Only Americans Burn in Hell Read online

  But the women of Fairy Land were immortal and undying beings, and they viewed the previous four hundred years in a very different light than the people living in Los Angeles.

  The women of Fairy Land knew that most of the technological developments of the previous four hundred years were about as impressive as an old dog learning a new trick, only to discover that the dog’s new trick was something useless like shelling pumpkin seeds, translating the Apocalypse of the Pseudo-Methodius out of Syriac, or building a career in the American recording industry by performing parodies of popular songs.

  Smartphones, the Internet, and air travel were only refinements of a principle that had governed human behavior from its very beginnings.

  All the technology really did was create new ways for a person to be annoyed by the neighbors.

  Fern and Celia knew where the real change had been.

  They knew what the real difference was between Los Angeles in the Year of the Froward Worm and, say, the early medieval period or the Ancient Hellenic era.

  Fern and Celia knew that the real change had come with the development of indoor plumbing and, specifically, the management of sewage.

  Celia and Fern were more sensitive than usual to the problem of human waste and its effective management.

  After all, they’d both watched the Red-Rose Knight be assassinated by Orson’s shit.

  The effective management of human sewage had been developed about one hundred years prior to the Year of the Froward Worm.

  Homo sapiens had been on Earth for about two hundred thousand years, which means that it took the planet’s dominant species roughly one hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred years before someone realized that people shouldn’t do a poo on the living-room floor.

  So don’t get your hopes up.

  When Celia and Rose Byrne went to Los Angeles, they had difficulty in figuring out where they should arrive.

  It wasn’t like London in the Seventeenth Century AD.

  Fern hadn’t left any magical beacons hanging around to guide her mother through the landscape.

  Los Angeles County was four thousand square miles.

  When Celia cast her spell that opened a magic window onto Los Angeles, she had to do a little faery fudging, asking that the window open on the place which would be the most hospitable to their arrival.

  She didn’t specify the exact nature of this hospitality.

  The magical window opened in the lobby of the Vista Theater, which was a movie house in the neighborhood of Los Feliz.

  The Vista, which was a giant single-screen theater, had been built in 1923 AD.

  The exterior façade of the building was Spanish Colonial Revival, but its interior décor was early Twentieth-Century AD Egyptian kitsch, which meant that the theater was filled with Pharaonic heads and hieroglyphics.

  Celia and Rose Byrne arrived on the evening of Thursday, June 2nd, 2017 AD.

  This evening hosted the Vista’s first screening of Wonder Woman, the huge media spectacle in which a lesbian named Diana left her magical island with the intention of beating the shit out of some Germans.

  For decades, the Vista had been managed by a man named Victor Martinez.

  A curious feature of Victor’s tenure was his delight in dressing up as characters from the films that showed at the Vista.

  Victor’s appearances in these outfits were always more enjoyable than the films themselves.

  When the Vista had shown Iron Man, which was about a war profiteer who learned that war profiteering could be more profitable if the war profiteer built a suit of armor and personally killed Muslims with his own mechanical hands, Victor Martinez wore a version of the war profiteer’s suit of armor.

  When the Vista had shown The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which was about a fussy midget drawn into an unlikely adventure by a slightly pompous wizard, Victor Martinez dressed as the wizard.

  When the Vista had shown Pirates of the Caribbean 3, which was a film about a pirate rapist with a charming accent, Victor Martinez dressed as the pirate rapist.

  Because Wonder Woman was about a female character, Victor Martinez did not dress as the film’s lead role on June 2nd, 2017 AD.

  Instead, he dressed as the film’s male sidekick, an indistinct American soldier during World War One.

  Another of the Vista’s employees, who was a woman, dressed as the lead character of Wonder Woman.

  They stood outside the theater, greeting attendees.

  Victor Martinez and his fellow employee were not the only people dressed in costumes on June 2nd, 2017 AD.

  A curious feature of early Twenty-First-Century AD life was that fans of media spectacles liked to dress up as characters which appeared within those media spectacles.

  In the case of the Vista’s premiere screening of Wonder Woman, this was really weird.

  No one had seen the film!

  It could have been a total piece of shit!

  Unlike Victor and his fellow employee, who had a vested economic interest in the film’s success, the people who dressed in costume at Wonder Woman had no stake in the property.

  Wonder Woman had arrived at the Vista anointed in a sold-out madness emblematic of the United States of America in the Twenty-First Century.

  This madness was long-brewing and the result of multiple historical occurrences and tendencies.

  Some of these historical occurrences and tendencies had been running for decades.

  Some had been running for centuries.

  The culmination of these historical occurrences and tendencies was the recent election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States of America.

  The Presidency was the highest office in the country, to which individuals were elected every four years through an arcane process that had been designed, originally, to make sure the United States was cool with enslaving people from Africa.

  Enslaving people from Africa was great business, and it was the economic bedrock of the fledgling nation, and it involved owning human beings who would be forced into labor and receive no benefits from that labor.

  About seventy years after its founding, the country held a big debate as to whether or not it was cool to enslave people from Africa.

  After this debate had killed about 716,000 poor White people fighting for the economic masters, and 36,000 Black people fighting for their freedom, everyone decided that enslaving people from Africa probably wasn’t too cool.

  Because it was no longer too cool to enslave people from Africa, which was the country’s explicit purpose, the United States entered a malaise.

  It had lost its demon.

  The purpose of the Presidency shifted.

  If its original function no longer existed, then surely some new purpose could be found.

  It turned out that the Presidency was really good at making war.

  After all, it had overseen about seventy years of war on Africa.

  So new wars were made.

  Decades and decades and decades of war.

  By the time that Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency, the elections which chose the President had transformed from referendums about who would best administer the international slave trade into contests about who’d get the chance to reduce illiterate Muslims into pulpy masses of intestines.

  Even by the dubious standards of candidates for the United States Presidency, Donald J. Trump was a wretched specimen.

  He was the most famous person who had ever lived.

  He was the most famous person who would ever live.

  He was orange, he wore a stupid wig, and he was a pawn of multinational corporations.

  He was hella racist.

  By any honest account, he was into sexually assaulting women.

  It was rumored that he was a speed freak, which would explain the difference between his public appearances as President and his public appearances in the 1980s AD and 1990s AD, when he’d been a fixture of New York City’s tabloid culture.

&
nbsp; In the early days, the President had been, if not especially bright, then at the very least coherent.

  By the time that he won the right to turn Muslims into shattered masses of agony, the President could barely speak.

  Amphetamine abuse has a terrible effect on the brain.

  For decades, the political liberals of the Celebrity branch of American governance had profited off Donald J. Trump’s crass public persona.

  They’d given him deals for books that he hadn’t written and stuck him on television whenever they thought it’d turn a buck.

  Trump, who pretended on television that he was a billionaire, was big entertainment dollars.

  His media persona was this: he was a total fucking jerk!

  And he was rich!

  He was great entertainment in a country that fostered a delusion in its poor that they too, someday, would be rich enough to treat other poor people like shit.

  Donald J. Trump ran for the Presidency, and won, by embracing political viewpoints in direct opposition to the very people who had created him.

  The liberals in the Celebrity branch of American governance had made a beast which they could not control.

  It was like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, a novel about a scientist who creates a monster out of spare human body parts that he’s dug up from graves. The monster gets angry. Things go badly.

  There were some differences.

  The monster in Frankenstein, made of rotten human remains, had a body that was slightly less disturbing than the body of the President, which was made of media coverage stitched together with plastic surgery.

  The monster in Frankenstein didn’t have a speed habit.

  And the monster in Frankenstein had a more honest relationship to literacy.

  The monster in Frankenstein was into reading Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe.

  By contrast, the monster who was the President just put his name on books that other people had written and then took money from political liberals in the publishing industry.

  What’s the harm? asked the publishing industry.

  It’s all just business, said the publishing industry.

  199,900 years of shitting in the living room.

  Anyway, the election of Donald J. Trump made America go nuts.

  To be fair, the country had always been pretty crazy.

  War, genocide, and slavery aren’t good for anyone’s mental health.

  But after Trump assumed the Presidency, the madness got worse.

  The people who’d voted for Trump went nuts because they’d won and had no idea what to do with their impossible victory.

  The country’s political liberals went nuts because Trump put them in the position of facing an undeniable and yet unpalatable truth.

  This was the truth that the political liberals could not deny and could not face: beyond making English Comp courses at community colleges very annoying, forty years of rhetorical progress had achieved little, and it turned out that feeling good about gay marriage did not alleviate the taint of being warmongers whose taxes had killed more Muslims than the Black Death.

  You can’t make evil disappear by being a reasonably nice person who mouths platitudes at dinner parties. Social media confessions do not alleviate suffering. You can’t talk the world into being a decent place while sacrificing nothing.

  The socialists didn’t go nuts.

  They were the people who’d thought about the complex problems facing the nation and decided that an honest solution to these problems could be achieved with applied Leftism.

  But don’t get your hopes up.

  Despite being correct in their thinking, the socialists were the most annoying people in America. When they spoke, it was like bamboo slivers shoved under a fingernail.

  I don’t know why.

  It was the single biggest American tragedy of the last one hundred years.

  By the Year of the Froward Worm, too much warmongering had splintered the national psyche into a series of tribes.

  The most obvious schism was between the public voices of the liberal warmongers and the public voices of the tribe that had helped Donald J. Trump win his impossible victory.

  For the sake of clarity, let’s call this second tribe the Fucking Assholes.

  The noise from the public voices of the liberal warmongers had become the dominant voice of the haute bourgeoisie. This contingent was represented by a mixture of high-grade celebrities, op-ed writers, Democratic party apparatchiks, and the mentally ill. A great number of these public voices had passed the Cash Horizon.

  For varied reasons, the public voices of the liberal warmongers had devised an idea that was extraordinarily profitable for the arch-capitalist class: that the Celebrity branch of American governance, and its products, could be read as a proxy for the struggles and strife of the great American unwashed.

  The public voices of the Fucking Assholes were represented by a mixture of low-rent celebrities, op-ed writers, Republican party apparatchiks, and the mentally ill. A great number of people in these public voices had passed the Cash Horizon.

  The public voices of the Fucking Assholes agreed with the public voices of the liberal warmongers: the Celebrity branch of American governance, and its products, could be read as a proxy for the struggles and strife of the great American unwashed.

  The only difference of opinion was about the interpretation of this proxy.

  Both sides accepted the unchallenged underlying thesis.

  The argument proved to be very profitable for the arch-capitalist class who actually owned the Celebrity branch of American governance.

  Everything was an advertisement.

  And if you’re wondering about the opinions of the non-public voices, then go and fuck off back to the Dark Ages.

  You’re revealing a thinking that’s very Twentieth Century AD, with atavistic tendencies towards logic and dreams of a populace that hasn’t been preyed upon by the mind-altering substances of the pharmaceutical industry. That shit is ancient news.

  You either agreed with the country’s priestly castes, and their apparatuses of sycophants, novitiate aspirants and true believers, or you found yourself on the receiving end of a barrage of hatred and death threats.

  Here was the difference between the priestly castes, many of whom had opinions on deadline for money, and everyone else: sane people shut the fuck up, nodded their heads, and did what they needed to survive in a toxic political landscape.

  In an era when public discourse was the bought-and-paid property of roughly twenty companies, and the airing of an opinion could subject a person to unfathomable amounts of abuse and recrimination, the only reasonable option was to be quiet.

  So when you next fawn over someone’s brave public thoughts, repeat the following: The contours of discourse are so horrendous that one thing has become certain. Any individual offering up a public opinion necessarily must be either hopelessly stupid or insane. I am engaging with a product of madness and idiocy.

  Regarding the public opinions offered up in this book, they are the products of both idiocy and bad craziness.

  But at least I have some justification for engaging with the stupidity and insanity of this book.

  I wrote the thing.

  Reader, what’s your excuse?

  Here was one thing that all the priestly castes agreed upon in the run-up to the election in the Year of the Misplaced Butter: Donald J. Trump could not, should not, and would not be President.

  It was impossible.

  But Donald J. Trump won anyway.

  A creature created by the Celebrity branch of American governance had taken over the Executive branch, the conflation of entertainment into political life was complete, and it had happened without the blessing of the high clergy, and it shut out the vast majority of people who were from the Celebrity branch of American governance.

  By the way, all of this is why one’s political tools should probably be comprised of effective organization,
decent arguments, an understanding of the actual political landscape, as opposed to an imaginary map built as a reflection of one’s own virtue.

  If the only tool in your political arsenal is shame, don’t be surprised what happens when you meet a shameless man.

  Enter Wonder Woman in 2017 AD.

  There’d been about fifteen years of films about superheroes, which were intellectual properties about supranatural beings like Celia.

  These films were all the same: a supranatural being reenacted American foreign policy by responding to an existential threat through exaggerated violence, generally after another supranatural being reenacted 9/11, which was when some Muslims blew up two ugly buildings in New York and facefucked reality into a cartoon.

  What differentiated Wonder Woman from the rest of the super-hero films was that its lead character was female.

  Because the country was run by a monster created by liberals in the Celebrity branch of American governance, and because liberals were totally disconnected from the political structure of their country, and because the film mapped to easy marketing demographics, Wonder Woman was freighted with a swollen ideology.

  It arrived as a place where the unexamined ideologies of American life could belong to women as easily as men.

  If you think this is an exaggeration, please read the following quotes from “Want to Take Political Action This Weekend? Go to the Movies”, an article written by Melissa Goodman for the website of the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union:

  Political action doesn’t always have to take the form of marching, holding a house party or calling your local representative. You can make a bold and necessary political statement just by buying a movie ticket.

  Go see Wonder Woman …*

  That was politics at the mid-point of 2017 AD.

  It arrived in an article on the website of an organization dedicated to civil liberties which suggested that an alternative to applied Leftist action was to patronize media produced by a massive multinational corporation owned by the same old shits who’d been ruining the world for centuries.

  This was the madness of the moment.

  People had lost the ability to tell the difference between the Celebrity and the other three branches of American governance.