Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

When I’m chopping logs for my old wood stove in Mayfair, I like to ask myself whether the liberal writers on HarperCollins, who are enmeshed in the media and entertainment industries, are so stupid that they don’t know they’re taking money from me, or if they’re so cynical and motivated by their own atomized interests that they don’t care. I never do make up my mind. Who can decide with that lot of saddos?

Remember when the feminist Internet sheilas were deadset about that Paki comedian fella Aziz Ansari rooting a young moll? That was a real laugh. Aziz was in a few of my movies. Epic , Ice Age: Continental Drift , and What’s Your Number? I jolly well paid for his holiday in the sun. Remember the original article that told the world about Aziz’s rooting? It was published on a website called Babe.net. Guess who’s an investor?

Do you recall when the benders at the Guardian unleashed a real corker and said that Empire , a hip-hop-themed television drama, was ‘audaciously honest on Black issues’? Crikey, do you care to hazard a guess who produced Empire ? Want to guess who owned the network? Guess who made the real money off the advertisements and sales into foreign territories? That Guardian article was a shock! They made me sound a bloody golly!

I’m getting on in years, but I think I’ve done pretty well. Maybe some sook dags say I play the larrikin, but I run a family businesses. Ooh, crikey, I hope I’ve stayed true to my values. I know that when my time comes and I go meet the Great Sky Cunt, I’ve raised a right crop of young’uns who’ll steer my works in the right direction.

If people from the Right Wing want to gain moral instruction, they go watch Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch makes money off the advertisements that are aired on the network.

If people from the so-called American Left want to gain moral instruction, they go buy a book published by a Certified Liberal who is being published by HarperCollins, and Rupert Murdoch makes money off the sale.

The purpose of anyone expressing a public opinion in American life, or consuming one, is this: to make money for about 1,500 people.

And don’t think I’m singling out Rupert Murdoch.

Other than the phone hacking, anything you could say about Murdoch was true of 1,499 other individuals.

For instance: the American cable network which served as the ideological counterweight to Fox News.

It was called MSNBC. It stole Fox News’s playbook and changed the cheap conservative opinions into cheap liberal ones.

Millions of people watched it every night, convinced that they were being given the inside scoop on how the Trump Presidency would crumble.

Because MSNBC wasn’t a jar of mustard, it didn’t come with a short narrative about its values, so maybe you can’t blame its viewers for being ignorant of who was manufacturing their opinion.

But still.

The letters N-B-C appear in MSNBC.

And as everyone remembers, NBC was the broadcast network that aired fourteen seasons of The Apprentice .

The Apprentice starred Donald J. Trump, and it was on that show where he honed the skills of televised humiliation and abuse which he would use to win the Presidency.

His last episode aired on February 16th, 2015 AD.

He declared his candidacy for the Presidency on June 16th, 2015 AD.

Comcast Corporation, which owns NBC, made big money off Donald J. Trump before he won the Presidency.

And then they made money after.

And, look, I can’t judge any writer who gets paid by Rupert Murdoch.

I took money from Penguin Random House, and if I hadn’t had a huge commercial failure, I’d be no different than anyone else.

I’d still be there, just another haute bourgeoisie aspirant chasing my small piece of the global media landscape.

I’d be hoping to crawl through the window before they locked it from the inside.

And to put an even finer point on it: through media coverage which generated advertising revenues, I Hate the Internet made money for Rupert Murdoch.

I didn’t even sign a contract with the devil and I still work for him.

Now here I am, disgruntled, and I’m like those Science Fiction writers of the Twentieth Century AD.

I see the future.

If you look at the corporate history of publishing, it’s been the reallocation of assets from smaller pools of capital into larger pools of capital.

Within twenty years, at least one major American publisher will be majority owned by a conglomerate from either China or the Middle East.

Probably Qatar.

Maybe Saudi Arabia.

And then your moral instruction will come from writers who are cashing cheques signed by repressive regimes with long histories of human rights abuses.

Your opinions will come from writers who will be no different than New York University.

They will be founts of knowledge and they will be economically powered by hegemonies built with slave labor.

And you’ll still be more concerned about who made your mustard.

None of this would be of any consequence.

Regardless of what is printed on tote bags, in normal circumstances books have no impact on the governing of any society.

And neither does television.

Popular entertainment is meaningless.

In a sane world, I’d be using the example of publishing to illustrate the increasing consolidation of wealth and money in the hands of a transnational global oligarchy, and bitching about how this excludes freaks from achievement in the arts.

But something terrible happened in 2016 AD: the ghosts of one million dead Iraqis cried out for a just revenge against their killers.

And the world listened.

And so a rogue member of the Celebrity branch of American governance took over the Presidency.

And Penguin Random House publishes his books.

And so does Simon & Schuster.

And so does Macmillan.

And so does HarperCollins.

But not Hachette.

There’s still hope!

Ignore the arms dealing of its corporate parent!

Except:

La Librairie Hachette craignait, à juste titre, que les résistants n’appliquent à la lettre le programme du Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) et ne nationalisent cet exceptionnel outil que les nazis admiraient et dont ils avaient envisagé de faire la base d’une énorme entreprise européenne placée sous leur contrôle… Obligés de céder, ils firent tout pour maintenir leurs positions au plus haut niveau dans la reconfiguration du capital envisagée. À la Libération, pour être sûrs que nul ne songerait à les accabler, ils firent réécrire une partie de leurs archives, en ajoutant par exemple qu’au cours d’une entrevue, Laval s’était montré glacial alors que, dans les faits, il avait été d’un commerce agréable, ou d’autres remarques que l’historien éprouve les plus grandes difficultés à repérer quand il consulte aujourd’hui ces documents savamment élagués en 1945.{Mollier, Jean-Yves. “L’édition française dans la tourmente de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 2011/4 (n° 112).}

Imagine a litter of three-month-old kittens. They are locked in a box. No light penetrates the box. There is a steady supply of oxygen. There is no food or water.

The kittens are kept in the box beyond the point of starvation and dehydration.

They shriek and they moan, and they rend each other with their claws.

They kill each other.

The dead are eaten by the living.

One kitten will survive the rest, nourished on the corpses of its siblings, but its suffering will be the longest and, in its final days, it will die the worst death, lacking even the analgesic numbness that comes with inflicting pain on another living being.