WHY I WANT TO FUCK JOHN HOWARD

Andrés Vaccari

(Abaddon #3, 2001)

 

THE CONSPIRACY OF GREY MEN

"The Grey Men," Dr. Travis continued, "play a pivotal role in these kind of fantasies. The appearance of this archetype is contemporary with the dawn of large bureaucracies and the rise of pseudo-rational economic ideologies. The Grey Men share the ideal traits of bureaucrats, accountants, lawyers, businessmen and other drab exemplars of the human fauna spawned by industrial capitalism. They are emblems of efficiency and procedure, to whom people are abstract quantities, and society a series of equations of greed and demand. Their code words are inevitability, invisibility and profit. Their language is a mixture of esoteric mysticism and mathematical babble, with constant references to magical, quasi-alchemical concepts like the Invisible Hand, the Balance of Trade and the Trickle-Down Effect. It is not surprising, ladies and gentlemen, that we are witnessing a marked increase in these paranoid fantasies after the Liberal Party's rise to power in 1995. It is not a coincidence either that patients are becoming sexually fixated on the figure of John Howard, our Primer Minister, and embodiment of Grey Man."


THE MECHANICS OF INHUMANITY

During one of the studies, a series of photographs was presented to a group of schizophrenic patients, who were instructed to group them in a meaningful schema. This series included: 1) A diagram of a Watt steam engine. 2) Liberal Party figureheads. 3) Disfigured genitalia of anonymous car crash victims. 4) Various environmental disasters. 5) Jeanette Howard, the Prime Minister's wife, eating at a corporate dinner. 6) Queues at banks and Centrelink Offices. 7) Victims of police brutality. 8) Victorian Ex-Premier Jeff Kennet's hair-do. 9) Iraqui refugees at Port Headland Detention Centre.


Sixty-five percent of patients strongly associated the disfigured genitalia with various powerful figures in the Howard Government, a phenomenon doctors interpreted as expressing powerlessness, projected as physico-sexual impairment, before a divisive and hermetic political regime. The Liberal Party figures were the objects of mutilation scenarios, and often the photos themselves were torn, or cut. Also, forty-nine percent of patients reported various elaborate, Sadean erotic fantasies, in which they took submissive roles, and which often involved binding and genital defacement.


THE SLEEP OF REASON

Dr. Travis explained that the advent of discourses like Scientific Management, Human Resource Management and Economic Rationalism had introduced a novel figure to the pantheon of 20th century psychosis. These prophets of efficiency and mechanism had become insistent iconic figures in the cosmologies of the deranged. He said that the new millenium would bring nightmarish variations on these archetypes, and cited a recent study in the US, where patients in various states of terminal psychosis described frightening meetings with cold female inquisitors, who muttered long strings of numbers and endlessly solicited detailed information, like physical characteristics and financial assets.

These visitors, clad in neat, spotless grey suits, dictated elaborate and grandiloquent cosmologies that explained the workings of society through the workings of a cryptic 'Economic Realm', which they described as a land of milk and honey where the souls of workers traveled after death, and which was ruled by a benevolent, all-seeing Hand.


ASSASINATION FANTASIES

During one of the studies, long-term inmates were provided with Conceptual Assassination Kits, and the ensuing fantasy-elaboration process was monitored closely.

In 87 % of the cases, the figure of Prime Minister John Howard emerged as a favourite target of assassination. Many elaborate death-schemes were put forth, many of which involved multiple automobile disasters and byzantine torture machinery. Twenty one percent of patients singled out Environmental Minister Robert Hill as a preferred object of death, and the proposed methods figured themes clearly echoing the present global devastation: death by toxic-waste intoxication, sunburns and starvation.


Doctors concluded that the Prime Minister's lack of any vital human traits (like compassion, imagination or sexuality) made him a favourite vessel for various paranoid projections and erotic decontextualizations. In a minority of cases, this perceived 'emptiness' facilitated reconceptualizations of Howard as robot or computer-generated image.


JOHN HOWARD'S CONCEPTUAL PUDENDA

Shortly before his unexplained disappearance, Dr. Travis outlined the results of his research in a manuscript presently in the possession of a Federal Police Task Force.