Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

The Harry Potter books were a series of fantasy novels about an English boarding school, wherein the most fantastical thing that happened was the complete absence of buggery and same-sex handjobs.

Mr. Spock from Star Trek ?

Why not?

Lord Voldemort?

All right.

But the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ?

Unless she’d somehow encountered self-published black-and-white comic books from the 1980s AD, the twelve-year-old was presumably receiving communications from the most commonly known versions of these intellectual properties.

And the commonly known versions were characterized by nothing more than their irrepressible hunger for pizza and their use of an American dialect of English that sounded like the media stereotype of California surfers.

They said shit like: “Cowabunga, dude and dudettes! I can’t wait to gnosh on some gnarly pizza and get, like, weirded out! Mondo nutsiness! Time to boogie!”

Imagine that horror beamed into your fucking head.

The right question wasn’t why someone would believe in the reality of Slender Man.

This was the right question: Why wouldn’t they?

America was full of millions of people who posted to the Internet, daily, about the importance of Batman, and insisted on interpreting prevailing social trends through the prism of Batman.

These people believed in Batman, they knew that Batman was real, and they invested Batman with religious faith.

Batman was a new god.

Batman had risen from the rankest nether regions of pop culture, nurtured on the Internet after September 11th, 2001 AD, which was when a bunch of Muslims facefucked the collective psyche of mankind and transformed reality into a shitty disaster movie from the mid-1990s AD.

Life became a cartoon.

A new pantheon was required.

And there was Batman.

And there was Mr. Spock.

And there were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

And there was Harry fucking Potter, still unbuggered, still longing for the strong and nurturing caress of a same-sex handjob.

All of these intellectual properties were no different than Slender Man.

They were just some crap that someone had made up.

And they all had definite, and well-documented, points of origin.

And this is why writers run into terrible peril when they write about supranatural characters that directly, or accidentally, touch upon hot-button issues like race or gender.

The problem is never race or gender.

That’s only the smokescreen.

The problem is the supranatural creatures.

The writer risks profaning a new religion.

Like all religious people, the new religion’s adherents are completely insane.

But they’re not so insane that they’re willing to make a direct argument about their religion.

You can’t say that Batman is real.

Not in public.

Not yet.

So they grasp at the obvious.

And like any zealots, they demand obsequious gestures as retribution for the profane.

One obsequious gesture that emerged around the Year of the Froward Worm was the employment of what were termed sensitivity readers.

Authors hired sensitivity readers, who were apparently of marginalized backgrounds, to read through the authors’ manuscripts and identify issues of bias or grotesque cultural misrepresentation.

Basically, it was a writer hiring someone from the Internet to tell the writer why they were wrong before other Internet people could tell the writer why they were wrong.

Imaginary narratives about fantasy worlds were being fact-checked!

By people who were about ten minutes away from making a sacrifice to Slender Man!

Like most efforts of the liberal intelligentsia to maintain plausible deniability about one’s culpability in the global order of exploitation, the concept of the sensitivity reader dripped with unexamined racism.

It essentialized to an extreme degree, suggesting that there were inalienable qualities specific to arbitrary social constructs, and furthermore, that any one individual could comprehend, and identify, biases against millions of people based on nothing more than the accident of their birth.

Even the name was insane: it suggested that people from arbitrary social constructs had an innate sensitivity that differentiated them from other human beings, and that this sensitivity was based in a unique moral superiority.

And it is this thought—that the arbitrary circumstances of birth give the ability to comment on a slim range of human suffering—which has animated a central motif of the book that you are reading.

The motif in question is the idea that the purpose of the Presidency of the United States of America is the transformation of Muslims into aching piles of ash and steaming puddles of blood.

As the towelheaded son of a dirty fucking immigrant camelfucker, I’ve focused on the most personally applicable aspect of the American War Machine and transformed it into a reccurring joke.

Yet, reader, does not this approach suffer from the sin of narrowness?

It’s not as if the American War Machine has limited itself to the execution of Muslims in the Middle East and North African region.

It’s not as if the American War Machine only fucks up the relatives of people who self-identify on the Internet as #MENA.

Ever since 9/11, the American War Machine has unleashed total chaos upon the world.

By the Year of the Froward Worm, seventy-two sovereign states were involved in its conflicts.

That’s 39 per cent of the world’s countries.

By the Year of the Froward Worm, about 13,486,400 refugees came from five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia.

All five of these places had been touched by the American War Machine.

Five had been fucked with by the Central Intelligence Agency, the major intelligence agency of the American War Machine.

Four had hosted members of the American War Machine’s military.

Three had been bombed by the American War Machine.

Two had hosted major American War Machine military operations.

One had hosted the longest war in the history of the American War Machine.

As I write this, America wages a secret war in Sub-Saharan Africa.

According to the best available information, this secret war is taking place in the following twenty countries: Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Botswana.

The secret war is conducted under an American combatant command named AFRICOM.

Much like the multinational conglomerate that owns Penguin Random House, AFRICOM is headquartered in Germany.

If I had to guess, I’d suggest that about 0.5 per cent of the American population knows that AFRICOM exists.

Even that estimate is wild in its optimism, as it would mean that around 1.6 million people in the United States know their country is waging a secret war against Sub-Saharan Africa.

And based on the evidence, I find this to be impossible.

Here is that evidence: if fifty people freak out on Twitter about issues of racial misrepresentation in a cultural product about supra-natural creatures, it generates coverage in the house organs of the American liberal intelligentsia.

Oh, the articles they’ll write!

There is fun to be done!

There are points to be scored!

There are games to be won!

Fifty people is nothing.

Which means that the threshold for generating media interest is very low.

So if 1.6 million people know about the secret war in Sub-Saharan Africa, wouldn’t this topic receive endless media coverage?

Insert your own joke here.