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.