The Cock Fight Crowd

It is fiesta time here. My hillside barangay joins the celebration in proper fashion, arranging for baptisms at the small church, putting up banners and decorations, fattening up on feast day, and dedicating four days to cock fights, from 2 to 5 in the afternoon.

Sufficient time to kill a decent number of chickens.

Now the first time I observed this crowd, I saw it as a bunch of drunken macho malcontents with nothing better to do than waste their time and money watching chickens peck each other to death.

But since then then I have installed better glass in my cross-cultural window. I have come to appreciate the enjoyment attached to cock fights.

Oops . . . wrong photo gallery . . .

I saw people I respect there this year and it opened my eyes and brain. I saw the mason who built my home, the neighbor from whom we bought our land, the barangay captain, and the woman who has become my wife's best friend. And yesterday my wife was at the arena. She quickly lost her P150 betting allocation but she had fun doing it. And she had the nerve to tell some guy standing next to her to kindly put out his cigarette because SHE did not want to die young sucking in his smoke.

He put it out, laughing at her or with her. Which is not exactly clear.

That was a major clash of cultures, eh?

When cock-fights become official non-smoking establishments then all cultural norms will have been ripped from their foundations.

And I confess, too, that I like tuba. It flows more amply than water about the cock fight arena.

It is one of the few alcoholic beverages that, in concert with my ample blood pressure medications, do not give me headaches. I'm sure because it is coconut juice, not really liquor, eh? Besides, my father-in-law sells the stuff, and he is a good guy.

Furthermore, I like the drunken men's table under the mango tree where we can get away from the mindless natter of those ridiculous women. And talk about the ones we would like to, umm . . . date . . .

So I now appreciate cock fights. I don't attend them myself because too many people stare at me and the introverted, self-contained private Me rebels against that. But I concede that a cockfight is good fun.

Divorcees in action . . . how we humans are
not much different than chickens . . .

It was just a twist of heritage that gave the Philippines lots of chickens and not so many horses and steers and bulls for bull fighting and rodeo. And there are zero horse-race tracks hereabouts as near as I can tell. If Manila has one, the Inquirer doesn't report race results in the Sports section. Anyway, the horses I've seen are smaller than a lot of the pigs. And they probably couldn't outrun them, either.

So chickens it is.

Given my cultural enlightenment, perhaps next you'll find me parking in the middle of the National Highway when it is convenient, or letting my dog roam free to impregnate the rest of the dog world hereabouts, or tossing my trash out the window for someone else to pick up. I already find relief along the roadside now and then. It is really convenient.

It's a style, for sure . . . some aspects better, some worse than the sanitized and rule-bound western norms.

Footnote in history: Catalonia, Spain today held its last bullfight. Animal rights people won the achievement by characterizing the tradition as "barbaric". There is no truth to the rumor that they will now turn their attention to chickens.