Technically, The Future Won’t Be Long wasn’t published by Penguin Random House.
Technically, it was published by Viking, which once upon a time had been the Viking Press before it was eaten by Penguin Books and became Viking Penguin, and before Viking Penguin was eaten by Penguin Putnam, and before Penguin Putnam was rebranded as the Penguin Group and was eaten by Penguin Random House.
Reader, if you follow this metaphor of consumption to its logical end, you may imagine my failed novel as the excrement that follows such a hearty meal.
If there’s one media outlet that has dominated the tone and tenor of American life since some Muslims facefucked life into a shitty disaster movie, it’s Fox News, which is a network found on cable television.
Generally speaking, Fox News offers news from a Far Right perspective, and is consumed by an ongoing advocacy that Muslims should be reduced to a heaping pile of agonized screaming ash.
If you’re in any liberal American home, and you want to invoke a series of paleoconservative values while implying your moral superiority to the people who hold them, all you have to do is wave your arms around as if you’ve been stung by a bee and shout this: “FOX NEWS! FOX NEWS! FOX NEWS!”
Everyone will know what you mean.
They’ll know that you mean this: “Republicans want to burn gay people alive and put Black people in cages and fuck up everything that I believe! But that stops here! After the digestifs!”
I shop in a grocery store designed for the haute bourgeoisie.
The prices are ridiculous.
Other than the organic produce, every product in my local grocery has, somewhere on its packaging, a goofy narrative about the company that manufactures the product.
In my neighborhood, it is impossible to go to the local grocery store and buy mustard without encountering a whimsical tale about rural people from Northern California and Oregon and how their quirky values are reflected in the ingredients of their products.
These quirky values are why it costs $3 for a vegan cookie.
The narratives go something like this:
Twenty years ago, my wife Betty and I were in our kitchen, talking about the taste of the mustard that our parents bought. All of the store brands weren’t anything like what we remembered, and they were made with pre-processed ingredients and contained preservatives. These chemicals might have allowed for a longer shelf life, but they reduced flavor, and even worse, no one knew what they did to people’s health. “I wish someone would go back to old-fashioned values,” I said. “Why won’t someone make a mustard that tastes great and is good for people?”
Then Betty asked a question that changed our lives.
“Why don’t we do it?”
I have watched hundreds of people read these narratives.
And as I have watched people read these narratives, the thought has occurred to me that people are more conscientious about their mustard than they are about the media they consume.
Reader, I have written a narrative in the voice of the man who owns HarperCollins and Fox News.
To acclimate you to its message, I’ve written this narrative in the style of stories that one finds printed on jars of organic mustard:
MEET RUPERT
Hi, I’m Rupert Murdoch. I’m having a cuppa in my country home in Mayfair, part of a little town that the lads like to call London. You probably don’t know much about my story, but ooh, crikey, I reckon it’s a real ripper.
Over sixty years ago, when I inherited an Australian newspaper from my father, I knew that people didn’t want a landscape chocka with media outlets producing a true spectrum of thought. The world was crying out for an oligarchical structure of media ownership, where a handful of companies controlled everything and created a false dichotomy of public opinion.
I took my father’s little newspaper and used it to gain an iron control over Australia’s media landscape, and I funneled the obscene profits into a slow campaign against other countries. My first target was the English. Those old bogans couldn’t resist my crass strategy of big tits paired with disgusting opinions for the ill-educated masses.
I moved on to America and did the very same thing. It was ace. The molls in the American government were some real wantons, and they deregulated their media landscape so that me and a few other big’un blokes could consolidate control over almost every outlet in the country. Television, film, newspapers, and publishing. Those Americans were bang up for it. What a bunch of naughty slags.
Maybe you’ll recognize one of my profitable divisions. It’s called Fox News. It does a cracking job of getting the olds upset about global warming and Christmas.
I also own HarperCollins, and one of the things that Harper-Collins does is publish books by American liberals. Strewth, it’s a great deal! I use Fox News to make money off rightward turns of public opinion, and then I make money off the reaction to those rightward turns of public opinion by publishing books which the ideological opponents of Fox News quote like gospel scripture.
When I’m chopping logs for my old wood stove in Mayfair, I like to ask myself whether the liberal writers on HarperCollins, who are enmeshed in the media and entertainment industries, are so stupid that they don’t know they’re taking money from me, or if they’re so cynical and motivated by their own atomized interests that they don’t care. I never do make up my mind. Who can decide with that lot of saddos?
Remember when the feminist Internet sheilas were deadset about that Paki comedian fella Aziz Ansari rooting a young moll? That was a real laugh. Aziz was in a few of my movies. Epic, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and What’s Your Number? I jolly well paid for his holiday in the sun. Remember the original article that told the world about Aziz’s rooting? It was published on a website called Babe.net. Guess who’s an investor?
Do you recall when the benders at the Guardian unleashed a real corker and said that Empire, a hip-hop-themed television drama, was ‘audaciously honest on Black issues’? Crikey, do you care to hazard a guess who produced Empire? Want to guess who owned the network? Guess who made the real money off the advertisements and sales into foreign territories? That Guardian article was a shock! They made me sound a bloody golly!
I’m getting on in years, but I think I’ve done pretty well. Maybe some sook dags say I play the larrikin, but I run a family businesses. Ooh, crikey, I hope I’ve stayed true to my values. I know that when my time comes and I go meet the Great Sky Cunt, I’ve raised a right crop of young’uns who’ll steer my works in the right direction.
If people from the Right Wing want to gain moral instruction, they go watch Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch makes money off the advertisements that are aired on the network.
If people from the so-called American Left want to gain moral instruction, they go buy a book published by a Certified Liberal who is being published by HarperCollins, and Rupert Murdoch makes money off the sale.
The purpose of anyone expressing a public opinion in American life, or consuming one, is this: to make money for about 1,500 people.
And don’t think I’m singling out Rupert Murdoch.
Other than the phone hacking, anything you could say about Murdoch was true of 1,499 other individuals.
For instance: the American cable network which served as the ideological counterweight to Fox News.