Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

The last time anyone thanked me for my honesty was in an email sent by the Office of Development and Alumni Relations at New York University, an institution of higher learning centered in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

NYU has three distinguishing characteristics.

The first is that it’s my alma mater.

I graduated in 2002 AD, after giving the university an absurd amount of money for an undergraduate degree.

This is why the school begs me for money.

It’s like a junkie who can’t stop.

NYU’s second distinction is its inhuman cost.

In 2017 AD, the tuition was $46,170 for a year. Throw in campus housing and administrative fees, and the total was $63,472.

To put this in context: as of 2016 AD, the American median income was $57,617 per person.

You can’t charge $63,472 and expect much more than a mixture of the rich and the gullible.

The gullible emerge from NYU in a state of financial ruin, indebted for a substandard education that they could’ve received for about 1/8th of the price at a state-run university.

Welcome to adulthood!

Time to pay back $253,888!

With compounding interest!

The rich kids come out fine.

The rich kids are always fine.

The third thing that distinguishes NYU is its Abu Dhabi campus, which opened in 2014 AD.

The idea behind the Abu Dhabi campus was to construct a mirror-world NYU that bestowed the same substandard education, and thus conferred the same substandard degree, as the Greenwich Village campus.

The only difference was that the mirror-world campus would be located on Happiness Island in the United Arab Emirates, an absolute monarchy funded by the world’s seventh-largest oil reserve.

Nothing says academic freedom like petrol feudalism!

Before the Happiness Island campus had its grand opening, an article appeared in the New York Times which detailed the nature of NYU’s new venture.

The school’s administration had arranged a deal with the government of the United Arab Emirates, in which the oil monarchy would cover the whole expense, and construction, of the mirror-world campus.

Picture this: a repressive regime renowned for its human rights abuses makes a deal with a bunch of very naïve and very greedy American bureaucrats.

What could possibly go wrong?

The oil monarchy sent labor recruiters around the Indian subcontinent.

The recruiters told people that they could make big money if they came to Abu Dhabi and helped build the mirror-world campus on Happiness Island.

When people of the Indian subcontinent arrived in Abu Dhabi, happiness proved elusive.

The workers were stuck in subhuman housing and paid dirt-poor wages.

When they tried to strike for the money they were promised, they had the shit beat out of them by the police.

And the workers couldn’t leave Happiness Island.

Their passports had been confiscated.

They were slaves.

And although putting people into human bondage and making them build college campuses was a time-honored tradition, it’d been a very long while since any American institution of higher learning had involved itself in this sort of disgrace.

On August 30th, 2017 AD, I received an email from NYU’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations.

The email was from a Senior Annual Giving Officer named Corey, and it informed me that Corey was coming to Los Angeles.

I live in Los Angeles.

Corey wanted to have lunch or get coffee.

For years, I’d received emails from NYU. All of the emails begged for money.

But none of them had extended a personal invitation of food or caffeine.

Corey’s email made me wonder if NYU employed a clipping service to search for media mentions of prominent alumni.

In the sixteen months prior to Corey’s email, I’d lived as a minor literary sensation off the strength of my novel I Hate the Internet . Some of the news stories about my book’s unlikely success had mentioned that I was an alumnus.

Whenever someone thanks you for your honesty, what they mean is shut the fuck up.

Being thanked for your honesty is like someone tattooing the word SEXY on their upper arm.

If it has to be said aloud, its opposite is sure to be true.

“Your face is very stupid!”

“Thank you for your honesty.”

“Madame, everyone in this room knows that your wife is a living grotesque!”

“Thank you for your honesty.”

“Never invade Russia in the winter!”

“Thank you for your honesty.”

“Your prolonged substance abuse is destroying your body, your employment prospects, and the mental health of your family members!”

“Thank you for your honesty.”

I wrote back to Corey.

This is what I wrote:

Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 1:26 AM

From: Jarett Kobek

To: Corey

Subject: RE: Meeting with NYU in LA?

Dear Corey,

Thanks for the offer, but I’ve long disconnected myself from NYU.

It’s impossible to imagine supporting an institution that allowed slave labor to build an entire campus in Abu Dhabi and has failed, completely, to redress the situation in any meaningful fashion.

On the surface, my email would appear to be motivated by a principled stance.

A principled stance is the euphemism that people like myself, who are hopelessly mired in the Looney Left, use to describe those moments when they say or do something that ruins a party by taking exception to a harmless comment or action.

I suppose that it was a principled stance.

It’s appalling that I attended an institution which placed a fig leaf atop global evil.

And it’s repulsive that the fig leaf was built by slaves.

And, really, I’m sorry how mixed I made that fig-leaf metaphor.

But only a mixed metaphor can contain the existential horror of NYU.

Also: I’m a terrible writer.

But, really, this was why I sent my note to Corey: I just wanted NYU to stop asking for money.

You can’t imagine how much email starts coming in after you’ve been a minor literary sensation.

In the same month that Corey extended his invitation for food or caffeine, a major American publisher issued my follow-up to I Hate the Internet . It was a novel that ended up with the title The Future Won’t Be Long.

It was a massive commercial failure.

Less than 300 copies sold in its first six months!

I Hate the Internet sold 300 copies in its first two weeks!

Reader, this was shocking.

If for no other reason than the simple fact that The Future Won’t Be Long was published by Penguin Random House.

Penguin Random House is the biggest publishing conglomerate in the world. It’s a multibillion-dollar multinational corporation owned by another multibillion-dollar multinational corporation called Bertelsmann, which spent much of World War Two producing Nazi propaganda and using Jewish slaves to work in its factories.

My book was backed by Nazi money!

And it still failed!

So what happened?

For decades, everyone who had any pretense to High Culture wasted fathomless hours talking about theorists like Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard.

These people with pretenses to High Culture had advanced the idea that reading incomprehensible French books gave them special insight into the way the world works.

Sometimes they expressed this pretense in unreadable texts called master’s theses and doctoral dissertations.

One of Baudrillard’s ideas was very popular. He’d theorized that there would be a moment when reality collapsed into fiction, at which point it would then be impossible to distinguish the fake from the actual.