Nigeria, March 1 -- I begin by pleading an obsessive problem - media language. As one who is routinely traumatised by encountering his own words reworked into imagined equivalents, duly enhanced and augmented even with the best and honest intentions, but which actually convey the exact opposite of intent, such an obsession is quite understandable. Fortunately, this preliminary is not personalised. I shall proceed, as gently as I can, and through purely fortuitous exemplars from our national media, to a straightforward proposition of just how a national psyche can be programmed, rewired, so to speak, into absorbing the freakish, the grotesque into its digestive system, so that it becomes assimilated as the norm. The process is mostly imper...