Who's Man Enough To Shut Up?

HYPOCRISY and the temerity to flaunt one's impoverished imagination-- which the Cebu City Council has been wearing on its sleeves lately-- got me riled up in my column at the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu (28th of March, 2006). Read on:

Stand Up and Deliver

Show me a man who wears his contentment like second skin, and I’ll show you someone man enough to laugh. Chances are, he might as well be the other side of a cuddly twosome chuckling their way beyond orgasm.

Which makes me wonder where goes the humor of the male-dominated Cebu City Council. Why so grumpy, sirs? Didn’t you hear it said that sexually fulfilled fellas are often spared from waking up at the wrong side of the bed?

Lately, it does seem as though some of our Councilors have been impotent about expressing amusement. Which is sorely needed, come to think of it, in the wake of that below-the-belt reality check from the Asian Institute of Management shutting out our Queen City of the South from among the country’s Top Five cities. That, especially for those with a wet dream about the city’s supremacy, is enough to make one go limp between the legs.

Roll their eyeballs, the councilors do as they raise their hackles against a print advertisement pitching for Penrex herbal capsule. Meant for those suffering erectile dysfunction, the ad offers a picture-perfect example on how to tease the imagination. It shows a bespectacled, naked male bowing his head in discontent while holding and covering his private parts with a cardboard showing a bulldog dozing off. But so extra alert are the councilors- most of them in their late 40s and obviously downhill from their roll-down-the-hay days- to fancy foulness, finding the promotional pitch as “offensive to morals” and “goes beyond the Filipinos’ line of decency.” You bet, they’re not joking!

It fails to demonstrate social responsibility, grumbles Councilor Arsenio Pacaña thumbs down the advertisement in a resolution the Council has approved. As if a capsule with a modest intent to ease sexual discontent ought to also energize the taker to spray his seeds, for instance, in ecological crusades for Mother Earth.

Hey, how about suggesting to Penrex merchants to package their capsule in such a way that it would be a contender for the print category of the Catholic Mass Media Awards? Claim, for instance, that an intake of Penrex would make one more robust about their civic duties as a citizen. Or, how about promising outright that this capsule is all it takes to stand up and deliver? If so, that would make Penrex irresistible even to the councilors themselves who certainly needs all the help they can muster to propel our city back on top. If that happens, surely our councilors would have more reason to be cheerful.

Hopefully, they will take their cue from another full-page advertisement-- a birthday greeting for a Cebuano congressman flaunting his list of achievements. Such display of self-gratification may smack of obscenity to some. But the congressman, raising the hand of Manny Pacquiao-- the epitome of virility to many-- at least looks genial with a grin. There may be other reasons, aside from his political success, why he isn’t frowning.