Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

She backed out of the driveway.

She followed one of the ropey strands of smartphone navigation.

Celia fiddled with the Jaguar’s radio until sound came through the car’s paltry speakers. The radio was tuned to 89.9FM, KCRW, one of Los Angeles County’s several stations affiliated with National Public Radio.

National Public Radio was, in part, radio sponsored by the American state. It was a relic of another era, which is to say the mid-1960s AD, when there was still currency in the idea that civic institutions could serve, and enrich, the lives of the citizenry.

What a jest!

What a jape!

KCRW was broadcasting the afternoon NPR news show, which was called All Things Considered .

As Rose Byrne followed her saliva-based smartphone navigation, the women heard the stories of the day.

The lead story was of some interest to both Celia and Rose Byrne, as it was about a recent Islamic-themed terror attack on London Bridge.

Like all terror attacks, the London Bridge incident had evoked a general aura of stupidity, and like all terror attacks in London, it had produced a plethora of people with silly accents waiting to give interviews to the vultures called reporters.

“Oi, guv, I tell you what, terrorism is bad stuff, innit, hey, guvvy?” said KCRW.

NPR dedicated thirty seconds to the importance of Donald J. Trump’s tweet about the terror attack. He’d insulted the Mayor of London.

What an asshole.

Rose Byrne drove the Jaguar into Hollywood.

The only good advice that anyone ever gave me about writing came from the author Stephen Prothero.

He said something like this: “If there’s an obvious comment about your book, don’t run from it. Just include the comment in the book itself and make it part of the text. Get there first.”

In the spirit of those words, let’s address the big fat elephant in the room.

Let’s talk about how you can’t write a novel about an island of women who banish and murder all of their male co-citizens and not have everyone think that you’re writing an allegory about #MeToo.

#MeToo was a hashtag.

Hashtags were a method for a bunch of people on social media to comment on the same topic, roughly at the same time.

You took an alphanumeric phrase and put the # symbol in front of that phrase and appended the phrase to a comment on social media.

#FuckTrump was a popular hashtag.

So was #NotMyPresident.

This book is not an allegory.

It was begun in August of 2017 AD.

#MeToo didn’t start until October of 2017 AD.

The first 12,000 words of this book were written before October of 2017 AD.

#MeToo kicked off with an article in the New York Times and a follow-up in the New Yorker . Both articles were about a film producer named Harvey Weinstein.

He had produced nearly every middlebrow American film of the last twenty years, he was a bully, he was a braggart, he was physically repulsive, and he was in deep with the Democratic Party.

And he was also a serial sexual abuser of women and a rapist.

With every news story there is a visible layer, the one that plays out in media coverage, and then there is an unconscious layer, the story serving as a medium through which unspoken social undercurrents are made manifest.

And the unconscious layer of the Harvey Weinstein story was all about Donald J. Trump.

They were both disgusting fat slobs from New York City, they were both from the Celebrity branch of American governance, they were both deep into politics, and it was a barely kept secret that both of them were pigs with women.

Had Donald J. Trump not won the election, #MeToo would not have happened.

The psyche of the haute bourgeoisie would not have bruised.

There would have been no waves of outrage.

And no one would have scrutinized Harvey Weinstein, who had decades of extraordinary access to Donald J. Trump’s opponent.

He would have been on the winning side.

And everyone always falls in line behind a winner.

The election of 2016 AD produced a problem: Donald J. Trump had both won and lost.

He was a beneficiary of the Electoral College, which was a system of proportional representation designed by America’s founders to ensure that no one would ever outlaw owning slaves from Africa.

The Electoral College didn’t stop America from outlawing slavery, but it did seriously screw up the Twenty-First Century AD.

Here’s how the Electoral College worked: the general election, in which the will of the people was expressed, meant nothing.

A candidate could win a majority of votes and still lose the election.

This is exactly what happened in 2016 AD.

Donald J. Trump lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College.

Millions more people voted for Donald J. Trump’s opponent than voted for Donald J. Trump. Way more Americans had decided that his opponent was the appropriate person to turn Muslims into garam masala.

Which made sense.

Under the previous President, Donald J. Trump’s opponent had been the Secretary of State, which meant that she’d been intimately, and professionally, involved with the obliteration of Muslims.

And say what you will of Donald J. Trump, but for all of the endless accusations hurled in his direction during the Year of the Misplaced Butter, no one ever suggested that he’d killed a Muslim.

Experience matters!

It wasn’t as if Donald J. Trump’s victory was unprecedented. Recent history had contained another split between the Electoral College and the popular vote.

2000 AD!

Everyone forgot.

But not me.

Here are three emails between me and a woman who shall remain nameless:

Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 11:26 AM

From: XXXXX (xxxx@xxxx.com)

To: Jarett Kobek

Subject: quick

election prediction in 1, 2, go!

Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 12:42 PM

From: Jarett Kobek

To: XXXXX (xxxx@xxxx.com)

Subject: Re: quick

TRUMP

possible popular/electoral split

Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 1:26 PM

From: XXXXX (xxxx@xxxx.com)

To: Jarett Kobek

Subject: Re: quick

Omg not again. Not again. I cannot take another popular/electoral split. I will lose my goddamned mind.

She didn’t lose her goddamned mind.

But everyone else did.

The Weinstein story exploded and went metastatic in a way that stories don’t go in an era of media fragmentation and a politically divided citizenry.

It was all-consuming, a black hole at the center of a depraved galaxy.

It opened two floodgates.

The first floodgate had held back a torrent of stories about men who worked in the Celebrity branch of American governance and their proclivities towards sexual assault.

The second floodgate was ancient magic.

It’d been there for a very long time, holding back all of women’s awful experiences with men from the dawn of civilization.

And now it was open.

There was an organic outpouring of stories.

These appeared on social media under the hashtag of #MeToo.

Women wrote about being sexually harassed, about being raped, about being treated like idiots. It amounted to a profound discomfort with the way that sexual politics worked in the post-industrial civilized world.

And let’s be clear.

Whatever the merit of any individual statement, the general intent of #MeToo was undeniable. It was people saying that a society built around the whims of men is a recipe for a disaster.

And if you disagree with that, go and look out the fucking window.