Only Americans Burn in Hell

by Jarett Kobek

  Oh, they thought. Here’s something else that’s broken.

  Everyone in America possessed an unconscious, and sometimes conscious, acknowledgement that their empire was in decline.

  But gone were the halcyon days when one could expect the whole thing to end through an invasion of the Mongols or the Ottomans or the Huns.

  Gone were the sweet moments when barbarian hordes would pull down the walls of your capital city and murder all of your cousins.

  Now an empire died of a thousand tiny wounds.

  Postal carriers stopped delivering mail.

  Air travel became a horror.

  Infrastructure went to shit.

  Trains crashed.

  And parking spots went out of order.

  Because the women of Fairy Land were traditionalists, they didn’t ride the elevator from the basement, but rather walked out of the underground parking structure.

  They emerged back on Whitley Avenue.

  Several years earlier, the faceless entity that owned the Fontenoy had installed a security gate. Rose Byrne blasted it open with magic and then did the same thing with the front door, which was also locked.

  In the lobby, they passed through a small room that looked like a bordello, and walked to the elevators opposite the front entrance.

  Celia pressed the call button.

  The doors opened.

  They got into the elevator.

  Ropey strands of salvia could bring Fairy Land’s women to a generalized magical destination, but it could not indicate why that destination was magical or what they should do when they got there.

  Given that this chapter occurs at this book’s rough three-fifths mark, it’s pretty obvious that Fern isn’t in the Fontenoy.

  Neither of the women know that.

  Which is shameful ignorance and demonstrates the limits of their preternatural powers.

  If the women of Fairy Land are really supranatural beings, unbound by the laws of nature and capable of casting spells that alleviate issues of plotting and characterization, you’d think that they’d have the resources to check the page number.

  Anyway.

  They’re in the elevator and they’re looking at the buttons which lead to the Fontenoy’s other twelve floors. If Fern is in the building, they have no idea what floor she’s occupying.

  The women of Fairy Land don’t have any choice.

  They’re going to have to explore each apartment in the building, one by one, until they can determine whether or not Fern is present within the structure.

  Which she obviously isn’t, if for no other reason than the fact that this chapter, like almost every chapter in this book, isn’t really about anyone finding Fern. This chapter is a poorly fleshed-out fictional pretense to write about something that isn’t fictitious.

  This is, after all, a novel written in an era when the entire purpose of fiction has been outmoded and destroyed by vast social changes.

  Another thing that the women of Fairy Land don’t know is that they’re in the most magical place in Los Angeles.

  The Fontenoy is where the American Twenty-First Century AD was invented.

  They started on the second floor, bursting into the apartment nearest the elevator.

  No one was home, but Rose Byrne did have an interesting conversation with a yellow parakeet.

  They burst into the next apartment, where three young men were smoking marijuana and watching television.

  In anticipation of the Season Seven premiere of Game of Thrones, the three young men had entered into a covenant.

  After the June 26th, 2016 AD finale of Season Six, each of the young men had gone to the source material and read every published volume of George R.R. Martin’s magnum opus.

  1,736,054 words of pure shit!

  But reading the books had not slaked their thirst, and in anticipation of the approaching Season Seven premiere on July 16th, 2017 AD, the young men had agreed to spend the summer rewatching every extant episode of the televised adaptation.

  As the women of Fairy Land burst into the apartment, the young men were watching the eighth episode of Season Three.

  The television was displaying a scene in which the mad dwarf Tyrion Lannister is in a boudoir with his unwilling wife Sansa Stark. They’ve just been married and Tyrion’s father has ordered Tyrion to break his bride’s maidenhead.

  The dwarf, in anticipation of this horror, has gotten ridiculously drunk.

  With great reluctance, his bride sheds her clothing.

  He stops her. If she does not want to sleep with him, he shall never force her.

  Then the dwarf passes out.

  This scene is of some interest because both the televised adaptation, and its source material, feature a character who’s drunk himself silly and refuses to sleep with someone on moral grounds, rather than the obvious explanation of too much alcohol rendering him unfit for the congruous act.

  This scene, in both book and television formats, points to the place where George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones is a divergent universe from the one in which we live.

  It ain’t the elves.

  It ain’t the fucking dragons.

  It ain’t the kid who can see the future.

  It ain’t the snow zombies who function as an obvious insult to the people of Scotland.

  What makes Game of Thrones diverge from our universe is one very special magical rule.

  This is the magical rule which creates the divergent universe: no male character in Games of Thrones ever experiences erectile dysfunction.

  The three young men were stoned enough that they all imagined someone had left the front door unlocked. They thought that the women of Fairy Land had the wrong apartment.

  One of the young men chatted up Celia while Rose Byrne demanded to know about Fern.

  Another of the young men made a joke about the absurdity of inquiring about ferns when clearly another green plant was the apartment’s dominant spirit animal.

  The women of Fairy Land didn’t get the joke.

  And this wasn’t because the language of the joke was slightly mixed in its metaphors.

  The joke was like all jokes about marijuana.

  Terminally unfunny.

  On it went, apartment by apartment, floor by floor.

  They burst into apartment #403 and found a woman named Ashley Lopez sitting on her living-room floor.

  She was practicing Transcendental Meditation, a technique in which the practitioner repeated a mantra, in the silence of their own mind, after having blown about $1,000 on a seven-day course to learn an easy trick that any old asshole can Google in about five minutes.

  With her mindfulness practice disrupted, Ashley opened her eyes and saw the women standing over her.

  She didn’t question their presence.

  It was one of those faery things, a biochemical process. The supranatural entities were emitting pheromones that calmed the human psyche.

  “Can I help you?” asked Ashley Lopez.

  “We are looking for my daughter,” said Celia. “Have you seen her?”

  “What’s her name?” asked Ashley Lopez.

  “Her name is Fern,” said Celia.

  Rose Byrne looked at the decorations on Ashley Lopez’s living-room walls.

  It was some witchy nonsense: a reproduction of The Tower from the Thoth tarot, the hieroglyphic monad of John Dee, a banker’s cheque endorsed by Austin Osman Spare, a Stele of Revealing, a mural of Tiamat, a painting by Steffi Grant, the logo of the Builders of Adytum, and other bullshit.

  Ashley Lopez was locked into a ceremonial magick groove.

  Ashley still believed in things like gods and primal magic and art nouveau and the manifestations of expression that dominated human consciousness before the psychic cataclysm of World War One.

  What can you do?

  Everyone’s got something.

  Ashley Lopez was confronted by the women of Fairy Land, who were actual magic.

  All of her ceremonial magic
k was of no use.

  On those lonely evenings when Ashley Lopez crossed the Abyss and went on the Dark Pilgrimage to Chorazin, the whole thing was about psychological insight into her own self and the limits of identity.

  Which was a real change from the old days.

  In the old days, magick used to be goofy shit like necromancy, which was the art of raising the dead, and demonology, which was the art of making the Spirits of Hell do your bidding.

  The defining aspect of demonology was the bathetic juxtaposition of its methods and its aims.

  The Spirits of Hell, who were supranatural beings capable of unimaginable feats, were summoned by the demonologist and asked to perform silly little tasks like facilitating intercontinental travel, or making another person have sex with the demonologist, or causing the reputation of a demonologist’s enemy to suffer grievous ruin.

  By the Year of the Froward Worm, no one needed the Spirits of Hell to help them travel to Asia or get fucked or ruin an enemy.

  Now people just owned smartphones.

  Ashley Lopez’s tenancy in the Fontenoy was foreordained by a lifetime of practicing ceremonial magick.

  In addition to challenging the limits of her identity, the ceremonies had blasted open her seven chakras and made her susceptible to the unseen but very real magical currents running throughout Los Angeles.

  When she signed her lease, it was like a magnet being drawn to metal.

  The Fontenoy was the most magical place in Los Angeles.

  Way back in 1989 AD, a young man had moved onto the ninth floor of the building.

  He was, just, like you know, this guy.

  His name was Matt Drudge.

  He’d been raised around Washington DC, which was the capital city of the United States of America, and that proximity gave him a fixation on the currents of power.

  He bummed around Hollywood for about half a decade. And this was the old Hollywood, the Hollywood of the Yucca Corridor, the Hollywood that existed prior to the infestation of the international capital class’s money laundering.

  It was gang territory. It was full of drug dealing. It was full of prostitution.

  In 1994 AD, Drudge’s father paid him a visit.

  He was appalled by his son’s life.

  At the time, Drudge was selling T-shirts at CBS Studios in Century City, which was on the other side of the hills that hold the HOLLYWOOD sign.

  The old man bestowed a gift upon his son from Circuit City on Sunset Boulevard: an IBM PC compatible computer.

  This was before the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 destroyed the American West Coast, another psychic cataclysm, and oddly, one that’s never been written about in any meaningful detail.

  Drudge’s computer had a modem, which was a stupid little device that connected to telephone lines and allowed his computer to call up other computers.

  Using his modem, Matt Drudge discovered the Internet. And this was the old Internet, the Internet of Usenet and #hack on EFnet, the Internet that existed prior to the infestation of the international capital class’s money laundering.

  Drudge’s first utterance on the Internet, ever, was three days after Christmas 1994 AD at 1:48PM.

  It said:

  hello from sex drenched hollywood

  Drudge replied to himself at 3:31PM. His response said:

  we are so sex drenched here in hollywood. 65% of us city dwellers have herpes

  And so, on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon, on the ninth floor of the Fontenoy, the Twenty-First Century AD was born.

  Ashley Lopez had lived in the Fontenoy for five years, performing ceremonial magick and using all kinds of magickal phrases, and she’d never said anything with as much power as the one phrase which had baptized a century.

  She’d never said anything as important, or as ominous, as hello from sex drenched hollywood.

  No one could have known that Matt Drudge was the only authentic genius of the Twenty-First Century AD.

  He was the only person in the world who understood how the Internet really worked.

  And he had found his demon.

  Not long after he’d written about 65 per cent of people in Hollywood having herpes, Drudge founded an email newsletter obsessed with the currents of power in American life.

  The newsletter was about the entertainment industry and politics, which, by virtue of the Celebrity branch of American governance, were the same thing.

  The newsletter was called the Drudge Report.

  It offered its readers a very gossip-inflected take on the issues of the day.

  Everything broke in 1998 AD.

  Newsweek, which was a magazine that offered milquetoast political and cultural reporting, decided not to run a story about an alleged affair between the sitting President, William Jefferson Clinton, and a twenty-two-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

  Drudge learned about the spiked story and sent word to his mailing list.

  He didn’t know it, but he’d murdered the gentleman’s agreement between news journalists and politicians, which was more or less a tacit acknowledgement that politicians could fuck around in private as long as Washington bureau chiefs were invited to dinner parties in Georgetown.

  And Drudge had, accidentally, trashed the American idea of good governance, fostering an environment in which the Republicans would go on to impeach William Jefferson Clinton, and learn that the way to power was through publicity stunts and using the Legislative branch not to govern but rather to obstruct.

  After the Lewinsky thing, Drudge’s fame went nuclear, went global.

  He got a short-lived TV show. He got a radio show.

  His newsletter evolved into a webpage that collated links to articles on other websites, and, on occasion, featured some of Drudge’s own reporting and, in times of emergency, an animated siren GIF.

  The links to other websites were written by Drudge himself in an ultra-minimalist headline style. hello from sex drenched hollywood.

  The webpage was three columns of black text on a white background.

  There was no flash and no glut.

  The design never changed.

  Not once in two decades.

  It was perfect in the way that Steve Jobs, a psychopath who enslaved Chinese children and made them build electronic devices which allowed American liberals to write treatises on human rights, had envisioned perfection: the absolute and seamless melding of form and function.

  By the Year of the Froward Worm, Drudge’s website received ten billion visits per year.

  In the late 1990s AD, there was an unbelievable amount of bullshit about how the Internet was going to offer new platforms of expression that leveled the playing field, and how computers would produce an enormous flowering of creativity and new opportunities.

  What no one admitted, or perhaps even realized, was that while the Internet would indeed create a million opportunities for people to express their ignorant-ass opinions on topics about which they knew nothing, those opinions would not offer any real benefit to the ignorant-ass people who offered them.

  The ignorant-ass opinions would only enrich the people who owned the platforms of expression.

  And the people who owned the platforms of expression were the same old shits who ruled the world.

  Here was the genius of Drudge laid bare: he understood, before anyone else, that the way to make money on the Internet was by monetizing other people’s content.

  After Drudge shattered journalism, the international capitalist class gathered up the fragments and ground them into dust.

  The noble profession transformed from attempts at a first draft of history into a quest for eyeballs on websites.

  In the process, seasoned professionals lost their jobs and were replaced with cocaine-addled children from Brooklyn who worked for spare change.

  The international capitalist class didn’t care.

  Journalism had always been a pain in their ass.

  What they wanted was traffic on the website
s that they’d funded.

  And Drudge drove that traffic.

  Even though Drudge’s website consisted almost entirely of links to other websites, it provided a coherent and linear worldview. The links were like a jigsaw puzzle. If you read Drudge for a week, you could piece together who he was and what he thought.

  He made sense of an era in which the world had become incomprehensible, and when the traditional arbiters of American life had given up any hope of explaining the global situation.

  His website was the Internet’s unmoved mover, just about the most read news site in English, and his millions of daily readers would deluge any site that he linked.

  And even more importantly, he was read by absolutely everyone who was anyone in media. He drove entire cycles with headlines that were no more than fifteen words in length.

  He was literally the most powerful voice in America.

  And if you think that’s an exaggeration, consider this: for all of the explanations floated as to why Donald J. Trump won the Presidency with his impossible victory, no one has ever suggested the most obvious.

  Which is that Donald J. Trump won the Presidency because Matt Drudge decided that Donald J. Trump should win the Presidency, and did everything he could to cast the best possible light on Trump’s many missteps.

  Donald J. Trump’s impossible victory had come via a very small margin: 77,744 votes cast in the three states had determined the Electoral College.

  0.02 per cent of the US population.

  By November 6th, 2016 AD, Drudge’s website received that many visitors every two and a half minutes.

  If you want to know about the American Twenty-First Century AD, I recommend watching two videos.

  One is available on the website of C-SPAN, which is a non-profit organization that hosts an archive of media related to the governance and affairs of public life in the United States.

  The other video is on YouTube, which is an expensive attempt by Google to make copyright law irrelevant.

  The first video is Matt Drudge’s appearance on November 11th, 1997 AD at the Annenberg School for Communication, which was a division of the University of Southern California, an institution of higher learning that used things like a School of Communication to cloak its relationship with the military–industrial complex.