Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

Because they are dumb animals trapped in the immediacy of a terrible situation, none of the kittens will ask the right question.

None of the kittens will ask: “Who locked me in this box?”

The defense mechanisms that you’ve been given as a member of a Western liberal democracy will not save you and they will not save your children.

It will take several decades, but your future, and theirs, is digitally inflected feudalism.

There’s a slow train coming.

Everyone knows it.

Your life, and your body, will have only one purpose.

You will make money for monsters beyond the Cash Horizon.

You will be the slave of HRH.

And because you will not kill the rich or mandate a wave of socialism, the best idea that you’ll have will be to exercise your franchise at the ballot box, where you will choose a candidate who’ll sell you down the river at the first flash of cash.

And your second-best idea will be to go out in public and fight with another poor person while a third poor person captures the action on a smartphone that they will turn into a monetarily profitable video for Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

And your third-best idea will be to become a cynical asshole who lies for money and writes thinkpieces to manipulate the emotions of naïve morons on the Internet.

And your fourth-best idea will be to become one of the naïve morons, and you will make money for your global overlords by pretending into devices built by slaves that the worst thing in the world is whenever a honky gas station attendant insults someone from Honduras.

And your worst idea will be to keep your head down and try to make a reasonably decent life while buying more shit and imagining that you have a special relationship with sports teams, the Celebrity branch of American governance, and intellectual property in which you have no economic stake.

None of this will save you.

If there are still historians in the future, and that’s a big if, and their histories are not sanitized at the behest of centralized organizations, my guess is that the Twenty-First Century AD will be seen as the time when all the reasonably decent ideas developed by the Left were co-opted and conquered by the Right.

Identity politics, performance art, fluidity with mass media, total freedom of speech, post-modernism.

The mistake was in thinking that these tactics were the specific province of one ideology.

But a gun doesn’t care who it shoots.

When those historians of the future write about 9/11, which was when some Muslims facefucked reality into a shitty disaster movie, it will be seen as the beginning of a moment that ended with the election of Donald J. Trump and the inauguration of the Hyperreal.

9/11 was avoidable, but its psychic message wasn’t: the destinies that Americans believed were their birthrights, and the birthrights of their children, were not inevitable.

Those destinies were the accidental byproduct of an unparalleled prosperity boom.

And that boom ended about fifty years ago.

And to fill the hole, the American people embraced the one sector that never dies, the one industry that never goes away, the one stain that spreads forever.

They went to war.

Against the world.

Against each other.

Donald J. Trump was the natural consequence of an entire society that adopted unending slaughter as its central function.

If you believe that this is simply an American issue, you’re wrong.

A few months before Trump’s election, America’s biggest partner in the war against Iraq, the United Kingdom, also heard the crying out of a million dead Iraqis.

And a majority of its citizens attempted suicide by withdrawing from the European Union.

And because no one ever mentions it: most of the European countries that have seen a Far Right resurgence were part of the so-called Coalition of the Willing.

The Coalition of the Willing was a shitty euphemism that President George Walker Bush used to describe the countries that his administration had beguiled or bullied into America’s second war against Iraq.

And I know, reader, that causality isn’t causation.

But still.

I remember.

And I hear the wailing ghosts of a million dead Iraqis.

And those future historians will also say this: when confronted by the total co-option of their tactics, and facing their greatest existential threat, American liberals doubled down on the very tactics that had been co-opted by their ideological enemies.

They fought over a corpse.

As a member of the Hyperreal, one message has resounded since the day of your birth: the discrediting of Christianity from refined intellectual opinion.

Christianity has been discredited for a very specific reason.

At its core, it exists in opposition to money.

And refined intellectual opinion is just another commodity.

Try some, buy some.

It’s all just filthy lucre for Penguin Random House.

On those long and empty nights when I hear the voices of a million dead Iraqis, sometimes the ghosts speak in full paragraphs.

Sometimes they say this: Jarett , our terrible vengeance has reconfigured your entire society into a shitty iteration of the Church.

We have restored the concept of original sin and we have forced your liberal intelligentsia to genuflect before it. We have ensured that they will do this in the form of vacuous statements regarding White Privilege issued between tweets about consequence-free hallucinogenic use, dank memes, and bespoke doggie daycare.

We have elevated a faux-Left who write books for Rupert Murdoch, and we have ensured that your society is doomed to rehash the battles of the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial with all the efficacy and power of the Byzantine scholars who debated how many angels could fit on the head of a pin while the Ottomans were sacking Constantinople in 1453 AD.

And, yes, Jarett, we find it very helpful that you’ve pointed out the apocryphal nature of this story about your ancestors and Byzantine scholars.

We thank you for both your honesty and your needless pedantry.

If you hadn’t noticed, we’re using the heightened language of rhetoric to make a greater point than mere factual happenstance.

Besides, your taxes paid for our blood.

So give us a break.

We have transformed your fellow citizens of the Hyperreal into a laity with no control over the debate or the direction of their society. We have ensured that all they can do is offer useless peasants’ revolts into cyberspace while enriching their feudal overlords and strengthening the ostracism of their fellows. We have created the world’s greatest device of excommunication in the form of the Internet.

And, yes, Jarett, we have heard your objection to the archaic use of the word “cyberspace.”

The paucity of books in Arabic translation ensured that a bootleg edition of William Gibson’s Neuromancer did not appear on the streets of Baghdad until February 2003, just prior to your country’s invasion of Iraq. Its cover artwork was a heavily pixelated-and-dithered Internet JPG of a painting by Rowena Morrill.

As such, we apologize to you for our lack of a fresher reference point and for failing to use au courant terminology to describe your vast and unending apparatus of state surveillance, social shame, and pointless judgment.

We note that in your fathomless need to play the pedant, you have emailed William Gibson and asked him whether or not an Arabic translation of Neuromancer appeared in Baghdad. We further note William Gibson’s response, in which he wrote that to his best knowledge there is no Arabic translation of the book.