Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

In the case of the Vista’s premiere screening of Wonder Woman , this was really weird.

No one had seen the film!

It could have been a total piece of shit!

Unlike Victor and his fellow employee, who had a vested economic interest in the film’s success, the people who dressed in costume at Wonder Woman had no stake in the property.

Wonder Woman had arrived at the Vista anointed in a sold-out madness emblematic of the United States of America in the Twenty-First Century.

This madness was long-brewing and the result of multiple historical occurrences and tendencies.

Some of these historical occurrences and tendencies had been running for decades.

Some had been running for centuries.

The culmination of these historical occurrences and tendencies was the recent election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States of America.

The Presidency was the highest office in the country, to which individuals were elected every four years through an arcane process that had been designed, originally, to make sure the United States was cool with enslaving people from Africa.

Enslaving people from Africa was great business, and it was the economic bedrock of the fledgling nation, and it involved owning human beings who would be forced into labor and receive no benefits from that labor.

About seventy years after its founding, the country held a big debate as to whether or not it was cool to enslave people from Africa.

After this debate had killed about 716,000 poor White people fighting for the economic masters, and 36,000 Black people fighting for their freedom, everyone decided that enslaving people from Africa probably wasn’t too cool.

Because it was no longer too cool to enslave people from Africa, which was the country’s explicit purpose, the United States entered a malaise.

It had lost its demon.

The purpose of the Presidency shifted.

If its original function no longer existed, then surely some new purpose could be found.

It turned out that the Presidency was really good at making war.

After all, it had overseen about seventy years of war on Africa.

So new wars were made.

Decades and decades and decades of war.

By the time that Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency, the elections which chose the President had transformed from referendums about who would best administer the international slave trade into contests about who’d get the chance to reduce illiterate Muslims into pulpy masses of intestines.

Even by the dubious standards of candidates for the United States Presidency, Donald J. Trump was a wretched specimen.

He was the most famous person who had ever lived.

He was the most famous person who would ever live.

He was orange, he wore a stupid wig, and he was a pawn of multinational corporations.

He was hella racist.

By any honest account, he was into sexually assaulting women.

It was rumored that he was a speed freak, which would explain the difference between his public appearances as President and his public appearances in the 1980s AD and 1990s AD, when he’d been a fixture of New York City’s tabloid culture.

In the early days, the President had been, if not especially bright, then at the very least coherent.

By the time that he won the right to turn Muslims into shattered masses of agony, the President could barely speak.

Amphetamine abuse has a terrible effect on the brain.

For decades, the political liberals of the Celebrity branch of American governance had profited off Donald J. Trump’s crass public persona.

They’d given him deals for books that he hadn’t written and stuck him on television whenever they thought it’d turn a buck.

Trump, who pretended on television that he was a billionaire, was big entertainment dollars.

His media persona was this: he was a total fucking jerk!

And he was rich!

He was great entertainment in a country that fostered a delusion in its poor that they too, someday, would be rich enough to treat other poor people like shit.

Donald J. Trump ran for the Presidency, and won, by embracing political viewpoints in direct opposition to the very people who had created him.

The liberals in the Celebrity branch of American governance had made a beast which they could not control.

It was like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , or, The Modern Prometheus , a novel about a scientist who creates a monster out of spare human body parts that he’s dug up from graves. The monster gets angry. Things go badly.

There were some differences.

The monster in Frankenstein , made of rotten human remains, had a body that was slightly less disturbing than the body of the President, which was made of media coverage stitched together with plastic surgery.

The monster in Frankenstein didn’t have a speed habit.

And the monster in Frankenstein had a more honest relationship to literacy.

The monster in Frankenstein was into reading Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe.

By contrast, the monster who was the President just put his name on books that other people had written and then took money from political liberals in the publishing industry.

What’s the harm? asked the publishing industry.

It’s all just business , said the publishing industry.

199,900 years of shitting in the living room.

Anyway, the election of Donald J. Trump made America go nuts.

To be fair, the country had always been pretty crazy.

War, genocide, and slavery aren’t good for anyone’s mental health.

But after Trump assumed the Presidency, the madness got worse.

The people who’d voted for Trump went nuts because they’d won and had no idea what to do with their impossible victory.

The country’s political liberals went nuts because Trump put them in the position of facing an undeniable and yet unpalatable truth.

This was the truth that the political liberals could not deny and could not face: beyond making English Comp courses at community colleges very annoying, forty years of rhetorical progress had achieved little, and it turned out that feeling good about gay marriage did not alleviate the taint of being warmongers whose taxes had killed more Muslims than the Black Death.

You can’t make evil disappear by being a reasonably nice person who mouths platitudes at dinner parties. Social media confessions do not alleviate suffering. You can’t talk the world into being a decent place while sacrificing nothing.

The socialists didn’t go nuts.

They were the people who’d thought about the complex problems facing the nation and decided that an honest solution to these problems could be achieved with applied Leftism.

But don’t get your hopes up.

Despite being correct in their thinking, the socialists were the most annoying people in America. When they spoke, it was like bamboo slivers shoved under a fingernail.

I don’t know why.

It was the single biggest American tragedy of the last one hundred years.

By the Year of the Froward Worm, too much warmongering had splintered the national psyche into a series of tribes.

The most obvious schism was between the public voices of the liberal warmongers and the public voices of the tribe that had helped Donald J. Trump win his impossible victory.

For the sake of clarity, let’s call this second tribe the Fucking Assholes.

The noise from the public voices of the liberal warmongers had become the dominant voice of the haute bourgeoisie. This contingent was represented by a mixture of high-grade celebrities, op-ed writers, Democratic party apparatchiks, and the mentally ill. A great number of these public voices had passed the Cash Horizon.