Only Americans Burn in Hell
Page 11
National Public Radio was, in part, radio sponsored by the American state. It was a relic of another era, which is to say the mid-1960s AD, when there was still currency in the idea that civic institutions could serve, and enrich, the lives of the citizenry.
What a jest!
What a jape!
KCRW was broadcasting the afternoon NPR news show, which was called All Things Considered.
As Rose Byrne followed her saliva-based smartphone navigation, the women heard the stories of the day.
The lead story was of some interest to both Celia and Rose Byrne, as it was about a recent Islamic-themed terror attack on London Bridge.
Like all terror attacks, the London Bridge incident had evoked a general aura of stupidity, and like all terror attacks in London, it had produced a plethora of people with silly accents waiting to give interviews to the vultures called reporters.
“Oi, guv, I tell you what, terrorism is bad stuff, innit, hey, guvvy?” said KCRW.
NPR dedicated thirty seconds to the importance of Donald J. Trump’s tweet about the terror attack. He’d insulted the Mayor of London.
What an asshole.
Rose Byrne drove the Jaguar into Hollywood.
Chapter Eleven
Let Slip the Dogs of War
The only good advice that anyone ever gave me about writing came from the author Stephen Prothero.
He said something like this: “If there’s an obvious comment about your book, don’t run from it. Just include the comment in the book itself and make it part of the text. Get there first.”
In the spirit of those words, let’s address the big fat elephant in the room.
Let’s talk about how you can’t write a novel about an island of women who banish and murder all of their male co-citizens and not have everyone think that you’re writing an allegory about #MeToo.
#MeToo was a hashtag.
Hashtags were a method for a bunch of people on social media to comment on the same topic, roughly at the same time.
You took an alphanumeric phrase and put the # symbol in front of that phrase and appended the phrase to a comment on social media.
#FuckTrump was a popular hashtag.
So was #NotMyPresident.
This book is not an allegory.
It was begun in August of 2017 AD.
#MeToo didn’t start until October of 2017 AD.
The first 12,000 words of this book were written before October of 2017 AD.
#MeToo kicked off with an article in the New York Times and a follow-up in the New Yorker. Both articles were about a film producer named Harvey Weinstein.
He had produced nearly every middlebrow American film of the last twenty years, he was a bully, he was a braggart, he was physically repulsive, and he was in deep with the Democratic Party.
And he was also a serial sexual abuser of women and a rapist.
With every news story there is a visible layer, the one that plays out in media coverage, and then there is an unconscious layer, the story serving as a medium through which unspoken social undercurrents are made manifest.
And the unconscious layer of the Harvey Weinstein story was all about Donald J. Trump.
They were both disgusting fat slobs from New York City, they were both from the Celebrity branch of American governance, they were both deep into politics, and it was a barely kept secret that both of them were pigs with women.
Had Donald J. Trump not won the election, #MeToo would not have happened.
The psyche of the haute bourgeoisie would not have bruised.
There would have been no waves of outrage.
And no one would have scrutinized Harvey Weinstein, who had decades of extraordinary access to Donald J. Trump’s opponent.
He would have been on the winning side.
And everyone always falls in line behind a winner.
The election of 2016 AD produced a problem: Donald J. Trump had both won and lost.
He was a beneficiary of the Electoral College, which was a system of proportional representation designed by America’s founders to ensure that no one would ever outlaw owning slaves from Africa.
The Electoral College didn’t stop America from outlawing slavery, but it did seriously screw up the Twenty-First Century AD.
Here’s how the Electoral College worked: the general election, in which the will of the people was expressed, meant nothing.
A candidate could win a majority of votes and still lose the election.
This is exactly what happened in 2016 AD.
Donald J. Trump lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College.
Millions more people voted for Donald J. Trump’s opponent than voted for Donald J. Trump. Way more Americans had decided that his opponent was the appropriate person to turn Muslims into garam masala.
Which made sense.
Under the previous President, Donald J. Trump’s opponent had been the Secretary of State, which meant that she’d been intimately, and professionally, involved with the obliteration of Muslims.
And say what you will of Donald J. Trump, but for all of the endless accusations hurled in his direction during the Year of the Misplaced Butter, no one ever suggested that he’d killed a Muslim.
Experience matters!
It wasn’t as if Donald J. Trump’s victory was unprecedented. Recent history had contained another split between the Electoral College and the popular vote.
2000 AD!
Everyone forgot.
But not me.
Here are three emails between me and a woman who shall remain nameless:
Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 11:26 AM
From: XXXXX (xxxx@xxxx.com)
To: Jarett Kobek
Subject: quick
election prediction in 1, 2, go!
Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 12:42 PM
From: Jarett Kobek
To: XXXXX (xxxx@xxxx.com)
Subject: Re: quick
TRUMP
possible popular/electoral split
Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 1:26 PM
From: XXXXX (xxxx@xxxx.com)
To: Jarett Kobek
Subject: Re: quick
Omg not again. Not again. I cannot take another popular/electoral split. I will lose my goddamned mind.
She didn’t lose her goddamned mind.
But everyone else did.
The Weinstein story exploded and went metastatic in a way that stories don’t go in an era of media fragmentation and a politically divided citizenry.
It was all-consuming, a black hole at the center of a depraved galaxy.
It opened two floodgates.
The first floodgate had held back a torrent of stories about men who worked in the Celebrity branch of American governance and their proclivities towards sexual assault.
The second floodgate was ancient magic.
It’d been there for a very long time, holding back all of women’s awful experiences with men from the dawn of civilization.
And now it was open.
There was an organic outpouring of stories.
These appeared on social media under the hashtag of #MeToo.
Women wrote about being sexually harassed, about being raped, about being treated like idiots. It amounted to a profound discomfort with the way that sexual politics worked in the post-industrial civilized world.
And let’s be clear.
Whatever the merit of any individual statement, the general intent of #MeToo was undeniable. It was people saying that a society built around the whims of men is a recipe for a disaster.
And if you disagree with that, go and look out the fucking window.
Or inside your smartphone.
And, reader, don’t mistake me for one of your dopey male acquaintances who, after #MeToo broke, went and posted statements on Facebook about how they were learning to be better people, when all they were really saying was this: Please don’t get me fired because I tried to fuck you when I was drunk at the office holiday party.
I wrote an entire book about the horror of a society built around the whims of men, and I did it long before there was any obvious reward for performing this particular piety.
It’s called I Hate the Internet.
It made me famous in Serbia.
Serbia!
Despite its obvious virtues, #MeToo demonstrated why the Twenty-First Century AD may preclude the possibility of meaningful political protest.
In August of 2017 AD, Donald J. Trump returned to Trump Tower, which was a giant golden skyscraper that he’d built over Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.
This was where Donald J. Trump had lived before he moved into the White House.
This was where he had staged his bid for the Presidency.
He hadn’t been back since he’d become President and earned the right to bomb the living fuck shit out of Muslim peasants in the name of American freedom.
A few days before his return, there’d been a White Supremacist rally in Virginia where a young woman was killed when a Neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors.
On the very same day as Donald J. Trump’s return, I happened to be staying on the eleventh floor of the Warwick Hotel, which is about two blocks south and one block west from Trump Tower.
From my hotel room, I could hear the protests outside of Donald J. Trump’s former home.
I walked over to Trump Tower, where the NYPD had blocked off Fifth Avenue.
Donald J. Trump still hadn’t arrived.
Like the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Trump Tower was empty of its eponymous hero.
About two thousand people were barricaded on both the west and east sidewalks.
People were holding signs.
People were wearing T-shirts relevant to their political protests.
People were using their cellphones to record video of the protests.
People were chanting.
They were screaming: THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!
When they screamed THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, I think what they meant was this: Donald J. Trump, here is the face of the American public, and we oppose you in all of your manifold perversions. We repudiate you in your evil. A change is gonna come, Bubba.
The scene was straight out of Tolkien.
A few thousand people, restrained by the Orcish Host of the NYPD, had been corralled into pre-approved places from where they shouted impotent chants at an impregnable empty golden tower.
The protestors were right.
It really was what democracy looked like.
In an era when significant amounts of social protest occurs on the Internet, it necessarily means that all of that social protest is monetized.
And not by the protestors.
#MeToo generated unbelievable amounts of web traffic.
For months, it was an international spectator sport.
Almost every time that someone interacted with #MeToo, they were generating income for Facebook or Google or Twitter, which were the three companies that dominated advertising and political expression on the Internet.
Here’s a list of the major institutional holders of Facebook, circa September 2017 AD: The Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, State Street Corporation, T. Rowe Price Associates, Capital World Investors (a subsidiary of Capital Group), Northern Trust, Morgan Stanley, Invesco, Geode Capital Management.
Together, these ten companies owned just over 31 per cent of Facebook.
Here’s a list of the major institutional holders of Google, circa September 2017 AD: The Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, State Street Corporation, T. Rowe Price Associates, Capital Research Global Investors (a subsidiary of Capital Group), Capital World Investors (a subsidiary of Capital Group), Northern Trust, BNY Mellon, Wellington Management.
Together, these ten companies owned just over 31 per cent of Google.
Here’s a list of the major institutional holders of Twitter, circa September 2017 AD: The Vanguard Group, ClearBridge Investments, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Slate Path Capital, State Street Corporation, OppenheimerFunds, Coatue Management, First Trust, Northern Trust.
Together, these ten companies owned just over 27 per cent of Twitter.
With one exception, none of these institutional holders was operated in any meaningful sense by anyone other than some old white guys in suits.
And the job of these white guys in suits was to make money for the people who owned everything.
In the case of the one institutional holder that was run by a woman, the woman in question had inherited the company from her father.
This literally was the Patriarchy.
And #MeToo had made them, and their clients, a huge amount of money.
The general consensus of opinion was that Twitter, more than any other company headquartered in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, had destroyed America.
It had turned everyone into kindergarteners, it had murdered journalism, and it had almost certainly helped Donald J. Trump get elected.
In the seven years following its initial public offering in 2011 AD, Twitter had never made a dime. It lost money for twenty-seven straight quarters.
Yet when it posted its results for the fourth quarter of 2017 AD, which was the time period encompassing the Weinstein revelations and the subsequent social fallout, Twitter revealed that in the final three months of the year, the company had made $91,000,000.
It was a #MeToo miracle!
And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of men!
In the early days, it felt as if the organic uprising of women was going to be the main story. It was one of those rare moments of social openness where the rules are up for grabs.
Anything could happen.
But this was America.
#MeToo became the same story as every story in America: a nexus of how power and money played out amongst the Celebrity branch of American governance.
The revised story fixated on the three industries that were the locus of Donald J. Trump’s power: the entertainment industry, journalism, and politics.
The organic outcry was lost amidst stories of the appalling behavior of certain men with professional careers in the public sphere. These stories tended to run the gamut: they went from unfortunate comments to groping to flat-out rape.
A handful of the stories weren’t even about sexual harassment.
They were about consensual relationships with deeply unsavory people, which had been recontextualized after the #MeToo moment.
Literally every woman alive who’d engaged in the biological imperative of sex with men had undergone the routine humiliation of consensual sex with at least one deeply unsavory person.
This was the bullshit con of heterosexuality.
But most of those women, who were poor and didn’t work in media, weren’t given the opportunity to write opinion pieces for Variety about their shitty ex-boyfriends and old lovers.
Their shitty ex-boyfriends and old lovers weren’t members of the Celebrity branch of American governance.
The unspoken social undercurrent of the revised story revealed itself.
#MeToo became about the way in which encounters with men had stymied the ambitions of women who had wanted to achieve upward social mobility in the industries that were the nexus of Donald J. Trump’s power.
Which, look, by itself this was no small problem.
But it’s a very far cry from what kicked the whole thing off, which was a story about a serial rapist who actively worked to destroy people after he raped them.
All of which creates an atmosphere that makes it very fucking hard to write a book about an island of women and not have everyone think you’re allegorizing a hashtag.
The whole thing’s ruined before it even started!
And, reader, trust me, I can imagine the responses to this chapter before they’re typed by dullards into social media, and they all boil down to something like this: “Who the fuck does this guy think that he is?”
>
To which I reply in advance: on the topic of #MeToo, I have more innate moral authority than most people in America.
And this isn’t because of inborn privilege.
There’s a simple explanation as to why I have innate moral authority on the topic.
I’m almost certainly the only person alive who was sexually harassed in front of a crowd of 280 people by a woman who pens New York Times opinion pieces about sexual harassment, and I’m absolutely certain that I’m the only person alive who experienced this sexual harassment several years after winning a $1.2-million judgment in a lawsuit against an Internet stalker who libeled me as a rapist.
Chapter Twelve
hello from sex drenched hollywood
Smartphone saliva brought the Jaguar XJ-S to Hollywood, a neighborhood that was being victimized by the international capitalist class’s money laundering.
The money laundering took the form of cruddy new apartment buildings and ugly hotels.
Hollywood was also a neighborhood that had become a hotspot of nightclubs, places where people went to dance, get high, and challenge the received sexual wisdom of the upper middle class.
Several blocks before their arrival, the women of Fairy Land knew their final destination.
They knew this because the navigation rope had wrapped itself around its target, which was the thirteen-story Fontenoy Apartments on Whitley Avenue.
From a distance of several blocks, the women of Fairy Land could see the building glowing.
The Fontenoy was an early Los Angeles folly, from back in the 1920s AD, dressed up in nouveau-riche ornamentation and a French-Norman roof.
When they arrived on Whitley Avenue, Rose Byrne parked the Jaguar in the Fontenoy’s underground parking structure, right after Rose Byrne used magic to blast open the structure’s automatic gate.
She took a parking spot that was reserved for someone on the tenth floor.
Celia cast a spell on the car, creating a glamor that caused human beings’ eyes to malfunction.
When human beings looked at the Jaguar, they didn’t see a vintage car designed by the British.
They saw a series of orange construction cones and were surprised by neither the appearance of the cones nor the implication that a parking spot, an inert piece of concrete demarcated by lines of paint, was out of order.