THUS Magazine

Several Latin American leaders have reported the same disturbing hallucination. A rumpled fat man with a very large head, dressed in a cheap suit and badly-knotted tie turns up unannounced and tries to get them to commit to spending vast sums of money, which they do not have, on unspecified things which they do not need. ‘At first I thought it was the Man from Del Monte,’ said an anonymous victim, ‘but he insisted his mission was bigger than pineapple chunks and concerned nothing less than saving the world’s poor from the wasteful antics of the world’s rich. I pointed out that it was ‘white men with blue eyes’ who had caused the problem. At that point he took out his false eye and said “well in that case, it wasnee me.” My friend Cristina Kirchner says he recommended ‘quantitative easing’ but it sounded like Peronist hyper-inflation. When she politely asked him about the Malvinas, he said; “Exactly. Remember the Belgrano. Vote yes to excess and nobody gets hurt, Evita.”

‘When I recommended that he went to see President Chavez of Venezuela, who has vowed to cut spending on mobile phones, parties, cakes, pointless trips abroad and wasteful public projects, the Man from Del Monte said Hugo was a publicity-crazed megalomaniac, friend of someone called Red Ken, only interested in nationalising banks and keeping global assets such as oil and gas to himself and helping troublemakers like Cuba, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Besides, only the top 20 countries by GDP were invited (including the EU, which wasn’t yet a country). 

“The Man from Del Monte promised plenty of snatch squads, riots and mayhem, tasers and coshing just like the old days in Latin America. “These people dinna ken that giving billions of dollars to bankers would help the world’s poor,” he said. “But look at Fred Goodwin. He rose from poverty to become the UK’s highest paid pensioner – and he’s only 50.” I said I was unaware of this Fred Shred man, but that his friend George Soros, who had helped the UK in the past by selflessly keeping it out of the European Monetary System and making $1 billion dollars on the side, had said that the focus should be on the developing economies. I said that Mrs. Merkel had put two fingers up to his proposal that Germany become a Weimar Republic again, and that the world’s bond markets had failed to see the logic of his masterplan, failing to buy less than £2 billion of UK gilts. “The world’s poor bankers won’t forget that,” he growled, “and neither will the Bilderberg boys if you don’t join the coalition of those willing to spend recklessly and print pretend money – you did it in the past, why not now?” When I asked him if Barack Obama was coming, the Man from Del Monte, he say “Yes. I’m taking him to dinner at a jive club and buying him an Arctic Monkeys T shirt. Plus, the police have orders not to stop his car when he travels through Brixton.”  ”Why didn’t you say so earlier, fat boy, I’ll be on the next plane,” I said, “But why are you holding your G20 photo opportunity in a horrible docklands warehouse in a bankrupt country?” “It’s symbolic of the new economic landscape we’re all working towards creating,” said the Man from Del Monte. ‘And, anyway, that’s where we’re holding the Olympics, too.”

John J Kelly