Bald truth

KALBONG WALANG MODO, HUWAG IBOTO!

Big bold letters scream atop the grimacing mug of you-know-who in all his Johnson-waxed shining baldness. Ready for both the web and the printing press. Ah, sweet revenge, devilishly grinned some local mediamen.

Truth is, I personally disapprove of it, dousing ice-cold water on the burning enthusiasm of the graphic artist so proud of his creation. It is politically incorrect, a pejoration of all the follically challenged.

But no sweeping generalization there, the artist grumbles, the qualifying “WALANG MODO” plus the distinguishing photo exacting the limit of its extent to you-know-who and none other.

Ay, you are too young to know the ramifications of baldness, which go way beyond the physical attribute of hairlessness.

In our youth, we innocently chanted: “Isa, dalawa, tatlo/ ang tatay mong kalbo/ pumasok sa banyo/ nabasag ang ulo.”  And laughed to our young hearts’ delight at some misfortune as though inhering in that father’s baldness. So cruel. 

Then, there is the common retort to any bombed-out joke: Nagpapatawa, hindi naman kalbo.

The great comedians of yore from Pugo and Togo to Pugak and Pipoy had billiard balls for heads. Hence, baldness becoming a requisite for laughter. Which degenerated the state of baldness as only good for laughs, never for anything serious; only for the insipid, never for the intellectual.

At the other extreme, again per movie stereotyping, baldness equals toughness,

meanness, savagery. As in Bruno Punzalan, the perennial Japanese berdugo in the war pictures of Fernando Poe, Jr. where the brutalized FPJ singlehandedly defeated the whole Japanese Imperial Army.

In between though, some laughable meanness of the baldy baddie finding manifest in Doctor Evil and Mini Me in the Austin Powers film series.  

No laughing matter however is the descent of baldness to depravation with the clean shaven death row convicts – ready for the electric chair – appending heinously criminal element to plain hairlessness.    

As there’s nothing funny, fearsome much less criminal in the de-follicled you-know-who, it is best to just discard that don’t-vote-for-him graphics.   

If you so insist – bound by your duty to let the voting public know what kind of man they may end up with as their representative for the next three years – then I say GO, just delete “KALBONG WALANG MODO.”

Why still write the obvious? That phrase is but a redundancy of the photo underneath – the same one published in the front page of Punto!.

A picture truly  worth a thousand and one words, with abusive, arrogant, bald, braggart, brat, cocky, calculating, discriminatory, disrespectful, egg-headed, elitist, flamboyant, flare-uppy, galling, grumpy, hairless, haughty, highhanded, ill-humored, ill-tempered, impetuous, jeering, juvenile, knocker, know-it-all, leery, lofty, master, miser, nasty, niggardly, obdurate, offish,  pompous, pugnacious, quarrelsome, quirky, rabid, repulsive, rude, snobbish, snooty, testy, tightwad, unapologetic, unrepentant, vainglorious, vindictive,  whimsy, wrong, xeric, yahoo, yuck, zero, and zilch but only token representation of the letters in the English alphabet. Zaldy A’s look-alike and the foremost visionary in the local media gasping for air after the litany of verbiage there.

The photo is the message itself. “HUWAG IBOTO” but the kicker. Just make sure the voters won’t mistake him for Cris Garbo.