By Cong Corrales
“Oligarch [n]: one of a small group of powerful people who control a country or an industry.” -- Cambridge English Dictionary
I USED to get annoyed whenever a dimwit finds its way into sober discussions on Facebook. Now, I just find ad hominem and non-sequitur arguments hilarious. Specifically, I find it funny how some people have the guts to display their ignorance just so they could push this administration’s contrived narrative.
One such example is a comment posted by a government worker on a friend’s public thread. My friend’s post was simple. It poked fun at how people cheered “wildly” to a song that supposedly espouses Marxist ideals. The song is Buklod’s “Tatsulok.”
Most of the reactions were expectantly sarcastic since the post itself was rife with sarcasm. Suddenly, from out of the blue, a mutual friend reacted: “Digong is about to bring the oligarchs to its knees.”
A guy responded to this with a name: “Dennis Uy.” For those who have been hiding under a rock the past three years, Uy is a tycoon from Davao City who came into prominence as soon as the President stepped into the Palace.
The mutual friend shot back: “Dennis is different from Hispanic and Neo-liberal oligarchs who are sacrificing poor Filipinos (at) the altar of greed. He is Digong’s alternative principled oligarch serving the real people’s interest.”
Naturally, this drew electronic guffaws (read: laugh emoticons). We encouraged our mutual friend to reconsider his position since his argument was untenable at best.
But he kept on digging his own ditch, so to speak. The mutual friend said that in order to topple “oppressive and greedy” oligarchs, you’d need your own oligarch to fight them. He presses on adding that you just make sure that your own oligarch tows to your terms. “People’s interest first before profit,” the mutual friend averred.
By now, it dawned on us that our mutual friend is serious about his “principled oligarch” theory. What we took as a joke was actually our mutual friend’s serious take on oligarchs.
The owner of the original post that spawned this asinine thread pointed out that our mutual friend that the oligarchs that rule now are no different from the oligarchs that ruled then.
“Oligarchy is indeed a class problem as they oppress. No exception. And nobody has the liberty of defining a term that has universal meaning to suit one’s biases. There is a term for that - miseducated, (analogous) to an uneducated, ignorant bigot,” the owner of the account told our mutual friend.
You’d think that this would silence the guy. No, it did not.
The exchanges left me in awe of this mutual friend’s pigheadedness. However, it is his opinion and he has all the right to express them. I also have all the right to express that his opinion is full of bovine excrement. Pfft.
