THE TOMATO CAN

The imminent candidacy of Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination brings to mind the classic story of the boxer Primo Carnera in the nineteen-thirties.

I’m not that old, but I know a lot from reading books, for which there is no substitute. People today got a telephone in one ear, an iPod in the other ear and a Blackberry jammed up their butt. Well, I’m here to tell you that you can get more fun from a one dollar used paperback than you can get from a five hundred dollar iPod.

Plus which, I look at time as a kind of string theory of warps and knots instead of a straight line, where you can reach one inch to the left or right and bump into the Mexican Revolution or Battlestar Galectica without having to cross the street.

Primo Carnera was a magnificent human specimen of a boxer from Italy. The guy looked fantastic on paper, huge and muscular. The only problem is, while he may have been fantastic in Italy, the United States had a much larger pool of talented boxers because of our huge population. But he looked stupendous. So these American promoters brought him up here, which was a long way to travel back in those days.

When they put him in to spar in the gym, they were dismayed at his lack of talent. But if you’re greedy enough, and if your greed is sharpened enough by a brutal world economic depression, which is the case that prevailed during the Great Depression, you will always find a way.

Since Carnera couldn’t win any fights on his own, they arranged to pay his opponents to take a dive. That way, they built him up in the standings. They also paid reporters to write sports articles about how he was an unbeatable Man Mountain of Iron.

They slowly promoted Carnera up the food chain until the public conception of him was that he was unbeatable. The only party who was not in on the gag was, unfortunately, Carnera himself. He had a convertible, a whole gang of women, a suite at the Plaza, you name it. He was a rube provolone from Calabria province who believed his own promotion, unfortunately for him.

Now his promoters prepared to cash in on their investment. They booked him a championship match against Max Baer, who was a psychopath, who had already killed two men in the ring, and they bet everything they could put together on Max Baer.

Baer demolished Carnera. He tore him up. Everybody went home rich, except Carnera, who got a one-way ticket on a tramp steamer to Argentina.

What has this got to do with Barack Obama? You figure it out. His biggest promoters are the owners of The New York Post, The New York Sun and every other nasty reactionary rag in the world. They are desperate to talk up any alternative to Hillary Clinton and her master strategist, whats-his-name.

They remember eight years of Clinton in the White House, with him making a monkey out of them on every occasion, and they’re not anxious to replicate the experience.

In addition, they know that the public has just about had enough of a vampiric medical system, which has been a cash cow for them, and they know that a Clinton presidency will for sure inaugurate a single payer system that will eliminate a big part of the top-end stealing that has been paying huge yachts, so that insurance executives can stand on the bridge like Admiral Hornblower with a nautical hat while people in the Bronx walk around with grotesque tumors sticking out of their faces that they can’t afford to excise.

There is no way to understate the depth of opposition to a single-payer medical insurance plan among America’s ruling class. You’re talking trillions of dollars being directed to the bank accounts of the super rich, and one woman and her husband spearheading a campaign to end it.

To top it off, I know nothing that would prevent Hillary Clinton from naming Bill as her running mate. Ha ha ha, Evita Peron minus the bananas! How about a little cootchie-cootchie in the White House, a conga line of left-wing policy wonks tearing up the meticulous kleptomanic Republican planning of the last six years!

The Republicans will do anything to stop her. We already know from the 2000 elections in what high regard they hold the democratic process. I’m surprised they haven’t taken a shot at her already!

But in the meantime they’re willing to give one last shot to try to woo dopey Democratic women away from her with Barack Obama’s pretty face.

He’s a political Primo Carnera. He got into the senate by default when his Republican opponent in Illinois had to withdraw over a nasty divorce scandal. He knows nothing, he’s done nothing. But, hey, the guy looks cute in a bathing suit.

If, by some fluke of politics, he got the nomination, he would be a sitting duck for Cheney and all those other Republican duck hunters. And they would make sure he stayed dead, not like that lucky duck down in Florida, who survived.

Tags:   None

© All rights reserved.

Posted on 1/22/2007 ( Permanent Link )
Read 440 Times
 Send to Friend