Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

Food, shelter, clothing, sex.

The world moved on and entered the Twentieth Century AD.

Rusticano could see the score.

He watched as liberal democracies consumed themselves with internal divisions about their relative social order, and he watched as these liberal democracies placed the petty squabbles about these internal divisions upon a foundation of ghettos and the foreign dead.

People had stopped arguing about the divine right of kings and now screamed at each other about human rights, about how terrible it was that some inequality in the internal society had made a mockery of that society’s values, and then retreated into their homes and feasted on the mass-murdered flesh of animals while their militaries dropped bombs on distant locales and the mechanisms of their societies destroyed the poor with unfair labor practices.

There was no place for Rusticano’s wordplay and his reason.

Not in the mortal world.

The Twentieth Century AD had only one rule: might made right.

Rusticano was immortal.

He was stronger than everyone else.

He could do anything he wanted.

Rusticano opened his black duffel bag and took out a five-gallon plastic fuel can that he’d purchased from Rite Aid at the corner of Vermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.

Rusticano unscrewed the cap on the fuel can.

Rusticano splashed out five gallons of gasoline that he’d purchased from the Shell station at the opposite corner of Vermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.

He did it so fast that neither Celia nor Fern nor the Fairy Knight could stop him.

The homeless people were too tripped out on the Fairy Knight’s blood to realize what was going on. And anyway, they were people who America had deemed useless, so they weren’t particularly surprised to be abused by a stranger.

“You may now thank me for my honesty,” said Rusticano.

Rusticano used a lighter that he’d bought at Rite Aid to ignite the gasoline.

Everything burned.

As their flesh caught fire, but they did not die, both the Fairy Knight and Fern said the Lord’s Prayer.

It was for nothing.

They might as well have said a prayer with a proven track record.

They might as well have said this:

Arafat Kazi got into the pit to see Guns N’ Roses at the Staples Center .

The building burned.

Celia burned.

Rusticano burned.

Fern burned.

The Fairy Knight burned.

The homeless burned.

Undying beings came out of the charred wreckage.

Rusticano looked at Celia.

Celia looked at Rusticano.

“Lady,” he said. “Your children are no longer in the building. I would ask that you send me back.”

Celia cast a spell and Rusticano disappeared.

One minute he was there.

Then: blink.

He was in a Coffee Fellows at the northeast corner in the München Hauptbahnhof.

Celia’s magic had not accounted for the difference in time zones and the operating hours of Coffee Fellows.

It was midnight.

Rusticano was trapped behind locked doors.

He threw a table through a plate glass window and walked down Prielmayerstraße towards the former Bürgerbräukeller.

As with the Gray’s Inn play, he had wrecked another narrative.

His actions had precipitated an unsatisfying end to this book, causing its story to dissolve into a hectoring lecture about Christianity divorced from any pretext of plot.

Exeunt Rusticano.

Rusticano was nobody’s fool.

He knew that the best arguments against Christianity were surprisingly terrible, and furthermore that these arguments relied on philological research, observations about historical injustice, scientific empiricism, and the issue of theodicy, which was the fancy way of asking Why does God let bad things happen to good people?

When people asked Why does God let bad things happen to good people? what they really meant was this: “Why does God let bad things happen to me?”

It’s a very Twenty-First-Century AD argument.

Cooked in a base of insipid narcissism.

The strongest of the bad arguments were the ones that relied on scientific empiricism, which pointed out the impossibility of God creating his son in human form.

And the impossibility of that human form rising from the dead.

But appeals to rationality and scientific truth, while making great sense on paper, faced a very significant problem.

The world kept getting weirder.

The everyday lives of everyday people were completely insane.

Roughly 100,000 people controlled the fates and destinies of 7,799,900,000 people, and the 7,799,900,000 let themselves be subject to the whimsies of the 100,000.

But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue.

It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit.

Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit.

It was the most insane bullshit!

But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician.

And yes, reader, that includes you.

You too are a magician.

Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian.

Here are some strips of paper and bits of metal!

Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal.

Humiliate yourself for strips of paper.

Murder for the strips of paper.

Humiliate others for the strips of paper.

Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation.

Treat the vast accumulators like gods.

Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs!

Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z!

The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump!

Kill! Kill! Kill!

Work! Work! Work!

Die! Die! Die!

Go on.

Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened.

Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility.

Yes, the Crusades were horrible.

Yes, the Inquisition was awful.

Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem.

Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded.

Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor.

But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror. Read the news.

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