Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

“He is called The Conqueror,” said HRH.

HRH walked past the photograph of himself and James Earl Carter Jr., taken around 2006 AD, in the halcyon days when HRH laundered medical marijuana money through environmental NGOs.

The sex worker walked past the photograph of HRH and Barack Hussein Obama, taken in late 2009 AD.

First Lady Michelle Obama had invited HRH to a White House dinner after HRH funded an initiative to help celebrate Women’s History Month.

HRH and the sex worker were 420-friendly.

The sex worker smoked from a waterpipe that she found in HRH’s living room.

HRH vaped indica.

“Now is the time, O you budding sapling of May,” said HRH. “Your clothes must take their absence from your flesh.”

When the sex worker took off her clothes, HRH was surprised to see that her chest, torso, and left outer thigh were inked with a multicolored tattoo.

The tattoo depicted a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of tentacles, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.

In a textbook example of the caricature endemic to the modern tattoo artist, a few of the monster’s tentacles wrapped around the sex worker’s nipples, and another stretched down to her mons pubis, while a final tentacle went around the left buttock and appeared to terminate at the sex worker’s rectum.

“Rare is the treasure who adorns her essential skin with the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft.”

“Thanks,” said the sex worker.

“Tell me, which of Lovecraft’s works do you rank as the finest?”

“I like ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’,” said the sex worker.

“O my darling, with each step you reveal new depths,” said HRH. “Your perversity knows no bounds.”

HRH vaped indica.

“The Thing on the Doorstep” was about a man who marries a woman only to discover that her mind has been replaced with the malevolent consciousness of the woman’s father. Everything revolves around open concerns of homosexuality, incest, trans people, and flat-out bestiality with a fishwoman.

On several occasions in his dewy youth, HRH had masturbated while reading the story.

“My plan had been to roger you senseless,” said HRH to the sex worker. “I was to leave you drooling and dazed like a donkey attacked by the silent killer of encephalomyelitis. Yet damn your eyes, you have revealed yourself as a beast who should not suffer the usual rounds of amorous pursuits. For you, I shall unleash the highest form of depredation. I will permit entry to my inner sanctum, to the chamber where the grandest perversity flourishes. Fear not. I possess no red room of pain. This is neither Fifty Shades of Grey nor The Amityville Horror .”

The sex worker followed HRH upstairs.

HRH led the sex worker into a bedroom.

There were two DXRacer chairs, a desk, and a giant LCD display attached to an Alienware Area-51 desktop computer.

HRH sat in one of the chairs.

“Position your meat in the other receptacle,” said HRH. “Join me at this terminal to infinity.”

“Are you trying to make me watch porn?” asked the sex worker. “I’ve seen porn. But it’s your money.”

HRH powered on the Alienware Area-51 desktop computer.

HRH opened the Google Chrome web browser.

HRH directed the Google Chrome web browser to https://www.twitch.tv.

https://www.twitch.tvwas the URL of Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, which was a website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry.

Amazon.com was owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owned Goodreads.com, the Internet Movie Database, Blue Origin, and the Washington Post , which was a newspaper with a slogan that said: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

This motto implied that without a free press casting illumination upon the powerful, American democracy would devolve into a hollow shell.

This motto had been handpicked by Jeff Bezos.

Depending on fluctuations in the stock market, on some days Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world.

Which meant that the motto was slightly disingenuous.

You don’t get as rich as Jeff Bezos without knowing exactly how people beyond the Cash Horizon wreaked havoc upon democracy: they said what they were going to do, in public, and then they did it.

In 2003 AD, about twenty people in the United States government told the world that it was going to kill a metric fuckton of Iraqis.

The whole world cried out, in unison, and demanded that the United States government not kill a metric fuckton of Iraqis.

But the Iraqis still died by the metric fuckton.

Remind me: who gave a shit about darkness?

The second problem with the motto was that it was based on an ahistorical assumption, which was that Americans lived in a democracy.

America was never a democracy.

It was a Republic.

It had been designed as a Republic.

The country’s founders were horrified by democracy.

American democracy couldn’t die because American democracy had never existed.

out of .

The front page of Twitch’s website displayed a live video stream from the Overwatch League.

Two regional teams battled each other in the game Overwatch while a live audience watched.

The stream was narrated by two men who’d patterned their vocal style after sports commentators.

“Dallas is going to swap things up a bit. Getting aggressive here and you have to worry a bit,” said one of the commentators.

“I mean that’s huge for Dallas,” said the other commentator. “Because now they’re going to have a player advantage. It’s a six versus five. That’s a big hit on the way out.”

“What the hell is this?” asked the sex worker.

“Are you not a millennial, madame?” asked HRH. “Is this not your natural domain?”

The vast majority of streams on Twitch were very different than Overwatch League.

A random person played video games in their home and broadcast this over the Internet. Twitch hosted the action, providing a central place for the meeting of broadcasters, who were called streamers, and their viewers.

The video game action occupied most of any individual stream. A small box, containing live video of the user, appeared in one of the stream’s corners. On the right side of the screen, the stream’s viewers commented in a scrolling livechat.

Depending on which streaming software was used, and depending on which plug-ins the streamer had configured, various graphics were displayed when viewers interfaced with the platform’s monetization.

In other words, the people watching videos on Twitch could give money to the people broadcasting on Twitch and these donations would show up in the stream itself.

“Over many arduous months, I have cultivated a personal fandom of several Twitch channels,” said HRH. “Permit a demonstration.”

HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of an unremarkable young man.

The young man was playing Fortnite: Battle Royale.

The sex worker watched as the young man navigated his video game avatar across an island landscape, destroying objects and simulating genocide against the other players connected to the same Fortnite server.