Tuesday, April 24, 2007 Obenieta: Not liking it hot By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
PET lovers might as well play with fire, if they’re cold about the veterinarian’s dire caveat in this climate enough to curdle one’s blood.
Beware of dogs or cats. “In heat,” that’s what these creatures usually are during summer when the male of the species travel far in search of a female mate. Be cautious lest you get in their way and whimper out from their fangs glinting under this sweltering weather.
That warning, come to think of it, holds true as well against every cynic’s pet peeve. The most rabid politician, who else?
Unfortunate, however, that anti-rabies vaccine shots are not available for us caught between the biting duels among various candidates.
At the campaign season seethes to a boiling point, even though issues and platforms remain lukewarm between the electorate’s ears, listening to all that jazz—jingles and spitfire clichés—has been no less tormenting as the caterwaul of feline lust at the rooftop or the dog’s moonstruck wail through the wee hours.
Unreason, avers one writer, is easily unleashed among other spawns of discomfort in these days that crackle like coals.
In the haze of heat waves, it’s no sweat to see madness on the loose. (No need to have shivers up one’s spine in memory of the tragedy triggered by Cho Seung-Hui, long languishing in the cold congealed in his heart in the wake of indifference he endured from people around him. Or the comedy in the hands of a Jun Ducat who gnashed his teeth at the apathy of authority.) Especially in this election season when rhyme and reason are hardly in vogue, nothing’s more convenient than cottoning one’s thoughts onto the dry spell of sense.
And that might explain why—in sharp contrast to the sunny disposition of election bets in their campaign posters—any voter who feels under the weather would rather set out on an escapade and stir up his adrenaline somewhere else away from the madding crowd. At the beach, for instance, where it would be easier to construct sand castles than prop one’s prospects in the future upon lofty promises with which politics in this corner of the tropics has long been built.
Cool, if there’s also bikini open showdown nearby to get breezy with even if feminists and the moralists would be clawing out catty or doggone with foam in their mouths.
Watching a skin show, politically incorrect it may be, would be a whole lot better than becoming an audience at the staging of self-aggrandizement and what it takes to be shallow. Sharks can talk, and they are not necessarily out of digitally animated spellbinders out to get you at hello.
No, those out to seduce us won’t do so with such timely topics like “global warming.” Or make us uncomfortable by waxing apocalyptic, for instance, about the abysmal water level in Buhisan Dam (the oldest reservoir in Cebu City). Instead, they’d sidle over us with the routine and refuge of generalization aside from harping as always on the tried-and-tested trance, the razzle-dazzle in song and dance.
A bit of digression: A candidate for councilor in an island north of Cebu suddenly keeled over on the campaign trail. He later died, reportedly a victim of “heat stroke.”
Now, that’s one dismal fate we hope won’t befall on us electorate while the gang of do-gooders drooling for our votes besiege us with their binge of words, words, words to make us feel warm about better days ahead.
Good thing our politicians don’t read weather forecasts, or God have mercy on us.
