And it still failed!
So what happened?
For decades, everyone who had any pretense to High Culture wasted fathomless hours talking about theorists like Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard.
These people with pretenses to High Culture had advanced the idea that reading incomprehensible French books gave them special insight into the way the world works.
Sometimes they expressed this pretense in unreadable texts called master’s theses and doctoral dissertations.
One of Baudrillard’s ideas was very popular. He’d theorized that there would be a moment when reality collapsed into fiction, at which point it would then be impossible to distinguish the fake from the actual.
He called this the Hyperreal.
But what neither Baudrillard nor his readers could ever locate was the exact moment when the Hyperreal would replace the real.
It was a mystery, floating-point arithmetic without any definitive beginning.
But then it happened.
On November 8/9th, 2016 AD, while I was asleep in London’s Little Venice, passed out in someone’s former childhood bedroom above Blomfield Road, the real became Hyperreal.
Donald J. Trump, the world’s best approximation of living fiction, whose body appears to be constituted of media coverage stitched together with plastic surgery, was elected to the Presidency of the United States of America.
When this happened at around 6AM Greenwich Mean Time, a film crew was on Blomfield Road. They were shooting footage for a film called Paddington 2.
The film was about a very fussy bear with a posh accent, its cartoon body generated by computers. The bear goes to prison and makes friends with inmates whose bodies were generated by loveless sexual reproduction.
My smartphone started vibrating.
People were sending me text messages of shock and awe.
They were freaked the fuck out.
What just happened? they asked.
It turned out that the people who were the least prepared for the Hyperreal were the same people who’d spent decades talking about the Hyperreal.
They had no special insight into anything!
A fog descended upon them.
Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.
These people are my friends.
And, holy shit, these people did not see this thing coming.
And, double holy shit, did it ever make them annoying.
Only two people have ever thanked Donald J. Trump for his honesty. The Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni and David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Great company!
No one else has ever thanked Donald J. Trump for his honesty.
And with good reason.
The President could not be honest.
This was not because the President went out of his way to exist in a state of perpetual falsehood.
The President could not be honest because he existed in a moral universe where there was no truth and there are no lies.
He was hopelessly insane.
He lived in the Hyperreal.
Ideas floated into his head, ideas floated out.
And the whole world jumped at their utterance.
If the country was bombarded, every day, by a morass of awful noise that displayed at best a partial relationship to the truth, and if the citizens of that country were expected to run around like chickens with their heads cut off in response to this awful noise, then why not empower someone to make a different kind of noise?
Why not get someone who would make noise in a different direction?
To steal a joke from the comedian Stewart Lee: it was like being given a room in a fleabag motel, and, in protest at its unsatisfactory conditions, shitting in the room’s bed before realizing that you had nowhere else to sleep.
But people did it anyway.
They shit the bed.
They voted for Donald J. Trump.
A fictitious being with, at best, a tenuous connection to reality ended up at the head of the world’s most powerful military and the world’s biggest economy.
He was from the fourth branch of American governance: the Celebrity.
And he had taken over the first branch: the Executive.
Reality collapsed into fiction.
And you would think, reader, that the best time to be backed by Nazi money was after a living caricature had inaugurated the Hyperreal.
But you’d be wrong.
Here was the implicit sales pitch behind my book: The country is collapsing, reality has gone mad, and a White Supremacist just murdered a woman by driving his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of protestors. So please buy my book about drug parties in the 1980s AD!
No one wanted to read that shit.
And all the Nazi loot in the world couldn’t make it otherwise.
This book that you are reading was going to be a cracked attempt at the sorry bullshit that people in the Hyperreal actually want to read, which are mindless tales about supranatural creatures.
I had come up with what I thought was a funny contrast between narrative voice and subject matter.
I was going to write a fantasy novel in the imagined voice of an alcoholic from southeastern New England. It was going to be the The Hobbit as told by a gin-room rummy from Fall River, Massachusetts.
It was going to go something like this:
Fuckin’ Bilbo the little midget over here, he crawls into the prickers and what does he see but some fuckin’ trolls sittin’ at a fuckin’ fire.
“Wow, I says, wow. You tell me, guy, what the fuck am I gonna do with some trolls?” says Bilbo the Dildo. “Who am I, a fuckin’ Terminator? I ain’t gettin’ myself eaten just cause some big shot Poindexter thinks he’s a wizard.”
But life kept interrupting.
Things went screwy.
It’s possible that I had a nervous breakdown.
Somehow I ended up writing a novel that is not only about whimsical undying characters who live on a magical island called Fairy Land, but is also a book that functions as an accidental allegory for a social media hashtag.
This state of affairs seems like a perfect statement about the present moment.
Corey wrote back about a week after I’d sent my email.
This is what he wrote:
Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 11:15 AM
From: Corey
To: Jarett Kobek
Subject: RE: Meeting with NYU in LA?
Dear Mr. Kobek,
Thank you for your response, your honesty, and your candor.
Chapter One
Certain Facts about Celia, the Queen of Fairy Land
Here are some things that you should know.
The first of these things: Celia was an immortal and undying being, possessed of supranatural powers.
The second: Celia lived on Fairy Land, which was an island in the sea past the sun.
The third: Celia was Fairy Land’s Regnant Queen.
The fourth: Celia had become Queen of Fairy Land when she and the other undying women on the island in the sea past the sun had decided to expel or murder all of the men in Fairy Land.
The fifth: when all of the men were dead or expelled, the women of Fairy Land gathered together and called upon Celia to reign as their Queen.
The sixth: Celia accepted the women’s call and wore the crown of Fairy Land.
The seventh: Celia liked to fuck.
Here’s another thing that you should know: everything is going to be okay.
It isn’t easy living in a world where every device of mass communication has been designed to tell you that you’re horrible.