It is 2023, and every day I wake to a pundit or member of Congress calling for civil war—or its euphemistic parlance, a “national divorce.” They cloak their ambition as civic concern, but I know the real plot. They want to strip the United States down and sell it for parts, partitioning it into oligarch and plutocrat fiefdoms that will war with each other for profit, and they want ordinary Americans to think it was their own idea.
I know this is the plot because the plotters have told us and because I have spent years detailing their agenda in books and articles. I am not alone: hundreds have written books and documents revealing other facets of coordinated malign intent. Despite the undisputed veracity of the threat, no officials have acted to stop it, and the media will rarely spell out their vision of the Divided States of America.
I do not think we, the American people, want another civil war. But I know we are being pushed there, and I refuse to go.
To be an American in the twenty-first century is to be viewed by officials as disposable. This is not a new feeling for the majority of Americans who have lived under various forms of subjugation—racial, ethnic, class—but what is new is how wide the net has been cast and how overt the agenda is.
Our current era—when American institutions greet their own dissolution with a shrug, when rights and resources are tossed away as if the collapse of the country is not only inevitable but desirable—has no precedent. Throw in digital surveillance and climate change and there is no clear road map out of an old war fought with new technology under a relentlessly ticking clock. Lincoln warned in 1838 that if the United States of America died, it would be by its own hand. But what we have is more like assisted suicide.
It is easy to love your homeland and hate your government. I have done it all my life and consider myself in the company of patriots. But there is a pain in loving a place that is so terrible and wonderful at once. You love it like a child and you love it like a parent, with an irrational depth and the fiercest desire to protect it from harm. You mourn the lost leverage of the ordinary American—of elections, of courts, of protest, of documentation. You remember when those things seemed to matter, or at least when the powerful felt obligated to pretend they did.
When a calamity hits, I research what past writers were doing when they faced the same hardships. What I find is that they spent most of their time surviving—thus the dearth of literature about the Spanish flu—but the pain haunts their subsequent work. This is most obvious in books written after a war, even when they do not cover the war itself. The Great Gatsby is just as much a World War I novel as A Farewell to Arms. In art a person can process the dark emotions society forbids them to express. This is why power brokers want to replace artists with artificial intelligence. There must be no lingering memory of what was because that might remind us of what we thought we would be. There can be no intrinsic humanity in art because then you start seeing people instead of mythic red and blue lines. You start tracking the blood, like Lincoln wanted. You start feeling for the people who bleed.
The Civil War haunts Mark Twain’s work even though he rarely addressed it outright. Twain grew up in an America of rapid growth and political instability. He entered early adulthood when America was at war and spent the rest of his life watching an American aristocracy sell the public an illusion as they undid the progress toward equality made in the war’s aftermath. Twain was born in a state that was neither north nor south, a state everyone wanted so badly they kept assaulting it. His solution in 1861 was to flee the fire and immortalize the flames. Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn. Sam Clemens, Mark Twain.
Dreams by day, repentance by night. You preemptively tear yourself apart so that the people who want to do that to you and to your country cannot do it first.
And then you piece yourself back together in prose because there is nothing left to be but an American. There is nowhere else to belong than to a colossal contradictory land whose sins persist to the present, whose potential is unlimited, whose threatened dissolution taunts you. A land built on principles never fully practiced, a land whose new tenets—the mainstreaming of elite criminal impunity, the contrived and bloodthirsty “national divorce”—build off the worst of this country’s history to create a future of unprecedented danger. You reject it and also know that abandoning America is the most self-destructive move of all. Where would you be without each other, you and this terrible, wonderful country?
