Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

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Only Americans Burn in Hell: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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‘Brilliantly funny … the best satire of our contemporary nightmare that you will ever see, and very possibly the last’
It’s 2019 and America is ruled over by a billionaire reality TV star. Its media is owned by a transnational class of the shameless and the depraved. And its people have been silently robbed of their wealth, their dignity and their democracy.
In this brave new world, going to see a superhero movie counts as activism, and arguing with the other serfs on social media is political engagement. BUT EVERYTHING’S FINE – as long as you never, ever ask yourself who makes money from the ticket sales and the ratings, or who owns Twitter.
It’s 2019 and Jarett Kobek has done the only thing a dissident American novelist can do in those circumstances: he’s joined the party and written fantasy novel about an immortal fairy queen and a shadowy billionaire philanthropist sheikh called Dennis.
Hilarious, provocative and unmissable,
is the only novel for our certifiably insane times.

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For varied reasons, the public voices of the liberal warmongers had devised an idea that was extraordinarily profitable for the arch-capitalist class: that the Celebrity branch of American governance, and its products, could be read as a proxy for the struggles and strife of the great American unwashed.

The public voices of the Fucking Assholes were represented by a mixture of low-rent celebrities, op-ed writers, Republican party apparatchiks, and the mentally ill. A great number of people in these public voices had passed the Cash Horizon.

The public voices of the Fucking Assholes agreed with the public voices of the liberal warmongers: the Celebrity branch of American governance, and its products, could be read as a proxy for the struggles and strife of the great American unwashed.

The only difference of opinion was about the interpretation of this proxy.

Both sides accepted the unchallenged underlying thesis.

The argument proved to be very profitable for the arch-capitalist class who actually owned the Celebrity branch of American governance.

Everything was an advertisement.

And if you’re wondering about the opinions of the non-public voices, then go and fuck off back to the Dark Ages.

You’re revealing a thinking that’s very Twentieth Century AD, with atavistic tendencies towards logic and dreams of a populace that hasn’t been preyed upon by the mind-altering substances of the pharmaceutical industry. That shit is ancient news.

You either agreed with the country’s priestly castes, and their apparatuses of sycophants, novitiate aspirants and true believers, or you found yourself on the receiving end of a barrage of hatred and death threats.

Here was the difference between the priestly castes, many of whom had opinions on deadline for money, and everyone else: sane people shut the fuck up, nodded their heads, and did what they needed to survive in a toxic political landscape.

In an era when public discourse was the bought-and-paid property of roughly twenty companies, and the airing of an opinion could subject a person to unfathomable amounts of abuse and recrimination, the only reasonable option was to be quiet.

So when you next fawn over someone’s brave public thoughts, repeat the following: The contours of discourse are so horrendous that one thing has become certain. Any individual offering up a public opinion necessarily must be either hopelessly stupid or insane. I am engaging with a product of madness and idiocy.

Regarding the public opinions offered up in this book, they are the products of both idiocy and bad craziness.

But at least I have some justification for engaging with the stupidity and insanity of this book.

I wrote the thing.

Reader, what’s your excuse?

Here was one thing that all the priestly castes agreed upon in the run-up to the election in the Year of the Misplaced Butter: Donald J. Trump could not, should not, and would not be President.

It was impossible.

But Donald J. Trump won anyway.

A creature created by the Celebrity branch of American governance had taken over the Executive branch, the conflation of entertainment into political life was complete, and it had happened without the blessing of the high clergy, and it shut out the vast majority of people who were from the Celebrity branch of American governance.

By the way, all of this is why one’s political tools should probably be comprised of effective organization, decent arguments, an understanding of the actual political landscape, as opposed to an imaginary map built as a reflection of one’s own virtue.

If the only tool in your political arsenal is shame, don’t be surprised what happens when you meet a shameless man.

Enter Wonder Woman in 2017 AD.

There’d been about fifteen years of films about superheroes, which were intellectual properties about supranatural beings like Celia.

These films were all the same: a supranatural being reenacted American foreign policy by responding to an existential threat through exaggerated violence, generally after another supranatural being reenacted 9/11, which was when some Muslims blew up two ugly buildings in New York and facefucked reality into a cartoon.

What differentiated Wonder Woman from the rest of the super-hero films was that its lead character was female.

Because the country was run by a monster created by liberals in the Celebrity branch of American governance, and because liberals were totally disconnected from the political structure of their country, and because the film mapped to easy marketing demographics, Wonder Woman was freighted with a swollen ideology.

It arrived as a place where the unexamined ideologies of American life could belong to women as easily as men.

If you think this is an exaggeration, please read the following quotes from “Want to Take Political Action This Weekend? Go to the Movies”, an article written by Melissa Goodman for the website of the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union:

Political action doesn’t always have to take the form of marching, holding a house party or calling your local representative. You can make a bold and necessary political statement just by buying a movie ticket.

Go see Wonder Woman …{ https://www.aclusocal.org/en/news/want-take-political-action-weekend-go-movies}

That was politics at the mid-point of 2017 AD.

It arrived in an article on the website of an organization dedicated to civil liberties which suggested that an alternative to applied Leftist action was to patronize media produced by a massive multinational corporation owned by the same old shits who’d been ruining the world for centuries.

This was the madness of the moment.

People had lost the ability to tell the difference between the Celebrity and the other three branches of American governance.

Because the world has gone stupid and elected a rogue member of the Celebrity branch of American governance into the Executive, allow me to point out the difference: representation in the traditional three branches of government really does matter, because the people who end up in the government are the people who make policy and laws.

In other words, these are the people who determine whether or not you will be able to make a living wage.

These are the people who shape your lives.

People who end up in the Celebrity branch of American governance are the people who make movies and television and huge profits for the same old shits who rule the world.

In other words, these are the people who are taking your money.

I know of what I speak.

I’m one of them.

I’ve duped you into buying my turgid work.

Unless you’ve pirated this book.

If you have, then good for you!

Do me a favor. Steal The Future Won’t Be Long !

And, yes, reader, I know the arguments about why it’s important to see diverse faces in television and in films.

And, yes, I realize that no one agrees with me on this topic.

But I’m sorry, arguing about the shadow theater of the entertainment industry is not politics.

What did everyone at the Vista Theater see when they made a bold political statement by giving money to the people who’d ruined the world?

Wonder Woman was a film made by people baptized in the primordial ooze of unconscious American life.

The attendees saw a story about the unexamined glory of American foreign policy, of the meaningfulness of war and violence, and a story about how a woman could be like a man in her ability to simulate genocide.

A woman named Diana lives on an island full of lesbians. Her mother is the Queen of the island. Everyone lives in paradise, doing what everyone who’s ever met a lesbian knows that all the world’s lesbians do, which is train for perpetual war. This goes on for millennia until one day an American in an airplane crashes on the island. Diana rescues the American, only to find that the reason he crashed is because a bunch of Germans were firing materiel at the plane. The Germans invade the lesbian paradise. The lesbians murder all the Germans. The Germans murder some of the lesbians. The American gets naked and feels insecure about the size of his penis on an island full of lesbians and then confesses that he’s working as a spy against the Germans, who have developed biological weaponry. Some nonsense happens where Diana gets convinced that Ares, the Greek god of war, is responsible for the chaos. Diana and the American go out into the world with the intention of murdering a bunch of Germans and stopping Ares from developing biological weapons. Then Diana goes to London where, as Celia once discovered, English shit is widely acknowledged as Europe’s most toxic. Then she goes to France with a motley crew of drunkards, and for some reason only the dark-skinned drunkards are capable of belief in the supra-natural. Then Diana kicks the shit out of some Germans for about forty minutes, performing ritualistic genocide that saves the fictional world while adhering to an unspoken embrace of American foreign policy. Somewhere in here, weirder members of the audience cheer and cry because they’ve imbibed enough primordial ooze that they believe the appropriate solution to the horror of men is to adopt the tactics of men. In other words, the committing of genocide has become so ingrained and unexamined in the American psyche that there is no longer any purpose in questioning whether or not one should commit genocide. The real question is who gets to kill. And for some reason it’s important that women have opportunities to butcher their fellow living beings. Just ask the ACLU. Then Diana kills Ares, who turns out to be an Englishman in a bowler hat, which is probably the only realistic thing in the entire film, and then the war ends and everyone is happy because Diana has committed genocide against the right people at the right time and there’s no way that the roman numeral at the end of World War One could possibly predicate a sequel.

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