Life became a cartoon.
A new pantheon was required.
And there was Batman.
And there was Mr. Spock.
And there were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
And there was Harry fucking Potter, still unbuggered, still longing for the strong and nurturing caress of a same-sex handjob.
All of these intellectual properties were no different than Slender Man.
They were just some crap that someone had made up.
And they all had definite, and well-documented, points of origin.
And this is why writers run into terrible peril when they write about supranatural characters that directly, or accidentally, touch upon hot-button issues like race or gender.
The problem is never race or gender.
That’s only the smokescreen.
The problem is the supranatural creatures.
The writer risks profaning a new religion.
Like all religious people, the new religion’s adherents are completely insane.
But they’re not so insane that they’re willing to make a direct argument about their religion.
You can’t say that Batman is real.
Not in public.
Not yet.
So they grasp at the obvious.
And like any zealots, they demand obsequious gestures as retribution for the profane.
One obsequious gesture that emerged around the Year of the Froward Worm was the employment of what were termed sensitivity readers.
Authors hired sensitivity readers, who were apparently of marginalized backgrounds, to read through the authors’ manuscripts and identify issues of bias or grotesque cultural misrepresentation.
Basically, it was a writer hiring someone from the Internet to tell the writer why they were wrong before other Internet people could tell the writer why they were wrong.
Imaginary narratives about fantasy worlds were being fact-checked!
By people who were about ten minutes away from making a sacrifice to Slender Man!
Like most efforts of the liberal intelligentsia to maintain plausible deniability about one’s culpability in the global order of exploitation, the concept of the sensitivity reader dripped with unexamined racism.
It essentialized to an extreme degree, suggesting that there were inalienable qualities specific to arbitrary social constructs, and furthermore, that any one individual could comprehend, and identify, biases against millions of people based on nothing more than the accident of their birth.
Even the name was insane: it suggested that people from arbitrary social constructs had an innate sensitivity that differentiated them from other human beings, and that this sensitivity was based in a unique moral superiority.
And it is this thought—that the arbitrary circumstances of birth give the ability to comment on a slim range of human suffering—which has animated a central motif of the book that you are reading.
The motif in question is the idea that the purpose of the Presidency of the United States of America is the transformation of Muslims into aching piles of ash and steaming puddles of blood.
As the towelheaded son of a dirty fucking immigrant camelfucker, I’ve focused on the most personally applicable aspect of the American War Machine and transformed it into a reccurring joke.
Yet, reader, does not this approach suffer from the sin of narrowness?
It’s not as if the American War Machine has limited itself to the execution of Muslims in the Middle East and North African region.
It’s not as if the American War Machine only fucks up the relatives of people who self-identify on the Internet as #MENA.
Ever since 9/11, the American War Machine has unleashed total chaos upon the world.
By the Year of the Froward Worm, seventy-two sovereign states were involved in its conflicts.
That’s 39 per cent of the world’s countries.
By the Year of the Froward Worm, about 13,486,400 refugees came from five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia.
All five of these places had been touched by the American War Machine.
Five had been fucked with by the Central Intelligence Agency, the major intelligence agency of the American War Machine.
Four had hosted members of the American War Machine’s military.
Three had been bombed by the American War Machine.
Two had hosted major American War Machine military operations.
One had hosted the longest war in the history of the American War Machine.
As I write this, America wages a secret war in Sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the best available information, this secret war is taking place in the following twenty countries: Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Botswana.
The secret war is conducted under an American combatant command named AFRICOM.
Much like the multinational conglomerate that owns Penguin Random House, AFRICOM is headquartered in Germany.
If I had to guess, I’d suggest that about 0.5 per cent of the American population knows that AFRICOM exists.
Even that estimate is wild in its optimism, as it would mean that around 1.6 million people in the United States know their country is waging a secret war against Sub-Saharan Africa.
And based on the evidence, I find this to be impossible.
Here is that evidence: if fifty people freak out on Twitter about issues of racial misrepresentation in a cultural product about supra-natural creatures, it generates coverage in the house organs of the American liberal intelligentsia.
Oh, the articles they’ll write!
There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored!
There are games to be won!
Fifty people is nothing.
Which means that the threshold for generating media interest is very low.
So if 1.6 million people know about the secret war in Sub-Saharan Africa, wouldn’t this topic receive endless media coverage?
Insert your own joke here.
Chapter Sixteen
Drink of Me, Eat of Me
At the end of September in the Year of the Froward Worm, the women of Fairy Land left the house on the hill and followed the last strand.
Saliva-based navigation was responsive to changes in traffic patterns, and while the shortest route to their destination would have been to take Los Feliz Boulevard to the 5 onto the 10 and then come in through 4th Street, a traffic accident had made the 5 a complete horror show.
The saliva-based navigation directed the women on to Vermont to the 101 to the 110 and had them come in through 6th Street.
Because their destination was in Skid Row, and because they were on 6th Street, Rose Byrne drove the Jaguar XJ-S through the most abject scene of American cruelty.
What you have to realize about America is that America was a mug’s game, it was a bullshit con, and nothing proved how fucked the country was more than Los Angeles’s homeless population.
Official estimates in the Year of the Froward Worm, based on nothing, were 58,000 people.
Unofficial?
More like 100,000.
More people than had won Donald J. Trump his Electoral College victory!
And even that number might be low.
It was impossible to say.