Life of Reilly. My week was only 66 hours at the office. The commute isn't bad, so really I only was occupied with the job for about seventy hours this week. I shouldn't feel so drained, I thought, and I rolled over and slept again until almost five.

The gray light came up and the night transitioned into a misty cold morning. The radio has nothing for me on a Sunday, only classical music. Normally that is soothing, and I like the tranquility of a Sunday morning. But something might have happened while I slept. I turned on the TV and clicked to CNN. I began to fill up on data and the status of military operations, spread of the pandemic, results of the games. The day is sliding into nightfall over there, the light bright and westering on the tanned faces of the commentators near Kirkuk. Mosul and Irbil are secure in the hands of the Kurds and some US paratroopers.

To the south, An Nasariya is secured by the Marines, or almost, they say. The Iraqis fire information counter-battery, still holding press conferences in some bunker, their spokesman a cut-out Saddam in his beret and bushy mustache. He says they have destroyed three tanks and a helicopter, and that suicide bombing will continue. The Iraqi information ministry says that suicide bombings will increase, and that we have misjudged the regime's resolve.

The case of Basrah, Iraq's second largest city has been turned over to the Brits. They are calm and methodical today. They are calling in close air support and this morning claim to have killed 200 fighters in a makeshift command center and captured an Iraqi general officer. I am confident they will wrap this city up with phlegmatic professionalism, their troops led by officers who learned their application of the city trade on the streets of Belfast during The Troubles.

The Iraqis are not the Irish. The Brits will secure the city.

There are only two other stories that intrude into the stream of the war. The network reports that the mystery disease of SARS continues to spread, yesterday's news at my office, but news to the rest of the world. Health officials are doing what they can, handing out leaflets at airports. I am amazed that there is no more intrusive power available to contain the movement of sick people. The right of confidentiality remains supreme; the Canadians cannot even walk down the line of embarking passengers looking for sniffles. Strange. It has killed 54 people so far and all we can do is ask people to voluntarily stay home. Carlo Viroli, the World Health Organization physician who was the first on the scene to idenitify it in Hanoi, got it himself and died yesteday.

In the other story, sandwiched into the white pick-up that drove into a line of US troops queued up at a PX in Kuwait City and the latest belt-bomber at a cafe in Israel, I find the morning light has devastated my picks in the office pool for the NCAA tournament. I was doing great, missing only six correct winners in the first round of sixty-four. Then of the thirty-two who advanced into round two, nearly 100% correct through round two, when sixty-four teams are reduced to thirty-two. I was correct on thirty picks. I cruised into the sweet sixteen with twelve correct. Great Eight round. I had positioned myself to scoop up literally dozens of dollars in the office pool through an intensive research process that occupied nearly five minutes at my desk. But now my careful research lies in ruins, my only hope now pinned on Texas, and Oklahoma in the Final Four.

I need to stop this and get on with the morning. General Tommy Franks is holding a press conference at 0700 Eastern Standard Time to fill me in on the official version of March Madness. It's news I need to know. There is a lot to absorb today, before we get to Monday again.

I need to pace myself. I don't want to get fatigued.