Only Americans Burn in Hell

by Jarett Kobek

  Never in service of the powerless.

  And then Jesus arrived from Bumfuck Shitsville, which, despite its proximity to Sepphoris, is what Nazareth was, and he spoke Aramaic with a hick Galilean accent, and he was a carpenter’s son, and he hung around with the filth of society. Sex workers, illiterate fisherman, lepers, literary agents, and tax collectors.

  He was nobody.

  And he talked funny.

  And what he said, the core message, delivered in that hick accent, was this: stop being a total fucking dick.

  If someone hits your face, offer them the other cheek.

  Forgive those who trespass against you.

  Serve others before serving yourself. The poor shall inherit the Earth.

  Throw away your possessions.

  Mercy is the greatest good.

  Don’t cast the first stone.

  Worry not over money.

  Embrace the sick.

  These ideas have been repeated so many times that they’ve become platitudes, bumper-sticker morality for the users of Twitter and depressed women of Instagram.

  They’re like anything in an era of mass production.

  Reduced into meaninglessness, transformed into marketable product.

  T-shirts.

  Words divorced from ideas.

  Sharp edges smoothed down.

  Yet the intent remains. Jesus had asked his followers to follow a moral code that violated every known precept of human nature.

  Consider, by contrast, the trilogy of plays by Aeschylus known as the Oresteia.

  The Oresteia goes like this: Agamemnon, from the House of Atreus and King of Mycenae, returns home after being away for over a decade. He’s been in Troy, where he practiced the art of ethnic cleansing.

  Before Agamemnon left for war, the goddess Artemis ordered him to sacrifice his daughter.

  So he did.

  He killed his daughter and sailed off to be a hero.

  While Agamemnon spent ten years practicing ethnic cleansing across the Aegean Sea, his wife Clytemnestra stewed over the murder of her daughter. She took a lover named Aegisthus.

  When her husband returns to Mycenae, Clytemnestra and Aegis-thus murder Agamemnon and then assume the crown.

  Years later, the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, a guy named Orestes, comes to Mycenae. On orders from the god Apollo, he murders his mother and Aegisthus.

  Unfortunately, there are these mythological things called the Erinyes.

  The Erinyes, or the Furies, are the living embodiment of vengeance. They torment anyone who breaks the basic rules of society.

  One of these rules: don’t fuck with hospitality customs.

  Another: don’t kill your mother.

  The Furies chase Orestes all over Greece, until one night, they fall asleep and Apollo spirits Orestes away to Athens, where the matricide begs help from the goddess Athena.

  Athena puts Orestes on trial in Athens. He gets prosecuted, he has to defend himself.

  The trial ends with a split jury. Athena casts the final vote in favor of Orestes, which frees him, and which also pisses the Furies off.

  They scream and shout about the sorrow they’re going to wreak upon the world as revenge for the insult. They spit and they foam.

  Athena, meanwhile, is the face of reason and calm. She soothes the Furies, slowly, suggesting a better function for them in the world. Why rage when you can help mankind and be worshipped? Who wants all that grief when life can be easy?

  The Furies agree and undergo a metaphysical transformation.

  They become the Kindly Ones.

  They’ve been tamed by Athena, the personification of Wisdom.

  The Oresteia is an allegorical representation of a major event in human history. It’s a stand-in for the establishment of civil justice. It’s about how societies maintain order in the face of outrageous crimes.

  The theme is so universal that all you have to do is engage with any website for about five minutes before you find yourself in the middle of the same debate.

  The Oresteia offers a comprehensible vision that works on shared assumptions of how human beings operate.

  You might not be able to claim blood for blood, but the court system still allows you a claim of retribution. Wrongs are made right and the world is put into order.

  There will be justice.

  But not vengeance.

  If Jesus had been advising Orestes, this is what he would have said: Forgive your mother for killing your father. Ask her to kill you next. If she refuses, bring her into your home and feed and clothe her. Love her. And expect no reward for doing as I command you. There is nothing you stand to gain by this mercy other than mercy itself.

  One must have as much sympathy for the perpetrator of a crime as for the crime’s victim.

  This is an inhuman standard.

  Even Celia, who wasn’t human, couldn’t wrap her head around it.

  Taken to its furthest logical extreme, the implication is that people don’t have to follow the scripts of their lives.

  You are more than your base urges.

  You don’t have to be as terrible as everyone else.

  You don’t have to burn with pointless judgment.

  There is another way.

  And it is guided by absolute mercy and radical compassion.

  This crazy hick showed up in sophisticated ol’ Jerusalem, where everyone posted on social media about the decline of society.

  And he spoke of love and forgiveness and mercy and brotherhood.

  And he told the people of Jerusalem that they didn’t have to follow the scripts of their lives.

  So they killed him.

  199,900 years of shitting in the living room.

  He was crucified, given the lowest of all deaths.

  “Ow, that really hurts,” said Jesus when the Roman legionnaire Casca Longinus thrust his spear into Jesus’ side.

  “Give a fuck, me,” said Casca Longinus. “Haddaway and shite, you poof.”

  Then Jesus died.

  And maybe he came back to life.

  Who fucking knows?

  Anything’s possible in a world so supranatural that Donald J. Trump ends up in control of 6,800 nuclear warheads.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Bleak House

  To understand how I ended up winning a $1.2-million judgment in a lawsuit against an Internet stalker who libeled me as a rapist, we have to go back to the early dim days of when I first decided to be a writer.

  This was back around 2007 AD, when I was newly arrived in the city of Los Angeles.

  I went west after the collapse of a romantic relationship that had lasted seven years, and I had moved to Los Angeles with the unconscious desire to be one of the people who come to California to die.

  Much to my surprise, it turned out that moving to Los Angeles wouldn’t kill you.

  So I had to do something.

  Being a writer seemed as bad a fate as any.

  In the first decade of the Twenty-First Century AD, there was a vogue called blogging.

  Blogging happened when people operated websites and used those websites to publish their own inane commentary on the issues of the day.

  There was a sense, then, that one could somehow launch blogging into a career as a writer.

  Don’t ask me to explain this.

  I did the same thing as every other pathetic would-be writer in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century AD.

  I started my own blog.

  I offered inane commentary on pointless bullshit.

  My blog attracted a small but dedicated readership. I’m sure that the daily writing probably helped in some way, but fuck me if I can tell you how.

  One member of that small but dedicated readership would end up becoming a huge problem.

  At the time, I didn’t know their real name, but they’d left several comments on my blog, and they’d always use the same pseudonym: “Oyster the Clown.”

  The comments were about me bei
ng a big ol’ homo.

  In June of 2008 AD, the same person had sent me an email.

  It made no sense.

  This was the full extent of the communication between me and Oyster the Clown.

  By 2009 AD, I’d stopped writing on the blog.

  The website was still there, with its senseless opinions getting no younger, but I couldn’t be bothered.

  I was doing a million other things, including figuring out how to get books published.

  If my career as a writer felt non-existent when I was sexually harassed by Amber Tamblyn, then in 2009 AD I was something below that.

  My career wasn’t even a career.

  It was a stupid little idea on which I’d wasted too much time when I could have been doing things that actually made money.

  Literally no one knew me as a writer.

  There was nothing to know.

  I should also mention that this happened before I lived in San Francisco.

  I had yet to be exposed to the mendacity of the people who make money off the Internet.

  My faith in humanity was not yet murdered.

  I was much softer.

  Over Thanksgiving of 2009 AD, while I was celebrating the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, someone went on the website of Vice and left comments on about fifty articles.

  Vice was a media platform that specialized in gross-out journalism and videos in which a sneering idiot from Brooklyn would visit a war-torn locale and contextualize the havoc in terms that could be understood by American children.

  The comments said two things.

  “Jarett Kobek is a rapist” or “Jarett Kobek is a pedophile.”

  Hello, said I to myself, you’re neither a rapist nor a pedophile! Why, these comments on the Internet are simply not true!

  Because I am good with computers, I was able to figure out that these comments had been posted from Woodland Hills, California, which was about twenty miles from my apartment in Los Angeles.

  I was also able to figure out that they had been posted by Oyster the Clown.

  This was not a happy moment.

  It’s difficult to be libeled as a rapist and a pedophile on the Internet and not feel as if the sky is collapsing on your head.

  It is an awful thing to experience.

  Someone is out to get you, said I to myself.

  At the time, reader, I didn’t know it but I was encountering the very strange and new experience of someone writing Jarett Kobek fanfiction.

  Generally speaking, fanfiction is written whenever someone decides that they want to tell a story about an intellectual property to which they have no legal rights.

  A good example would be when a Batman true believer wants to offer up a prayer and types a little story about Batman kicking the shit out of The Joker.

  Or snogging The Riddler.

  Or whatever.

  These stories tend to go into the Internet.

  Alas, many of them, like the Jarett Kobek fanfiction, are about pedophilia and rape!

  And, reader, as we’ve read about someone else’s Jarett Kobek fanfiction, I shall write a bit of my own.

  I’ll tell you a story about the failure of The Future Won’t Be Long.

  You’ll have to pardon me, as this fanfiction will be short on both pedophilia and rape.

  But it will employ the grotesque language of business.

  Which is almost as bad.

  If you believe in brands, then you must also believe that the success of any brand derives from its ability to reflect and be defined by its core values.

  If, following the self-published US release of I Hate the Internet, you can conceive of a Jarett Kobek brand, then you must also conceive that its core value was this: fuck you.

  Self-publishing meant that I Hate the Internet had erupted into the world with no permission, no rules, and disconnected from the social and class strictures dominating American writing.

  And the novel’s text had done something nearly impossible: it had shit on the rich not from a sense of envy but rather one of superiority.

  The brand said this: I denounce thee.

  I denounce thee, publishing.

  I denounce thee, civility.

  I denounce thee, you masters of reality.

  Fuck you.

  After I Hate the Internet was released and succeeded beyond his wildest ambitions, Jarett Kobek couldn’t imagine any direction other than going to one of the five major publishers.

  At the moment of his triumph, Jarett Kobek suffered a failure of imagination.

  He flung himself at Penguin Random House with all the vigor of a dog returning to its own vomit.

  He allowed himself to be published in the trade dress of a literary writer.

  He revealed himself as a class pretender, as someone who believed that he could operate on the level of Jonathan Franzen, as the kind of fraud who’d take that misbegotten Treblinka money and run run run.

  It was the smart decision.

  But the smart decision was what it always is.

  The anti-life equation.

  The death of fuck you.

  And, boy, did Jarett Kobek ever pay the price.

  In the end, his ultimate fuck you was to himself.

  Anyway.

  Vice deleted the comments.

  I spent the new few weeks Googling my own name, obsessively, wondering when Oyster the Clown would strike again.

  But nothing happened.

  Silence.

  In early April of 2010 AD, I visited San Francisco, where I delivered a paper on the underground comix artist Rory Hayes at a comic-book convention.

  During my visit, I received an email informing me that I’d been subscribed to the mailing list of Biggayfrathouse.com, a website dedicated to a Big Gay Frat House in San Francisco’s Castro District.

  The email carried the IP address of the person who subscribed me.

  An IP address is the individual marker of any point of access to the Internet.

  The IP address in the email resolved to a Comcast Cable account in Washington DC.

  In about 1,000 words, this will be an important detail.

  I Googled for my own name and discovered that a few minutes after I’d been subscribed to the mailing list of Big Gay Frat House, someone had gone to the website of CNN and posted two comments on an article about the screenwriter Diablo Cody’s pregnancy.

  The first comment was from someone calling themselves, “oyster.”

  The first comment read: “Abort it now!”

  Just below, “Jarett Kobek” had commented: “I do enjoy a good fetus rape.”

  Things again fell silent.

  On May 3rd, 2010 AD, an article that I’d written was published both in print and online.

  It detailed a visit that I’d made in 2009 AD to northern Iraq, where I’d spent a small amount of time at Lalish, the central religious shrine of the Yezidi, who are a persecuted religious culture from Syria and Iraq.

  Getting the article published was a total pain in the ass.

  This was well before the Yezidi were genocided by the Islamic State in 2014 AD, which meant that the Yezidi were not yet a story that appealed to the editorial class.

  And the ultimate thrust of what I wanted to write was an unpopular message on the verge of America’s supposed withdrawal of military troops from Iraq.

  The thrust was this: We’ve made a huge mess and these people will pay the price.

  It took a year, but I ended up publishing with the NYU Alumni Magazine on the advice of my friend Rich Byrne, who said that glossy alumni magazines tended to pay serious money.

  He wasn’t kidding.

  I got $1,800 for a 1,500-word piece.

  The editorial process was tortured, and the article was a disaster, and somehow the whole thing ended up as a holiday in other people’s misery.

  It functioned in the exact same way as videos on Vice.

  Someone shows up in a crisis zone and leaves anointed with a superficia
l knowledge of other people’s pain.

  On the night of the article’s publication, the situation with Oyster the Clown exploded.

  Hundreds of comments were left across a wide spectrum of websites.

  These were the usual: gay/rapist/pedophile.

  The really dangerous stuff was the accounts opened in my name.

  Facebook accounts.

  Accounts on one of Google’s early attempts on social media.

  And most insidious of all, an account on YouTube, which contained a surprising amount of personal information in the profile data.

  The YouTube account had been used to leave endless comments on videos of children.

  These comments were not savory.

  There was other stuff too.

  I’m not going to bother to recount it here.

  This went on for about a month.

  New comments, new accounts.

  Meanwhile, I was finishing the manuscript of ATTA, and I knew that it was the first significant writing that I’d done, and I further knew that its completion would necessitate getting in touch with professionals in the publishing industry.

  I also knew that the first thing that professionals in the publishing industry would do, if they were considering the manuscript, was search for my name on Google.

  The results would be the fake Jarett Kobek perving out on videos of children and hundreds of comments about my pedophilia.

  And the job of any competent publishing-industry professional is finding an excuse to say no.

  By this point, I’d wasted about two or three years on the bullshit of writing.

  I didn’t need anyone else’s help fucking up my life.

  It was too late to go back now.

  Something had to be done.

  At the time, I was poor as fuck.

  But class in America is a weird thing.

  Half of it is money.

  Half of it is social access.

  I had no money, but I did have social access.

  I ended up talking to a friend of a friend, who was a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

  They passed on the name of a law firm in San Francisco that routinely dealt with this shit.

  “What would you do?” I asked the friend of a friend.