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Sunday, February 22, 2004
Obenieta: If hope were something with feathers
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sun.star Essay
To be cocksure in this country, this so-called “land of the morning,” is to have a spotless mind bleached everlasting with a blast of sunshine.
Under the weather wobbles the stock market. And while the vendors of chickens cluck their tongues in the wings of a bird-flu scare, guess what’s crowing? The certainties of election candidates, yes. And must we buy these?
The worst of times for cynics, who see nothing funny with the fanfare of politics, can also be the best. For trying humor against hopelessness on the way out of uncertainty, at the very least.
Let’s have a good time, shall we? Let’s take the cue from those who fancied the Sphinx were in a playful mood as they made mountains out of this molehill of a mind-teaser: Why did the chicken cross the road?
“To die. In the rain.” Or so Ernest Hemingway hypothetically waxed laconic. “Because it could not stop for death,” thus Emily Dickinson was supposed to have shrugged, inconsolable in the face of the inexorable. As if in concurrence to those downcast about this country’s future, as though it leads nowhere else but to the eternal potholes and dust of Naga-Uling Road.
Would Hemingway and Dickinson have sounded just as melancholic at the sound and the fury with which the supporters of Fernando Poe, Jr. signified the nothingness in their lives at the prospect of his disqualification from the presidential race?
Let there no rain in Da King’s parade, they thundered down the streets. See how they braved the barricades even as the police tried to disperse them with water cannons. In Cebu, FPJ supporters marched from Plaza Independencia to Colon to air solidarity messages. Thus one of their placards proclaimed, “Pinoy si FPJ.” As homegrown, true, as the hot stuffs at Jollibee.
The chicken had to cross the street, presumed the X-Files sleuth Fox Mulder because “it was a government conspiracy.” Now, that’s something FPJ’s legion of fans won’t have a migraine agreeing. Never mind if they seem like a bunch of headless chickens running on empty. In which case, there’s reason for Albert Camus’ existentialist conjecture, as cogent if it were to refer to anyone of Da King’s ardent defenders: “It doesn’t matter; the chicken’s actions have no meaning except to him.”
Eventually, we the electorate would have the leader we deserve. We are what we choose. When will each voter follow where consciousness and conscience lead? Yes, to go to polling precincts in the manner of the chicken that Aristotle assumed must have crossed the road “to actualize its potential.”
True, it has become like a cry in the wilderness why we don’t cast our ballots according to our best lights or why we remain under the spell of entertainers and rabble-rousers. Then again, that might make sense to the louse lost in the hair of Albert Einstein who was presumed to have pondered: “Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.”
But which comes first, the mindlessness of us voters or the heartlessness of our leaders? Now that’s just as good as cracking one’s head on a chicken-and-egg question.
Whatever may come after the elections, who knows? The only thing so far that sounds so airtight are the answers whittled down to the triteness of campaign spiels, echoed to us as if we were kids who must lick our lips at the crackle of fried-chicken skin.
Meanwhile, the air explodes with the excitement of those who bet on their luck. As if the elections were a game for fighting cocks.
(February 22, 2004 issue)
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