With One Convulsive Leap, He Was Free!

Many years ago, decades, to be honest, I had an old writing tutor at Uni. Harry Garlic was his name, for real. I don’t remember much of the class beyond two things. One, Harry was always hurting for the cigarettes he’d given up years before, and he played with an unlit coffin nail every minute of the hour we spent with him each week. He said just going through the motions helped him cope with the physical need for a smoke. I adapted that life-hack many years later when I decided to take a year off drinking. I found that making myself a fancy beverage every night with fizzy water, ice, and chopped fruit recalled enough of the muscle memory of having a grownup drink that it took the edge off my cravings for something harder.

Thanks, Harry.

The other thing he gifted me was a story about escaping the impossible. It’s been a long time, and I’ll mangle the particulars, but it’s the mythic structure that is important. Harry’s story concerned an American newspaper cartoonist in the 1930s. Sorry, I don’t recall the name, and I’m not sure he even existed, but that’s not important.

The cartoonist had a sort of Indiana Jones serial that ran long story arcs over many weeks. It was popular, but money was tight, and the bean counters pointed out that our guy didn’t even do the artwork for his cartoon anymore. He knocked up storyboards, and lesser (read, cheaper) artists did the finished work.

Why not just use them?

So they gave him a couple of weeks’ notice. Our guy shrugs it off and keeps doing what he’s always done, building an increasingly tense and impossibly balanced story arc that reached a crescendo of anticipation on the Friday of his last week.

Harry told us what happened in those last few panels, and I wish I could tell you exactly what he said, but the details are lost to me. I was living with a dope dealer at that point in my life and smoking way too much weed, so, you know…

What I do recall is a scenario that echoes some of the great Wile E. Coyote moments. Our hero is standing on a piece of cantilevered cliff that’s broken away and was plummeting towards a horrible death on jagged rocks thousands of feet below.

Bad guys with machine guns stand at the edge of the cliff from which he’s just fallen away, firing wildly and laughing maniacally as bad guys are wont to do in this crazy, go-go world of ours. There may have been an armed blimp, or possibly it was a biplane because I think it was armed with flamer throwers.

Anyway, our hero cartoonist files these, his final panels and leaves, smiling.

The newspaper bosses are like, “What the fuck?”

The interns they expected to pick up this story are like, “No fucking way.”

And the switchboard is lit up with hundreds of readers, maybe thousands, begging to know what happens.

What happens is that nobody can figure out how to get our dime store Dr Jones analogue off that falling coyote rock and past the machine gun goons and the flame-throwing blimp.

By Monday, the cartoonist was back at their desk with double his old salary on an ironclad contract.

Everybody, and Harry assured us that meant everybody at the newspaper gathered around to watch him solve the unsolvable story arc.

He put pen to paper. His hand moved quickly. He tore off the sheet and handed it to an intern, or apprentice or whatever.

The publisher grabs it and curses him.

The hero simply jumped off the plummeting piece of rock and landed safely behind all the Machine Gun Kelly’s.

For good measure, he kicks the boss villain in the butt.

The only text ran in the final panel.

With One Convulsive Leap, He Was Free!

Perhaps Peter Dutton should have dropped into Harry’s class. Or perhaps not. If he’d heard that story, he might’ve spent the last year or so losing sleep over Albo waking up and going, “Oh right, yeah.” And simply freeing himself from the legacy of Scott Morrison’s Stage 3 Tax Cuts with one convulsive leap.

It seemed impossible that Labor would ditch those massively regressive handouts to the extremely wealthy until yesterday when, all of a sudden, it wasn’t.

And now the politics of fear, greed and envy, which was Morrison’s only actual area of expertise, are suddenly flipped against Dutton. You could hear it in the panic of Spud’s garbled sound bites. You could see it in Susan Ley’s headless chicken dance when asked if the Opposition would be voting against more generous tax cuts for ten million voters.

With one convulsive leap, Albo was free.

And as he leapt, he dumped a mountain of the folding stuff on everybody watching from below.

Pass me that cigarette, Harry.

I need a smoke.