Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

To this end, we refute William Gibson and assert again that a bootleg version of Neuromancer appeared in Baghdad in February of 2003, arriving on the same shelves as the novels of Saddam Hussein. We dare you, and William Gibson, to prove that this did not occur.

We have ensured that your feudal overlords benefit from the Church. They are the ones who make money off inflections of dogma about the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial. They own the device of excommunication. The hierarchal social pyramid of the classroom textbook has returned.

You are near its bottom, but because you made the curious life choice to be an entertainer, you are not quite a serf. You are a jongleur. The third-oldest profession. Keep singing your songs. See how much effect it has on the world.

We will tell you about the delusion that animates your stories. You were born at the tail end of the only fifty years in history when life got noticeably better. You grew up in an historical anomaly and you have mistaken the contours of this anomaly for The Way Things Work.

The other 4,950 years of recorded history were bitter slogs through the wretched lives of miserable people suffering beneath unfair systems of governance. The weight of those years is against you, Jarett. What kind of idiot would assume that five anomalous decades are a better predictor of the future than the other 4,950?

Let’s not pretend. Only people in about twenty countries had better lives during those fifty years. If you haven’t killed them yet, perhaps you should inquire with the people of Iraq about whether or not they experienced a significant increase in their quality of life while suffering beneath an oppressive system of oil feudalism propped up by British Petroleum.

Our greatest vengeance, Jarett, is that we have recreated the Church and removed from it any hope of the Christian virtues. Your entire society has reconstituted itself around a cruel medieval structure and stripped away that structure’s slim benefits.

Your Twenty-First Century AD is about everything interesting from your Twentieth Century AD being transformed into a very shitty religion ruled over by a high clergy of the haute bourgeoisie. They pray to monsters. Their faint wish is to somehow avoid their feudal destinies. But they too will fall.

Everything will be top and bottom.

There will be no middle.

Now you live in a world where there is no hope, no charity, and no fraternity.

Please enjoy Batman.

Please enjoy Harry Potter, even if he is an unfulfilled ghulat al-latah.

Please enjoy the Presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Please enjoy Brexit.

Please enjoy the rise of the Far Right.

Good luck with the future.

You will most certainly need it.

PS: We also apologize for the instance last spring when we expressed surprise that your given name isn’t spelled with two Rs and one T.

But you killed us, Jarret.

You did it with drone warfare.

You did it with a child’s toy.

You did it with a radio-controlled airplane.

Get over yourself.

So what the fuck, reader, why not?

If for no reason other than the bloody-minded perversity of the damned, you might as well embrace the most discredited idea in Western life.

You might as well ride dirty with Jesus.

And his ultimate message.

It’s not like anything else is working.

You are more than your base impulses.

You don’t have to follow the script of your life.

Don’t be a dick.

The only things that they can’t monetize are individual acts of kindness.

It occurs to me that I never explained how Arafat Kazi talked his way into the pit.

He found the box office manager.

Arafat Kazi said that he’d bought a ticket.

But that the ticket wouldn’t scan.

And then he apologized.

And apologized again.

And again.

And again.

Think about it from the perspective of the box office manager: presumably this was a person who’d spent a great deal of his life talking to people who wanted free admission.

Surely, he was hardened against grifters and schemers.

But none of those people were dressed like circus performers.

They were not holy fools clad in motley.

And none of them apologized for the bother.

And none of those people got a free ticket.

And that’s why I’m a Christian.

After Rusticano, there was nothing else for it.

Celia went back to Fairy Land.

Fern went with her.

The Fairy Knight was left in the mortal world, doomed to wander for an uncertain term, but with the promise that his mother and sister would keep in touch.

Fern’s return to Fairy Land occasioned much joy.

Magical charm returned to the island.

The lesbianism was explosive.

What could Fern do?

The experiment had failed.

Life had not turned out how she wanted.

Everything that she’d hoped would carry her through had turned out hollow.

In the end, all that remained was where she’d grown up.

Welcome to true adulthood, Fern.

And, sometimes, Fairy Land was visited by the fractured shimmering astral projections of people tripping on dimethyltryptamine.

As always, the women of Fairy Land believed that these astral projections were remnants of The People Who Came Before.

The astral projections tried communicating with the women.

But their voices came out like Morse code sent over a telegraph wire.

Dot, dash, dot, dash, dash, dot, dot.

One spirit appeared with greater frequency than the others.

Its form had become better defined, more human.

With each of its appearances, the spirit inched closer to speech.

Its words had begun to sound like English.

Like this: lrhsssrsssslrlrllrlrrlrllrrssssllsssslrssssrrssssrlrlrssssslrllssssrlrlssssrlrlsssrrrlll .

One night, as Fern walked past the Warbling Yews of Nevermore, she came upon this spirit.

It looked like a man.

It spoke like a man.

“Madame,” the spirit said to Fern, “I perhaps wonder if your elvish brain can be run through its robust Mandelbrotian paces.”

Fern stared at the spirit.

She’d heard the story of The People Who Came Before.

Who hadn’t?

They’d been the original inhabitants of Fairy Land.

And they’d grown so weary of life that they made a bargain with a creature calling itself Eru Ilúvatar.

In exchange for the blessing of eternal peace, The People Who Came Before had traded away their narcissistic senses of selves.

They’d lost all that my/me/mine bullshit.

They’d lost the curse of language.

And then they’d disappeared.

Fern was freaked the fuck out.

It wasn’t that one of The People Who Came Before was speaking.

With magic, none of the rules are ever set in place.

Weird shit happens all the time.

Fern was freaked the fuck out because she couldn’t imagine how, by any possible quirk of magic, one of The People Who Came Before would materialize in Fairy Land while wearing a T-shirt that said this:

“Oh most noble spirit,” said Fern. “Do you speak now from the Great Beyond?”

“If, in your greeny estimation,” said the fractured astral projection, “the Great Beyond is the ketamine-flecked restroom of the local hotspot and private events space known as KABIN, then, yes, this hearty voice shouts from the Great Beyond.”