John Howard: The Elisha Cook Jr Of Politics
Harold Hark
1 April 2004

"Aren't I lucky, I got a chunky bit."
Alien Leader in the film "Bad Taste"

Peter Jackson's chunder-loving aliens should be returning to earth any day now because there is vomit aplenty, especially from the Coalition of the Willing, who appear to be choking on it.

If you saw the film you will recall that the "chunky bits" were provided by one of the aliens' own according to a time honoured recipe requiring the ingestion of only the finest vintage corpses before celebratory regurgitation. It's not certain they would appreciate the corked brew being decanted by the triple-tongued two-faced twin twits of two-bit tyranny George W. Bush and John W. Howard, but maybe for lunch.

Indeed, the Dubya's-a-pair are looking so terminally ill that I expect the happy-chappy breakfast show crew on a certain Melbourne FM station to pose one of their infamous "Sophie's Choice" question to listeners:

If you were starving to death on a desert island with John Howard, George Bush and Kylie Minogue and all three suddenly died, who would you bury very deeply and who would you eat?

OK, the answer is pretty obvious...unless you're the kind of noble turd who would have given Kylie a decent Christian burial.

Yes, it looks like the jig is up for the village idiot and his pet weasel.

Come November, Umeruhcans will go through contortions unheard of to extract their heads from the cosy warmth of their arseholes, but extract them they will and vote the weirdo Bush into oblivion. Unless, of course, the Republican Party engineers an all state coup this time and their votes become superfluous.

For Bush to be re-elected, the spiral of human evolution (admittedly that elongated it appears to be a very flat line) would be instantly rendered null and void and we could all give up and revert to a Neanderthal yesteryear. Which, by some strange coincidence, is where the Coalition of the Willing has been trying to take us all along.

Here in Oz, our National Wedgie is flailing and thrashing in his attempt to nail Mark Latham on something, anything. In the meantime he has lost sight of how pathetic this looks to the electorate; the embarrassing plight of the desperate fellow is never lost to onlookers.

To borrow another analogy from the movies: Imagine John Howard as Film Noir's favourite spineless double-crosser, Elisha Cook Jr.

As so often happened to Elisha in his roles as a weedy little cheat utterly devoid of character, John Howard's callow betrayals of the unfortunate and his willingness to sacrifice every principle to gain the upper hand will lead him to a bad end. Not the gallows or The Chair or a public flogging. Not even as a training neck for Franchot Tone to practice ever tighter Windsor Knots with a silk tie. Little Johnny will escape all that for there is nothing Film Noir about Australia. Nor Wild West, so forget the tantalising vision of him being run out of Bennelong after a tar and feathering.

Something much more fitting must be set aside for the most shameful man who ever strode Australian soil wearing Vodafone trackies.

But of course! In keeping with Illiberal Party tradition, once John Howard loses the election, he'll be shunned by everyone who rode his bullet proof vest to power. The rest of us will have nightmares about him for years, but his own party will forget he ever existed, almost overnight. A response entirely in keeping with that mob of spivs in corporate clobber.

Whatever will he do in retirement? The shame of being Australia's worst ever Prime Minister will insure that he spends it in isolation. Corporations who normally snatch up ex-Illiberal MPs for their insider expertise will turn their backs, fearing shareholder retaliation. Shareholders, who normally couldn't care less about their responsibility as citizens, have had it up to here with the likes of John Howard blowing their chances of getting something for nothing.

Will he be lonely, the little chap no one likes? Not if Kamal is on hand to sing him nighty-night songs. And he'll have Janette and the kids to remind him of his glorious "contribution" to tax reform. But whenever he goes out jogging in that awkward way he has of showing us what an inauthentic human being he really is, he'll want to keep his head down. Passers by, if they even notice him, will likely show their appreciation of his reign with pent up sprays of deeply emotional chunky bits.

I know I would.