Raped by Wonders. The Unauthorized Biography of Eagles of Death Metal
"Raped by Wonders" is not a biography of a rock band you probably have never heard of. It's a novel about rock and roll, drugs, freedom, love, friendship, a planned and accomplished monstrous crime and a haunting pursuit between different groups of psychopaths on three continents. A novel about the clash between the two seemingly most contradictory, farthest along the scale of normality historical phenomena - rock and roll and radical Islam; a merciless parody of the value breaks in today's civilization, of modern forms of use of fundamental principles and ideas. Cruelly ironic, this novel is an alarming cry for the borderline state of the modern world.
And the good old bad Radoslav Parushev this time is more aggressive, more animatedly entertaining and politically incorrect than ever.
Palm Desert
In addition to many other things, Josh Homme is also the author of Jesse Hughes’ high school nickname - the Devil. Here’s how it happened. As much as he tried to save his buddy from getting his ass kicked, Josh couldn’t be with him everywhere and at all times, and so Jesse, who must have been a truly annoying little son of a bitch, still got his ass kicked every now and then, while Josh was engaged elsewhere (at a dentist appointment; with a tattooed bimbo wearing braces on her teeth in the back seat of a battered Chevy parked behind the school; in geometry class). More or less half the school waited for Josh Homme to turn his back on his fucking protege in order to jump him and merrily kick his little ass. In addition to being very annoying, however, Jesse Hughes was extremely vindictive. One way or another, he always managed to wreak payback on his tormentors. On one such occasion, witnessing the mean and inspired revenge which Jesse brought on one of his enemies (I can only guess but I imagine that the revenge incorporated at least the involuntary consumption of feces skillfully camouflaged by mixing into a specific portion of stew in the school cafeteria, to be eaten by the enemy), Baby Duck raised an eyebrow and, with a mix of irony and awe, said to Jesse, “You’re a horrible little evil son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
Jesse was thrilled to hear it. “I am, right?” he said proudly. “I am!”
“Oh, yeah. You’re the Devil in the flesh!”
So he started calling him the Devil. Jesse Hughes is still proudly using his diabolical nickname to this day. Yes, there are certain people who find it particularly original and timeless to be called the Devil, no matter how old they get. We can’t be all as deep as the sea. One couldn’t live for thirty minutes in a world where we’re all as deep as the sea.
So yeah, Jesse is a huge fan of the devil, he doesn’t mind kissing the devil on his tongue and truly considers this to be extremely cool and original - it’s as if we’re still in the 20th century and death metal is the cutting edge of cultural fashion. Jesse Hughes likes the devil and likes people thinking of him as a devil. How does Jesse unite his desire to be the Devil himself with the fact that he is a devoted believer in Christ? Well, he doesn’t - and why should he? One only has an inner conflict if one has an inner conflict. If one doesn’t, one doesn’t, and everything inside him is just fine and dandy. We can’t all be seas and oceans on this planet - there would be no dry spot left to sit down and have a smoke.
Yes, Jesse was brought up as a good conservative Catholic - against the background of the Protestant faith of his home South - and any understanding of his character is impossible without taking into account those two interwoven facts: one, that he has wanted to lick Satan’s tongue for as long as he can remember, and two, that for all his life, he has loved with all his heart his King and Savior J.C.
I’ve seen - I can’t recall where and when - an interview Jesse gave in the lobby of what looked like an Italian hotel. The journalist asks him about his thoughts on J.C. On hearing that specific question, Jesse - always ready for a fun joke - pretends to be extremely hot for two rotund middle-aged ladies who happen to pass by through the lobby, nodding to them in courteous and mocking greeting, saying hello and then turning his head to follow their receding fat asses with his eyes, as if he’s never seen anything like them. The first time he does it, it looks disarmingly foolish. Then Jesse does it three more times during the same interview, with the same imbecilic effort, and each time he looks just as pleased by his own devilish creativity. Meanwhile, ogling asses, Jesse presents a brief and quite clear outline of his thoughts regarding the King of the Universe J.C., which are as follows:
There is no earthly power which can convince Jesse in the existence of evolution. As hard as they try, godless scientists can never discover the missing link between man and ape - there is no talking monkey and that’s that. Faced with this fact, godless scientists come up with a fairy-tale talking monkey which never existed. Jesse, for one, prefers to believe in a fairy-tale dude like J.C. instead of the fairy-tale monkey of the evolutionists who will all burn in hell and the Devil will fuck them all, forever and ever, with his coarse crimson Cock.
In addition to the fact that evolution is bad, Jesus himself is great, because he teaches Jesse how to be a kind and compassionate human being - every single day.
In addition to being a cool dude, Jesus is also an intolerant, uncompromising one: everyone who leads a rock’n’roll life will certainly burn in hell, forever and ever, and there will be as little mercy for him as for those enemies of God, the fucking evolutionists. So, Jesse Hughes is aware that he’s going to hell after he dies, but “at least I’ll know why I’m there, damn it!”.
I am not sure that I need to comment on that. As a long-standing Christian, I am well aware that the thing with Jesus Christ is deeply and strictly personal for everyone of us.
My favorite city, no matter what
Everyone knows the facts about that summer - yet another attempt for a military coup against the Justice and Development Party and the cult party leader, only this time much more widely supported by the populace, because the coup attempt was not strictly Gülenist but rather simply secular and anti-Neo-Ottomanist. Millions of ordinary people had realized what they’d lost in the last few years and the fact that there wasn’t much else to lose, and they’d come out in force in the hot July Saturday night, to fight in the boulevards, the markets, the parks, the wharfs, the bridges, the streets and the squares of perhaps the most majestic city in human history. The whole city was lit, there was a very agreeable breeze coming in from the sea, hundreds of mosques broadcast echoing calls to this or that, thousands of cars sounded with music of great variety, millions of seagulls were overexcited as they circled and cried over the millions of people and, at least in the early hours of the night, the atmosphere was rather one of a bloodthirsty holiday than that of a tragedy.
Our plan was to find a hotel situated as closely as possible to the place where Jesse was about to be executed and then, more or less, improvise our next moves according to circumstances. Then again, getting a taxi and convincing the driver to take us twenty-five kilometers across a city boiling with a burgeoning military coup in addition to two separate versions of civil disobedience armed with metal pipes (respectively, supporting the coup and opposing it), plus several (more than five, according to some sources) military countercoups and one or two counter-countercoups (a considerable number of military personnel, originally uninitiated in the conspiracy, had joined the anti-government action independently, after they’d more or less seen what was unfolding on TV), was all but impossible.
Yes, there were taxis at Atatürk Airport, but their drivers were impenetrably engaged watching the news on their tiny TV sets and arguing with each other, very loudly and obviously about politics. Considering the whole country was visibly falling apart, it was a pleasant surprise to find a rental car service which was still operating. They didn’t have a car with GPS navigation or automatic transmission, however, so the designated driver for our rental Mitsubishi had to be none other than Beria Sellers - the only one of us schooled in the ancient art of stick-driving. On the way here, we had not managed to reach a consensus about informing the Turkish police (one of the most serious and effective in the world, when they felt like it) about the abduction of Jesse Hughes. Or rather, Josh and I had reached several different kinds of antithetical consensuses - from “We’re going straight to the cops - no way we’re fighting a terrorist cell of psychopaths on our own” to (Josh’s) “I only need to get my hands on a rifle and a box of ammo and we’re on, just show me the place.”
As for rifles, yes - there were quite a few of them on display everywhere in the city. There were all kinds of guns - from antique but still deadly enough Ottoman models to very contemporary ones. And many of them were used during that night, by the soldiers, police, gendarmerie, high school and university students, women and children of Istanbul. With the help of a greasy, much-used printed map we found in the glove compartment of the ancient Mitsubishi, we drove to the outskirts of the Fatih neighborhood. It took us almost all night to make our way there, as the shooting forced us to make a number of stops which we spent lying face down on the dirty asphalt smelling like cat piss, with the wind pushing empty newspaper cones in our faces still bearing the traces of the fried fish and other seafood which had been wrapped in them. I saw the bodies of gendarmerie officers, the bodies of police dogs, I saw the shot dead body of one of the most beautiful chestnut-haired women I’d seen alive in my life, I saw street lamps of all sorts, I saw banners and iPhones and machetes in bloodied hands and parrots and cats and mosques and armored vehicles and a burning helicopter brought down from the sky, I saw the Beşiktaş stadium and some other stadiums, I saw squares large and small, broken traffic lights, exquisite fountains and closed restaurants, mothers running holding infants, olive trees and palm trees and barricades built from dumpsters, I saw Dervish khanqahs torn apart by machine gun fire, I saw the wonderful gardens of Hurrem Sultan and the black, moonless night sky of all-wise God above — and around 5:20 am, on a deserted junction, while Joshua Homme and Beria Sellers and I were still deliberating whether to ask the Istanbul cops for assistance, we were summarily arrested by them.
Enter the next psychopaths
On the morning of the thirteenth day of our arrest, while I was still sleeping, dreaming about a lonely Gog forever lost in the whirlpools of his Magog, Captain Sinan Cinaroglu ordered his favorite rock star Josh Homme to be brought to his office for an extensive interview. As Cinaroglu himself noted at the beginning of the interview, chain-smoking and sitting on the window ledge with his feet dangling five stories over Turgut Özal boulevard roaring below, there was the distinct possibility that the countercoup forces were going to assume control over the whole Southern half of the European part of the city - the whole city region south of the Golden Horn was about to fall in enemy hands, including the Fatih neighborhood. Pro forma, just so he could be said to have done his job properly, it was about time for him to either have us shot dead (the usual practice in times of revolution, applied to any persons stupid enough to allow themselves to be arrested by the revolutionary authorities), or else let us go out on the streets where we were probably going to be shot dead by someone else. Since it had already been quite a few days in which the Revolutionary Tribunal could not find a suitable crime for us to be accused of, except of course being the wrong people at the wrong place and time, and since no connection could be established between us and the crimes of the late Beria Sellers, it looked like we were going to be set free before lunch time. And, while a harried Sergeant was looking for Josh’s personal effects, including his smartphone, so that he could have them back, Captain Cinaroglu was already filling him in on what happened to Jesse Hughes during our informational blackout, at least according to the news sources.
Without a word, the Turks brought my small backpack with my own personal effects, including my smartphone and the charger for it, in my cell about 8:30 am - as I had just sat down to use their toilet. I started to charge the phone and immediately went online. In typical Turkish style, not a single Turk made an appearance for the next two hours which I spent still locked in my cell. But I was left with the impression that something positive must have started to happen to my case somewhere up in the Turkish hierarchy, and I even shaved with the idea that I was doing it to make myself look a little more presentable instead of doing it so that I wouldn’t be shot dead and buried with a stubble. Except for shaving and plucking a few evil little hairs out from between my eyebrows, I spent the whole time furiously clicking and scrolling. Here’s what I learned:
Ten full days ago, one of the many skirmishes simultaneously going on in the city broke out in the northern part of Fatih neighborhood, the one close to the wharfs along the Golden Horn, in the deserted storage facilities of a non-functioning supermarket. Understandably, no one paid much attention to yet another shooting in a city engaged in several concurrent military coups and countercoups, especially in a deserted place with slow pedestrian traffic and almost no children playing outside. Let them shoot each other, it’s only going to make things wrap up sooner. The cause of the fracas, however, was in this case not political but rather purely religious. On the one hand of the improvised barricade were those amateurs - the nerds from “Fatih Illuminated”. Each one of them (a total of eight people, probably the whole personnel of the sect) ended up illuminated, in the middle of Fatih, by a bullet shot straight into his chest, abdomen or head by the Chechen snipers who had them in their crosshairs from four different positions on the rooftops of the nearby low-lying residential buildings, so that the poor “Fatih Illuminated” had absolutely zero chance of surviving and continuing their careers as brave psychopaths. Their prisoner, the American rock musician Jesse Hughes, was discovered by the Chechen to be unharmed, with his mouth gagged and his body wrapped in ritual black chains, as the nerds were totally going to sacrifice his life for real before the Chechen got them. There was no information whether Jesse Hughes made a comment to his liberators, the Chechen snipers, who were apparently not, technically, his liberators either, since they took him, probably against his wishes, to an ordinary van which they used to leave the city in the direction of Edirne and cross, unchallenged, first the state border between Turkey and Bulgaria and then the one between Bulgaria and Greece, before they drove South for nine hundred kilometers to reach the port of Piraeus, changed a few ferries and other land and air transport and finally, three days ago, delivered their captive in reasonably unharmed condition to the city of Riyadh, the capital of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to the people who had sent them in the first place - the organization “Al-Saah”, hitherto quite obscure for too many people in the West, and even in the East.
“Al-Saah” literally means “hour”, but in Arabic, it is not used to denote 1/24 of the day, but rather a very specific hour which will happen only once - the Last Hour, i.e. the Day of Judgment which will be the End of Days. To judge by the stuff I managed to read and watch in the approximately two hours preceding my release, it was an eschatological movement, a sect in Wahhabi Sunni Islam which, generally speaking, holds the opinion that the End of the World can be helped - that is, deliberately expedited by the true believers. The true believers have nothing to worry about - on Judgment Day, they will be resurrected, snapped up and whisked off to Heaven, all of which will be preceded by merry and particularly massive massacres of non-true believers. “Al-Saah” unites not just a few nerds - like the “Fatih Illimunated” who were effectively dismantled above - but rather numerous representatives of various strata of the Saudi population, including the oil aristocracy, the financial sector and the relatively educated male urban citizens, as well as distinguished ulema - scholars of the Quran and the Hadith. At some point, “Al-Saah” became something like a state within the state, gathering more and more followers on all levels of society, for example 100% of the Generals in the HQ of the Kingdom’s armed forces. We’re talking a secret society which does not keep its ultimate goal a secret - namely, the destruction of the whole world to bring about the Muslim Paradise for those who deserve it. Before he knew it, King Saud himself was surrounded by viziers and advisors carrying the badge of “The Hour” on the inside of their bedding sheet’s lapel, and found himself forced to consider their interests in everything he did. “Al-Saah” grabbed the Saud royal family by the balls, making it understood that they had no other chance to control the heat boiling under the seemingly calm Wahhabi surface of Saudi society. There will always be malcontents, Your Majesty, always and everywhere except in Paradise, so let’s just make our way there faster. Foreign intelligence agencies residing in Riyadh, including the US ones, in the spirit of their characteristic, slightly imbecilic pragmatism, came to the conclusion and reported to their governments that the cell/sect/society/party/movement “Al-Saah” is in effect the new significant factor in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the State Departments and various assorted responsible factors of the Great Powers, convinced that there’s no such thing as the End of the World and this was clearly yet another hustle to keep the desert population in blind obedience, ordered their intelligence agencies to maintain good working relationships with “our new sons of bitches over there”. Gather all the information we need to have peace and quiet and keep oil prices under control - what’s most important is to have something to keep in check those who happen to be the most important bedding sheets at the moment, i.e. the ones who are currently able to kick the asses of everyone else wearing bedding sheets over there.
Thus, by conducting the operation for kidnapping Jesse Hughes, it was the intention of “Al-Saah” to make its presence known to the whole world and act towards its (the world’s) impending destruction. How was it exactly that they planned to achieve the desired eschatological effect? Well, you already know how, you must remember the general facts of the matter - it was fairly recent and since then, the summer of 2016, there haven’t been so many other serious attempts to destroy the world, no more than five or so.
Yes, of course, there were ancient prophecies. There always are if you need them. The ancients have left us such an immense number of prophecies that there’s always been a few for every single idiot on earth who decides to be inspired by them. By the way, I’ve never read a decent enough translation of the few particular Hadith which the spiritual leaders of “Al-Saah” interpreted to reach the definitive conclusion that the musician Jesse Everett Hughes of the Eagles of Death Metal is none other that the Quranic Jesus - Isa, son of Maryam. True, Jesse’s mother’s second name is in fact Mary, as well as his father’s second name is Joseph. The Hadith in question do mention Isa’s, may He rest in peace, red hair and beard, as well as the fact that before the Hour strikes, Isa’s current companion in life will bear the rather strange name Tuesday Cross. There are also a few other signs which, if one is determined and creative enough, could be interpreted as proof of the identity between Isa and Jesse. There’s also an online recording of a specific radio show which must have been instrumental - one in which the Reverend Jesse, in his capacity of a minister of the Universal Life Church, sounding considerably high and ecstatically Protestant, bellows out seemingly incoherent sentences which, in fact, quote specific passages of the prophetic Hadith in question, almost verbatim.
In general, I don’t know how it is that “Al-Saah” decided that Jesse is God and why. Despite the resulting deluge of negative comments in the Muslim world, including charges of total idiocy leveled at “Al-Saah” by distinguished Islamic thinkers and scholars of the Quran and the Hadith, I for one don’t think that there’s something extraordinarily unusual or illogical in their decision to pronounce Jesse as the Quranic Jesus - that is, I don’t think it’s more illogical than the decision of “Fatih Illuminated” to sacrifice him in execution of a mysterious supreme ordinance, nor do I think that the idea of “Al-Saah” is more idiotic than the idea of the Wahhabi cell of Molenbeek to kill ninety of his fans during his concert, cutting off the penises of some of them and stuffing them in their mouths in the process. If you ask me, it’s only that certain psychopaths simply inspire others, they inspire the next ones in turn and that’s that - there’s nothing to marvel at, since we accepted the behavior of the initial psychopaths as something normal in the first place - which made us psychopaths as well, so that every psychopath afterwards simply becomes a part of us; one of us.
A few days later, my theory about the acceptance of psychopathic behavior was largely validated by the appearance of the next generation of psychopaths - the Shia psychopaths who were in turn inspired by “Al-Saah”. But let’s not get ahead of the story, we’re still on the subject of “Al-Saah”.
Palm Desert
In addition to many other things, Josh Homme is also the author of Jesse Hughes’ high school nickname - the Devil. Here’s how it happened. As much as he tried to save his buddy from getting his ass kicked, Josh couldn’t be with him everywhere and at all times, and so Jesse, who must have been a truly annoying little son of a bitch, still got his ass kicked every now and then, while Josh was engaged elsewhere (at a dentist appointment; with a tattooed bimbo wearing braces on her teeth in the back seat of a battered Chevy parked behind the school; in geometry class). More or less half the school waited for Josh Homme to turn his back on his fucking protege in order to jump him and merrily kick his little ass. In addition to being very annoying, however, Jesse Hughes was extremely vindictive. One way or another, he always managed to wreak payback on his tormentors. On one such occasion, witnessing the mean and inspired revenge which Jesse brought on one of his enemies (I can only guess but I imagine that the revenge incorporated at least the involuntary consumption of feces skillfully camouflaged by mixing into a specific portion of stew in the school cafeteria, to be eaten by the enemy), Baby Duck raised an eyebrow and, with a mix of irony and awe, said to Jesse, “You’re a horrible little evil son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
Jesse was thrilled to hear it. “I am, right?” he said proudly. “I am!”
“Oh, yeah. You’re the Devil in the flesh!”
So he started calling him the Devil. Jesse Hughes is still proudly using his diabolical nickname to this day. Yes, there are certain people who find it particularly original and timeless to be called the Devil, no matter how old they get. We can’t be all as deep as the sea. One couldn’t live for thirty minutes in a world where we’re all as deep as the sea.
So yeah, Jesse is a huge fan of the devil, he doesn’t mind kissing the devil on his tongue and truly considers this to be extremely cool and original - it’s as if we’re still in the 20th century and death metal is the cutting edge of cultural fashion. Jesse Hughes likes the devil and likes people thinking of him as a devil. How does Jesse unite his desire to be the Devil himself with the fact that he is a devoted believer in Christ? Well, he doesn’t - and why should he? One only has an inner conflict if one has an inner conflict. If one doesn’t, one doesn’t, and everything inside him is just fine and dandy. We can’t all be seas and oceans on this planet - there would be no dry spot left to sit down and have a smoke.
Yes, Jesse was brought up as a good conservative Catholic - against the background of the Protestant faith of his home South - and any understanding of his character is impossible without taking into account those two interwoven facts: one, that he has wanted to lick Satan’s tongue for as long as he can remember, and two, that for all his life, he has loved with all his heart his King and Savior J.C.
I’ve seen - I can’t recall where and when - an interview Jesse gave in the lobby of what looked like an Italian hotel. The journalist asks him about his thoughts on J.C. On hearing that specific question, Jesse - always ready for a fun joke - pretends to be extremely hot for two rotund middle-aged ladies who happen to pass by through the lobby, nodding to them in courteous and mocking greeting, saying hello and then turning his head to follow their receding fat asses with his eyes, as if he’s never seen anything like them. The first time he does it, it looks disarmingly foolish. Then Jesse does it three more times during the same interview, with the same imbecilic effort, and each time he looks just as pleased by his own devilish creativity. Meanwhile, ogling asses, Jesse presents a brief and quite clear outline of his thoughts regarding the King of the Universe J.C., which are as follows:
There is no earthly power which can convince Jesse in the existence of evolution. As hard as they try, godless scientists can never discover the missing link between man and ape - there is no talking monkey and that’s that. Faced with this fact, godless scientists come up with a fairy-tale talking monkey which never existed. Jesse, for one, prefers to believe in a fairy-tale dude like J.C. instead of the fairy-tale monkey of the evolutionists who will all burn in hell and the Devil will fuck them all, forever and ever, with his coarse crimson Cock.
In addition to the fact that evolution is bad, Jesus himself is great, because he teaches Jesse how to be a kind and compassionate human being - every single day.
In addition to being a cool dude, Jesus is also an intolerant, uncompromising one: everyone who leads a rock’n’roll life will certainly burn in hell, forever and ever, and there will be as little mercy for him as for those enemies of God, the fucking evolutionists. So, Jesse Hughes is aware that he’s going to hell after he dies, but “at least I’ll know why I’m there, damn it!”.
I am not sure that I need to comment on that. As a long-standing Christian, I am well aware that the thing with Jesus Christ is deeply and strictly personal for everyone of us.
My favorite city, no matter what
Everyone knows the facts about that summer - yet another attempt for a military coup against the Justice and Development Party and the cult party leader, only this time much more widely supported by the populace, because the coup attempt was not strictly Gülenist but rather simply secular and anti-Neo-Ottomanist. Millions of ordinary people had realized what they’d lost in the last few years and the fact that there wasn’t much else to lose, and they’d come out in force in the hot July Saturday night, to fight in the boulevards, the markets, the parks, the wharfs, the bridges, the streets and the squares of perhaps the most majestic city in human history. The whole city was lit, there was a very agreeable breeze coming in from the sea, hundreds of mosques broadcast echoing calls to this or that, thousands of cars sounded with music of great variety, millions of seagulls were overexcited as they circled and cried over the millions of people and, at least in the early hours of the night, the atmosphere was rather one of a bloodthirsty holiday than that of a tragedy.
Our plan was to find a hotel situated as closely as possible to the place where Jesse was about to be executed and then, more or less, improvise our next moves according to circumstances. Then again, getting a taxi and convincing the driver to take us twenty-five kilometers across a city boiling with a burgeoning military coup in addition to two separate versions of civil disobedience armed with metal pipes (respectively, supporting the coup and opposing it), plus several (more than five, according to some sources) military countercoups and one or two counter-countercoups (a considerable number of military personnel, originally uninitiated in the conspiracy, had joined the anti-government action independently, after they’d more or less seen what was unfolding on TV), was all but impossible.
Yes, there were taxis at Atatürk Airport, but their drivers were impenetrably engaged watching the news on their tiny TV sets and arguing with each other, very loudly and obviously about politics. Considering the whole country was visibly falling apart, it was a pleasant surprise to find a rental car service which was still operating. They didn’t have a car with GPS navigation or automatic transmission, however, so the designated driver for our rental Mitsubishi had to be none other than Beria Sellers - the only one of us schooled in the ancient art of stick-driving. On the way here, we had not managed to reach a consensus about informing the Turkish police (one of the most serious and effective in the world, when they felt like it) about the abduction of Jesse Hughes. Or rather, Josh and I had reached several different kinds of antithetical consensuses - from “We’re going straight to the cops - no way we’re fighting a terrorist cell of psychopaths on our own” to (Josh’s) “I only need to get my hands on a rifle and a box of ammo and we’re on, just show me the place.”
As for rifles, yes - there were quite a few of them on display everywhere in the city. There were all kinds of guns - from antique but still deadly enough Ottoman models to very contemporary ones. And many of them were used during that night, by the soldiers, police, gendarmerie, high school and university students, women and children of Istanbul. With the help of a greasy, much-used printed map we found in the glove compartment of the ancient Mitsubishi, we drove to the outskirts of the Fatih neighborhood. It took us almost all night to make our way there, as the shooting forced us to make a number of stops which we spent lying face down on the dirty asphalt smelling like cat piss, with the wind pushing empty newspaper cones in our faces still bearing the traces of the fried fish and other seafood which had been wrapped in them. I saw the bodies of gendarmerie officers, the bodies of police dogs, I saw the shot dead body of one of the most beautiful chestnut-haired women I’d seen alive in my life, I saw street lamps of all sorts, I saw banners and iPhones and machetes in bloodied hands and parrots and cats and mosques and armored vehicles and a burning helicopter brought down from the sky, I saw the Beşiktaş stadium and some other stadiums, I saw squares large and small, broken traffic lights, exquisite fountains and closed restaurants, mothers running holding infants, olive trees and palm trees and barricades built from dumpsters, I saw Dervish khanqahs torn apart by machine gun fire, I saw the wonderful gardens of Hurrem Sultan and the black, moonless night sky of all-wise God above — and around 5:20 am, on a deserted junction, while Joshua Homme and Beria Sellers and I were still deliberating whether to ask the Istanbul cops for assistance, we were summarily arrested by them.
Enter the next psychopaths
On the morning of the thirteenth day of our arrest, while I was still sleeping, dreaming about a lonely Gog forever lost in the whirlpools of his Magog, Captain Sinan Cinaroglu ordered his favorite rock star Josh Homme to be brought to his office for an extensive interview. As Cinaroglu himself noted at the beginning of the interview, chain-smoking and sitting on the window ledge with his feet dangling five stories over Turgut Özal boulevard roaring below, there was the distinct possibility that the countercoup forces were going to assume control over the whole Southern half of the European part of the city - the whole city region south of the Golden Horn was about to fall in enemy hands, including the Fatih neighborhood. Pro forma, just so he could be said to have done his job properly, it was about time for him to either have us shot dead (the usual practice in times of revolution, applied to any persons stupid enough to allow themselves to be arrested by the revolutionary authorities), or else let us go out on the streets where we were probably going to be shot dead by someone else. Since it had already been quite a few days in which the Revolutionary Tribunal could not find a suitable crime for us to be accused of, except of course being the wrong people at the wrong place and time, and since no connection could be established between us and the crimes of the late Beria Sellers, it looked like we were going to be set free before lunch time. And, while a harried Sergeant was looking for Josh’s personal effects, including his smartphone, so that he could have them back, Captain Cinaroglu was already filling him in on what happened to Jesse Hughes during our informational blackout, at least according to the news sources.
Without a word, the Turks brought my small backpack with my own personal effects, including my smartphone and the charger for it, in my cell about 8:30 am - as I had just sat down to use their toilet. I started to charge the phone and immediately went online. In typical Turkish style, not a single Turk made an appearance for the next two hours which I spent still locked in my cell. But I was left with the impression that something positive must have started to happen to my case somewhere up in the Turkish hierarchy, and I even shaved with the idea that I was doing it to make myself look a little more presentable instead of doing it so that I wouldn’t be shot dead and buried with a stubble. Except for shaving and plucking a few evil little hairs out from between my eyebrows, I spent the whole time furiously clicking and scrolling. Here’s what I learned:
Ten full days ago, one of the many skirmishes simultaneously going on in the city broke out in the northern part of Fatih neighborhood, the one close to the wharfs along the Golden Horn, in the deserted storage facilities of a non-functioning supermarket. Understandably, no one paid much attention to yet another shooting in a city engaged in several concurrent military coups and countercoups, especially in a deserted place with slow pedestrian traffic and almost no children playing outside. Let them shoot each other, it’s only going to make things wrap up sooner. The cause of the fracas, however, was in this case not political but rather purely religious. On the one hand of the improvised barricade were those amateurs - the nerds from “Fatih Illuminated”. Each one of them (a total of eight people, probably the whole personnel of the sect) ended up illuminated, in the middle of Fatih, by a bullet shot straight into his chest, abdomen or head by the Chechen snipers who had them in their crosshairs from four different positions on the rooftops of the nearby low-lying residential buildings, so that the poor “Fatih Illuminated” had absolutely zero chance of surviving and continuing their careers as brave psychopaths. Their prisoner, the American rock musician Jesse Hughes, was discovered by the Chechen to be unharmed, with his mouth gagged and his body wrapped in ritual black chains, as the nerds were totally going to sacrifice his life for real before the Chechen got them. There was no information whether Jesse Hughes made a comment to his liberators, the Chechen snipers, who were apparently not, technically, his liberators either, since they took him, probably against his wishes, to an ordinary van which they used to leave the city in the direction of Edirne and cross, unchallenged, first the state border between Turkey and Bulgaria and then the one between Bulgaria and Greece, before they drove South for nine hundred kilometers to reach the port of Piraeus, changed a few ferries and other land and air transport and finally, three days ago, delivered their captive in reasonably unharmed condition to the city of Riyadh, the capital of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to the people who had sent them in the first place - the organization “Al-Saah”, hitherto quite obscure for too many people in the West, and even in the East.
“Al-Saah” literally means “hour”, but in Arabic, it is not used to denote 1/24 of the day, but rather a very specific hour which will happen only once - the Last Hour, i.e. the Day of Judgment which will be the End of Days. To judge by the stuff I managed to read and watch in the approximately two hours preceding my release, it was an eschatological movement, a sect in Wahhabi Sunni Islam which, generally speaking, holds the opinion that the End of the World can be helped - that is, deliberately expedited by the true believers. The true believers have nothing to worry about - on Judgment Day, they will be resurrected, snapped up and whisked off to Heaven, all of which will be preceded by merry and particularly massive massacres of non-true believers. “Al-Saah” unites not just a few nerds - like the “Fatih Illimunated” who were effectively dismantled above - but rather numerous representatives of various strata of the Saudi population, including the oil aristocracy, the financial sector and the relatively educated male urban citizens, as well as distinguished ulema - scholars of the Quran and the Hadith. At some point, “Al-Saah” became something like a state within the state, gathering more and more followers on all levels of society, for example 100% of the Generals in the HQ of the Kingdom’s armed forces. We’re talking a secret society which does not keep its ultimate goal a secret - namely, the destruction of the whole world to bring about the Muslim Paradise for those who deserve it. Before he knew it, King Saud himself was surrounded by viziers and advisors carrying the badge of “The Hour” on the inside of their bedding sheet’s lapel, and found himself forced to consider their interests in everything he did. “Al-Saah” grabbed the Saud royal family by the balls, making it understood that they had no other chance to control the heat boiling under the seemingly calm Wahhabi surface of Saudi society. There will always be malcontents, Your Majesty, always and everywhere except in Paradise, so let’s just make our way there faster. Foreign intelligence agencies residing in Riyadh, including the US ones, in the spirit of their characteristic, slightly imbecilic pragmatism, came to the conclusion and reported to their governments that the cell/sect/society/party/movement “Al-Saah” is in effect the new significant factor in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the State Departments and various assorted responsible factors of the Great Powers, convinced that there’s no such thing as the End of the World and this was clearly yet another hustle to keep the desert population in blind obedience, ordered their intelligence agencies to maintain good working relationships with “our new sons of bitches over there”. Gather all the information we need to have peace and quiet and keep oil prices under control - what’s most important is to have something to keep in check those who happen to be the most important bedding sheets at the moment, i.e. the ones who are currently able to kick the asses of everyone else wearing bedding sheets over there.
Thus, by conducting the operation for kidnapping Jesse Hughes, it was the intention of “Al-Saah” to make its presence known to the whole world and act towards its (the world’s) impending destruction. How was it exactly that they planned to achieve the desired eschatological effect? Well, you already know how, you must remember the general facts of the matter - it was fairly recent and since then, the summer of 2016, there haven’t been so many other serious attempts to destroy the world, no more than five or so.
Yes, of course, there were ancient prophecies. There always are if you need them. The ancients have left us such an immense number of prophecies that there’s always been a few for every single idiot on earth who decides to be inspired by them. By the way, I’ve never read a decent enough translation of the few particular Hadith which the spiritual leaders of “Al-Saah” interpreted to reach the definitive conclusion that the musician Jesse Everett Hughes of the Eagles of Death Metal is none other that the Quranic Jesus - Isa, son of Maryam. True, Jesse’s mother’s second name is in fact Mary, as well as his father’s second name is Joseph. The Hadith in question do mention Isa’s, may He rest in peace, red hair and beard, as well as the fact that before the Hour strikes, Isa’s current companion in life will bear the rather strange name Tuesday Cross. There are also a few other signs which, if one is determined and creative enough, could be interpreted as proof of the identity between Isa and Jesse. There’s also an online recording of a specific radio show which must have been instrumental - one in which the Reverend Jesse, in his capacity of a minister of the Universal Life Church, sounding considerably high and ecstatically Protestant, bellows out seemingly incoherent sentences which, in fact, quote specific passages of the prophetic Hadith in question, almost verbatim.
In general, I don’t know how it is that “Al-Saah” decided that Jesse is God and why. Despite the resulting deluge of negative comments in the Muslim world, including charges of total idiocy leveled at “Al-Saah” by distinguished Islamic thinkers and scholars of the Quran and the Hadith, I for one don’t think that there’s something extraordinarily unusual or illogical in their decision to pronounce Jesse as the Quranic Jesus - that is, I don’t think it’s more illogical than the decision of “Fatih Illuminated” to sacrifice him in execution of a mysterious supreme ordinance, nor do I think that the idea of “Al-Saah” is more idiotic than the idea of the Wahhabi cell of Molenbeek to kill ninety of his fans during his concert, cutting off the penises of some of them and stuffing them in their mouths in the process. If you ask me, it’s only that certain psychopaths simply inspire others, they inspire the next ones in turn and that’s that - there’s nothing to marvel at, since we accepted the behavior of the initial psychopaths as something normal in the first place - which made us psychopaths as well, so that every psychopath afterwards simply becomes a part of us; one of us.
A few days later, my theory about the acceptance of psychopathic behavior was largely validated by the appearance of the next generation of psychopaths - the Shia psychopaths who were in turn inspired by “Al-Saah”. But let’s not get ahead of the story, we’re still on the subject of “Al-Saah”.