Tuesday, September 30, 2008 Obenieta: Bring us booze By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
LET me drink to this giddy declaration of faith: God looks after fools, drunkards and the United States.
Though that high note of soused-up spirituality is attributed to Anonymous, it strikes a common chord smack in this American season gone off-key in the midst of financial insecurity. You bet, bartenders need not worry anymore if they can’t comfort their customers with a quote from Lord Byron (“Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication.”). All they have to do be companionable is to break the ice by bringing up today’s hottest topic. The US economy, oh yes.
Man, if those financial institutions are now running on empty and tottering down a dead-end, could it be because a party of alcoholics has been calling the shots at Wall Street?
Steroids for sobriety, however, seem to be in short supply. “Market fear has gripped cities across the Southeast,” says a report. Motorists are jumpy, jostling at gas stations and causing “sporadic shortages and temporary shutdowns” in the wake of banks and investors hoarding what remains of cash. “When those basic assumptions of your daily life— such as gas being available or the safety of a money-market fund—are violated, it sends you a shock and you do get emotional, irrational reactions,” says Dennis Jacobe, chief economist for Gallup Inc. It’s a wonder people didn’t go out and empty the grocery store shelves, echoes a Nashville resident.
Panic is a protective instinct, according to a professor of clinical marketing at the University of Southern California.
Being defensive is the better part of valor. Thus agree the leaders of barangay Pasil whose version of clinical marketing, with the help of the Cebu City Council, would have them imposing a P1,000 fine on those found in a “state of drunkenness.”
That happens when one can cause “undue disturbance and discomfort” for being “incoherent, unsteady in movement and lacking in restraint.” Yes, like those white-collar clique at Wall Street.
Hopefully, the ordinance would purge the place—notorious as a criminals’ nest—of drunks and street thugs. Oh, if only they’d take their cue from my friends and yours truly, whose spell of timidity can be broken only by hell-bound and hair-raising binge at the videoke. Or, by nodding off our hangover heads to the words of Charles Bukowski, the “poet laureate of the gutter,” who once said, “When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.”
Considering the domino effect of economic distress throughout the world, it’s likely competition among robbers and pickpockets would become more cutthroat. And so one of Pasil’s hardboiled hoodlums may try begging as a less atrocious alternative. I hope, however, that he will be as less threatening as one beggar in New York who let what’s written on the cardboard be all he needed to make a pitch, boozy does it, for his urgent outreach: “Need cash for alcohol research.”
