Only Americans Burn in Hell Quotes

“In the same month that Corey extended his invitation for food or caffeine, a major American publisher issued my follow-up to I Hate the Internet. It was a novel that ended up with the title The Future Won’t Be Long.

It was a massive commercial failure.

Less than 300 copies sold in its first six months!

I Hate the Internet sold 300 copies in its first two weeks!

Reader, this was shocking.

If for no other reason than the simple fact that The Future Won’t Be Long was published by Penguin Random House.

Penguin Random House is the biggest publishing conglomerate in the world. It’s a multibillion-dollar multinational corporation owned by another multibillion-dollar multinational corporation called Bertelsmann, which spent much of World War Two producing Nazi propaganda and using Jewish slaves to work in its factories.

My book was backed by Nazi money!

And it still failed!”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“I can think of one reason why I can’t escape comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut.

And it ain’t because my work is so indebted to his own.

It’s because Vonnegut was the same as me: another con artist ripping off the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

A bunch of people have talked shit about Céline.

I don’t blame them!

Besides being one of the best writers of the Twentieth Century AD, he was also a rabid anti-Semite who collaborated with the Nazis.

But I can’t judge!

I too have collaborated with Nazis!

I was published by Penguin Random House!”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“Then Jesus died.

And maybe he came back to life.

Who fucking knows?

Anything’s possible in a world so supranatural that Donald J. Trump ends up in control of 6,800 nuclear warheads.”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“There is a curious lacuna in Abigail, and one that is never revealed through the stylized vocals of King Diamond,” said HRH to Celia. “Speak not of the ludicrous sequel. We are not barbarians, madame. We consider texts unburdened by a priori knowledge. As King Diamond sings, we meet the ghost of Count de LaFey, and also his unfaithful wife, and their descendant Jonathan and his wife Miriam. One almost need not even mention Abigail herself. The stillborn child of de LaFey’s wife, conceived in the sullen pits of adultery. Although the main thrust of the album concerns itself with Abigail’s attempts to possess Miriam, represented as the symbolic transition from eighteen to nine, I remain struck by our ignorance of Abigail’s father. Her sire is the one player never identified. I wonder, madame, have you any theories as to the identity of this unfortunate progenitor?”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“I’m burnt out.

Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States!

So there’s really no point.

Stop hoping that books will save you.

Stop pretending.

Everyone else has.”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“I don’t blame anyone for getting addicted to their smartphones.

I only blame people for their terrible attempts at reviewing my work.

Vonnegut, Vonnegut, Vonnegut!

He invented the short sentence!

He invented the short paragraph!

He invented jokes!”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“But who the fuck are the dinosaurs reviewing books on websites?

Losers!

Who reads books?

Nobody!

Who uses a website?

Nobody!

It’s all smartphones now.”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“Most of the comparisons between this book and the writings of the late Kurt Vonnegut will occur in cheap little reviews on Goodreads.com and Amazon.com, which are Internet websites owned by a guy named Jeff Bezos.

These websites are where the American readership makes sure that American authors know their fucking place, and further ensures American authors know that their place is the equivalent to that of a moon-faced kid being shoved into some mud by a bully.”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“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.”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue. It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit.

Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit. It was the most insane bullshit! But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician.

And yes, reader, that includes you. You too are a magician.

Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian.

Here are some strips of paper and bits of metal!
Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal.

Humiliate yourself for strips of paper. Murder for the strips of paper. Humiliate others for the strips of paper.

Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation.

Treat the vast accumulators like gods.

Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs! Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z! The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump! Kill! Kill! Kill! Work! Work! Work! Die! Die! Die!

Go on. Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened.

Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility.

Yes, the Crusades were horrible. Yes, the Inquisition was awful. Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem. Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded. Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor.

But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror.

Read the news.

Murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape...Despair.

All secularism has done, really, is remove a yoke from the rich. They’d always been horrible, but at least when they still paid lip service to Christian virtues, they could be shamed into philanthropy. Now they use market forces to slide the whole thing into feudalism.

New York University built a campus [in Abu Dhabi] with slave labor! In the Twenty-First Century AD! And has suffered no rebuke! Applications are at an all-time high!

The historical arguments against Christianity are as facile as reviews on Goodreads.com, and come down to this: Why do you organize around bad people who tell you that a Skyman wants you to be good?

To which the rejoinder is: yes, the clergy sucks, but who cares how normal people are delivered into goodness?”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“Google was a company that’d made more money off advertisements than any other company in the history of the world, but it had been founded by people who were embarrassed by a business model dependent upon advertising lawn chairs, car insurance, and Viagra.

To deflect the embarrassment, the company cloaked itself in an aura of innovation and some old bullshit about the expansion of human knowledge.

Google maintained this façade by providing web and mobile services to the masses.

The most beloved of these services was the near daily alteration of the company’s logo as it appeared on the company’s website.

Almost every day, the Google logo transformed into cutesy, diminutive cartoons of people who’d done something with their lives other than sell advertisements. These cartoons were called Google Doodles.

They encompassed the whole spectrum of achievement, with a special focus on scientific achievement and the lives of minorities. In its own way, this was a perfect distillation of politics in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Whenever they appeared, the Google Doodles were beloved and celebrated in meaningless little articles on meaningless little websites.

They were not met with the obvious emotion, which would be total fucking outrage at a massive multinational corporation co-opting a wide range of human experience into an advertisement for that very same corporation.

Here was the perversity of Twenty-First-Century AD life: Native-American women had a statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they did of being hired into a leadership position at Google.

And no one cared.

People were delighted!

They were being honored!

By a corporation!”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“Here’s one much worse: that, in the end, everyone’s life is still dominated by the whims of the very rich and the social mores of the slightly rich. And that this new reality is exploited by the people who understand that appearances are more important than reality.

All of which is to say that by fixating on sex, the discussion around sexual harassment misses the key element.

Which is the harassment. The people who end up in positions of power end up in those positions because they are very, very good at humiliation.

That’s their skill.

That’s how they end up as CEOs.

Everyone who has ever had a job has been humiliated by their boss.

This is the nature of the thing.

And, yes, it sucks that the men who end up in power are so fucking crude that the only way they can imagine humiliating women is with sex.

But every single boss who’s humiliating his women underlings is also humiliating his male underlings.
This is who we, as a society, put into power.

Remind me: how many obsequious movies and books and articles have been written about Steve Jobs?
In the end, having a job, even a job like writing, is about interfacing with money, and the biggest lie of our society is that the individual currencies of money are units that measure value.

Money doesn’t measure value.

Money is the measure of humiliation.

What would you do for a dollar?

What would you do for ten dollars?

What would you do for a million dollars?”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“Harvard University was a hedge fund that masqueraded as an institution of higher learning. It was one of the places where the world’s upper classes enjoyed grade inflation as they became economic war-lords of the technocratic elite who mouthed platitudes about equality while crushing the global poor.”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“If the only tool in your political arsenal is shame, don’t be surprised what happens when you meet a shameless man.”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell

“By the time that Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency, the elections which chose the President had transformed from referendums about who would best administer the international slave trade into contests about who’d get the chance to reduce illiterate Muslims into pulpy masses of intestines.

The people who’d voted for Trump went nuts because they’d won and had no idea what to do with their impossible victory.

The country’s political liberals went nuts because Trump put them in the position of facing an undeniable and yet unpalatable truth.

This was the truth that the political liberals could not deny and could not face: beyond making English Comp courses at community colleges very annoying, forty years of rhetorical progress had achieved little, and it turned out that feeling good about gay marriage did not alleviate the taint of being warmongers whose taxes had killed more Muslims than the Black Death.

You can’t make evil disappear by being a reasonably nice person who mouths platitudes at dinner parties. Social media confessions do not alleviate suffering. You can’t talk the world into being a decent place while sacrificing nothing.

The socialists didn’t go nuts.

They were the people who’d thought about the complex problems facing the nation and decided that an honest solution to these problems could be achieved with applied Leftism.

But don’t get your hopes up.

Despite being correct in their thinking, the socialists were the most annoying people in America. When they spoke, it was like bamboo slivers shoved under a fingernail. I don’t know why. It was the single biggest American tragedy of the last one hundred years.

Here was the difference between the priestly castes, many of whom had opinions on deadline for money, and everyone else: sane people shut the fuck up, nodded their heads, and did what they needed to survive in a toxic political landscape.

In an era when public discourse was the bought-and-paid property of roughly twenty companies, and the airing of an opinion could subject a person to unfathomable amounts of abuse and recrimination, the only reasonable option was to be quiet.

So when you next fawn over someone’s brave public thoughts, repeat the following: The contours of discourse are so horrendous that one thing has become certain. Any individual offering up a public opinion necessarily must be either hopelessly stupid or insane. I am engaging with a product of madness and idiocy.”
― Jarett Kobek, Only Americans Burn in Hell