by Jarett Kobek
And your fourth-best idea will be to become one of the naïve morons, and you will make money for your global overlords by pretending into devices built by slaves that the worst thing in the world is whenever a honky gas station attendant insults someone from Honduras.
And your worst idea will be to keep your head down and try to make a reasonably decent life while buying more shit and imagining that you have a special relationship with sports teams, the Celebrity branch of American governance, and intellectual property in which you have no economic stake.
None of this will save you.
If there are still historians in the future, and that’s a big if, and their histories are not sanitized at the behest of centralized organizations, my guess is that the Twenty-First Century AD will be seen as the time when all the reasonably decent ideas developed by the Left were co-opted and conquered by the Right.
Identity politics, performance art, fluidity with mass media, total freedom of speech, post-modernism.
The mistake was in thinking that these tactics were the specific province of one ideology.
But a gun doesn’t care who it shoots.
When those historians of the future write about 9/11, which was when some Muslims facefucked reality into a shitty disaster movie, it will be seen as the beginning of a moment that ended with the election of Donald J. Trump and the inauguration of the Hyperreal.
9/11 was avoidable, but its psychic message wasn’t: the destinies that Americans believed were their birthrights, and the birthrights of their children, were not inevitable.
Those destinies were the accidental byproduct of an unparalleled prosperity boom.
And that boom ended about fifty years ago.
And to fill the hole, the American people embraced the one sector that never dies, the one industry that never goes away, the one stain that spreads forever.
They went to war.
Against the world.
Against each other.
Donald J. Trump was the natural consequence of an entire society that adopted unending slaughter as its central function.
If you believe that this is simply an American issue, you’re wrong.
A few months before Trump’s election, America’s biggest partner in the war against Iraq, the United Kingdom, also heard the crying out of a million dead Iraqis.
And a majority of its citizens attempted suicide by withdrawing from the European Union.
And because no one ever mentions it: most of the European countries that have seen a Far Right resurgence were part of the so-called Coalition of the Willing.
The Coalition of the Willing was a shitty euphemism that President George Walker Bush used to describe the countries that his administration had beguiled or bullied into America’s second war against Iraq.
And I know, reader, that causality isn’t causation.
But still.
I remember.
And I hear the wailing ghosts of a million dead Iraqis.
And those future historians will also say this: when confronted by the total co-option of their tactics, and facing their greatest existential threat, American liberals doubled down on the very tactics that had been co-opted by their ideological enemies.
They fought over a corpse.
As a member of the Hyperreal, one message has resounded since the day of your birth: the discrediting of Christianity from refined intellectual opinion.
Christianity has been discredited for a very specific reason.
At its core, it exists in opposition to money.
And refined intellectual opinion is just another commodity.
Try some, buy some.
It’s all just filthy lucre for Penguin Random House.
On those long and empty nights when I hear the voices of a million dead Iraqis, sometimes the ghosts speak in full paragraphs.
Sometimes they say this: Jarett, our terrible vengeance has reconfigured your entire society into a shitty iteration of the Church.
We have restored the concept of original sin and we have forced your liberal intelligentsia to genuflect before it. We have ensured that they will do this in the form of vacuous statements regarding White Privilege issued between tweets about consequence-free hallucinogenic use, dank memes, and bespoke doggie daycare.
We have elevated a faux-Left who write books for Rupert Murdoch, and we have ensured that your society is doomed to rehash the battles of the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial with all the efficacy and power of the Byzantine scholars who debated how many angels could fit on the head of a pin while the Ottomans were sacking Constantinople in 1453 AD.
And, yes, Jarett, we find it very helpful that you’ve pointed out the apocryphal nature of this story about your ancestors and Byzantine scholars.
We thank you for both your honesty and your needless pedantry.
If you hadn’t noticed, we’re using the heightened language of rhetoric to make a greater point than mere factual happenstance.
Besides, your taxes paid for our blood.
So give us a break.
We have transformed your fellow citizens of the Hyperreal into a laity with no control over the debate or the direction of their society. We have ensured that all they can do is offer useless peasants’ revolts into cyberspace while enriching their feudal overlords and strengthening the ostracism of their fellows. We have created the world’s greatest device of excommunication in the form of the Internet.
And, yes, Jarett, we have heard your objection to the archaic use of the word “cyberspace.”
The paucity of books in Arabic translation ensured that a bootleg edition of William Gibson’s Neuromancer did not appear on the streets of Baghdad until February 2003, just prior to your country’s invasion of Iraq. Its cover artwork was a heavily pixelated-and-dithered Internet JPG of a painting by Rowena Morrill.
As such, we apologize to you for our lack of a fresher reference point and for failing to use au courant terminology to describe your vast and unending apparatus of state surveillance, social shame, and pointless judgment.
We note that in your fathomless need to play the pedant, you have emailed William Gibson and asked him whether or not an Arabic translation of Neuromancer appeared in Baghdad. We further note William Gibson’s response, in which he wrote that to his best knowledge there is no Arabic translation of the book.
To this end, we refute William Gibson and assert again that a bootleg version of Neuromancer appeared in Baghdad in February of 2003, arriving on the same shelves as the novels of Saddam Hussein. We dare you, and William Gibson, to prove that this did not occur.
We have ensured that your feudal overlords benefit from the Church. They are the ones who make money off inflections of dogma about the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial. They own the device of excommunication. The hierarchal social pyramid of the classroom textbook has returned.
You are near its bottom, but because you made the curious life choice to be an entertainer, you are not quite a serf. You are a jongleur. The third-oldest profession. Keep singing your songs. See how much effect it has on the world.
We will tell you about the delusion that animates your stories. You were born at the tail end of the only fifty years in history when life got noticeably better. You grew up in an historical anomaly and you have mistaken the contours of this anomaly for The Way Things Work.
The other 4,950 years of recorded history were bitter slogs through the wretched lives of miserable people suffering beneath unfair systems of governance. The weight of those years is against you, Jarett. What kind of idiot would assume that five anomalous decades are a better predictor of the future than the other 4,950?
Let’s not pretend. Only people in about twenty countries had better lives during those fifty years. If you haven’t killed them yet, perhaps you should inquire with the people of Iraq about whether or not they experienced a significant increase in their quality of life while suffering beneath an oppressive system of oil feudalism propped up by British Petroleum.
Our
greatest vengeance, Jarett, is that we have recreated the Church and removed from it any hope of the Christian virtues. Your entire society has reconstituted itself around a cruel medieval structure and stripped away that structure’s slim benefits.
Your Twenty-First Century AD is about everything interesting from your Twentieth Century AD being transformed into a very shitty religion ruled over by a high clergy of the haute bourgeoisie. They pray to monsters. Their faint wish is to somehow avoid their feudal destinies. But they too will fall.
Everything will be top and bottom.
There will be no middle.
Now you live in a world where there is no hope, no charity, and no fraternity.
Please enjoy Batman.
Please enjoy Harry Potter, even if he is an unfulfilled ghulat al-latah.
Please enjoy the Presidency of Donald J. Trump.
Please enjoy Brexit.
Please enjoy the rise of the Far Right.
Good luck with the future.
You will most certainly need it.
PS: We also apologize for the instance last spring when we expressed surprise that your given name isn’t spelled with two Rs and one T.
But you killed us, Jarret.
You did it with drone warfare.
You did it with a child’s toy.
You did it with a radio-controlled airplane.
Get over yourself.
So what the fuck, reader, why not?
If for no reason other than the bloody-minded perversity of the damned, you might as well embrace the most discredited idea in Western life.
You might as well ride dirty with Jesus.
And his ultimate message.
It’s not like anything else is working.
You are more than your base impulses.
You don’t have to follow the script of your life.
Don’t be a dick.
The only things that they can’t monetize are individual acts of kindness.
It occurs to me that I never explained how Arafat Kazi talked his way into the pit.
He found the box office manager.
Arafat Kazi said that he’d bought a ticket.
But that the ticket wouldn’t scan.
And then he apologized.
And apologized again.
And again.
And again.
Think about it from the perspective of the box office manager: presumably this was a person who’d spent a great deal of his life talking to people who wanted free admission.
Surely, he was hardened against grifters and schemers.
But none of those people were dressed like circus performers.
They were not holy fools clad in motley.
And none of them apologized for the bother.
And none of those people got a free ticket.
And that’s why I’m a Christian.
* Mollier, Jean-Yves. “L’édition française dans la tourmente de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 2011/4 (n° 112).
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Man Who Said Bo! to a Goose
After Rusticano, there was nothing else for it.
Celia went back to Fairy Land.
Fern went with her.
The Fairy Knight was left in the mortal world, doomed to wander for an uncertain term, but with the promise that his mother and sister would keep in touch.
Fern’s return to Fairy Land occasioned much joy.
Magical charm returned to the island.
The lesbianism was explosive.
What could Fern do?
The experiment had failed.
Life had not turned out how she wanted.
Everything that she’d hoped would carry her through had turned out hollow.
In the end, all that remained was where she’d grown up.
Welcome to true adulthood, Fern.
And, sometimes, Fairy Land was visited by the fractured shimmering astral projections of people tripping on dimethyltryptamine.
As always, the women of Fairy Land believed that these astral projections were remnants of The People Who Came Before.
The astral projections tried communicating with the women.
But their voices came out like Morse code sent over a telegraph wire.
Dot, dash, dot, dash, dash, dot, dot.
One spirit appeared with greater frequency than the others.
Its form had become better defined, more human.
With each of its appearances, the spirit inched closer to speech.
Its words had begun to sound like English.
Like this: lrhsssrsssslrlrllrlrrlrllrrssssllsssslrssssrrssssrlrlrssssslrllssssrlrlssssrlrlsssrrrlll.
One night, as Fern walked past the Warbling Yews of Nevermore, she came upon this spirit.
It looked like a man.
It spoke like a man.
“Madame,” the spirit said to Fern, “I perhaps wonder if your elvish brain can be run through its robust Mandelbrotian paces.”
Fern stared at the spirit.
She’d heard the story of The People Who Came Before.
Who hadn’t?
They’d been the original inhabitants of Fairy Land.
And they’d grown so weary of life that they made a bargain with a creature calling itself Eru Ilúvatar.
In exchange for the blessing of eternal peace, The People Who Came Before had traded away their narcissistic senses of selves.
They’d lost all that my/me/mine bullshit.
They’d lost the curse of language.
And then they’d disappeared.
Fern was freaked the fuck out.
It wasn’t that one of The People Who Came Before was speaking.
With magic, none of the rules are ever set in place.
Weird shit happens all the time.
Fern was freaked the fuck out because she couldn’t imagine how, by any possible quirk of magic, one of The People Who Came Before would materialize in Fairy Land while wearing a T-shirt that said this:
“Oh most noble spirit,” said Fern. “Do you speak now from the Great Beyond?”
“If, in your greeny estimation,” said the fractured astral projection, “the Great Beyond is the ketamine-flecked restroom of the local hotspot and private events space known as KABIN, then, yes, this hearty voice shouts from the Great Beyond.”
“The restroom of KABIN,” said Fern. “What are you doing?”
“I indulge in brief respite. I am in attendance at a fundraiser hosted by 2020 Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Kamala Harris,” said HRH. “Former Attorney General! Top Cop! Straight from the sewer milieu of San Francisco single-party politics! Law and order for the chaos of Trump’s America! The iron fist of the prison–industrial complex sheathed in a red velvet glove!”
“You are in America,” said Fern. “What part of America?”
“The District of Columbia,” said HRH. “Yet my time in your world is as fleeting as the sanity of an unprepared pop sensation thrust into the charnel house of post-industrial fame. Will you not answer my question, madame, in the quick, while still we share our brief moments? I have traveled across time and space. If nothing else, I am a seeker!”
“What is the question?” asked Fern.
“For fifteen years, I have pondered one thought,” said the projection of HRH. “My brain is as tormented as a hardened platoon of Achaeans struck down by the arrows of Apollo.”
“What is your question?” asked Fern.
“How can one resolve the idiocy of Varg Vikernes,” asked HRH, “with his undeniable aesthetic success? When I listen to his recorded works, it causes a great grotesque feeling in the interior self. I am experiencing the horrors of racism. Yet I thrill to the music. I must resolve this dilemma! Can you cut the knot, madame?”
Through all of the coincidental nonsense of fiction, Fern knew what HRH was asking.
She knew all about Varg Vikernes.
This was because of Anthony.
; Her dead boyfriend had co-authored a posthumously published academic paper on Norwegian Black Metal.
This paper had appeared in 22:4 of Popular Music and Society.
Anthony’s co-authorship had been, mostly, a favor to a fellow doctoral student named Jacob.
Jacob had been browsing compact discs at Generation Records on Thompson Street when he’d stumbled across the Fierce Recordings reissue of Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger.
This was back in The Year of the Speckled Band, which roughly corresponded to 1995 AD, 1415 AH, and 5755 AM.
When he first held the compact disc and its jewel case, Jacob had no idea what the hell was in his hands.
But the ultracontrast black-and-white cover art convinced him into an impulse buy.
Jacob went home and listened to Transilvanian Hunger.
He used the Internet, then in its pre-Google days, to search on Darkthrone and Transilvanian Hunger.
Jacob used a search engine called AltaVista.
AltaVista helped Jacob find out that Darkthrone was one of the foremost bands in the second wave of a subgenre called Black Metal.
AltaVista also helped Jacob find out that the words printed on the album’s back insert—Norsk Arisk Black Metal—translated to NORWEGIAN ARYAN BLACK METAL.
Jacob had that old familiar feeling.
Heavy Metal, of which Black Metal was a subgenre, was like all rock music in the Twentieth Century AD: totally indebted, and dependent upon, the influence of African-American blues and R&B.
But there had been a trend in Heavy Metal.
Its practitioners had gazed towards the structures and presumed virtuosity of Classical Music.
Heavy Metal was a genre that pulled away from the African-American influence and sought inspiration amongst received conceptions of European tradition.
Jacob saw Black Metal as the furthest possible extension of this trend.
Transilvanian Hunger was an album defined by its abject rejection, ideologically and aesthetically, of the African-American influence.
By virtue of this approach, and its resulting sound, the album was something totally new in quasi-popular music.
That old familiar feeling arrived whenever Jacob stumbled into the cheap wordplay that animates minor academic papers.
In an instant, he came up with a title: “Why are Black People Absent from Black Metal?: National identity, artistic convention and racist ideology in a new subgenre of heavy metal music.”