February 2045
I took longer than some people to start calling it the war. And by some people, I mainly mean my husband, Asher. “This is it, Natalie,” he said to me that first Friday, back in June 2036, after watching the news coverage from Oklahoma City for three hours straight. siege: more than 300 killed and 400 wounded in terrorist military attacks, the headlines read. “It’s started. The civil war.”
He claims I rolled my eyes. I don’t think I did. “Well,” I said, “these idiots in Oklahoma obviously want us to think that’s what it is.”
Ever since I met Ash, in 2021, he has both dreaded and expected this or that political nightmare just around the corner, some other ghastly shoe always about to drop. Occasionally, one did. To me, his sincere alarm often seemed mixed with a doomer’s touch of anticipatory relish. And he always thought I was too disengaged from politics, sometimes guilty of “willful obliviousness” and “toxic positivity,” generally “in denial” about the inevitable American apocalypse, the end, the horror, the horror.
Even now, seven years after the insurgency ended, he says I’m too quick to move on. “You know people are still getting killed, right?” he asked during a call last November, on our first Thanksgiving apart in 23 years. I replied that people are also still dying from Nipah and COVID but that not even most of his fellow San Franciscans wear a mask.
During that summer of the first attacks, I referred to the violence a few times as the hillbilly intifada. I meant it ironically, disparagingly, but Ash didn’t approve of comparing the Plains Patriot Militia to Palestinian terrorists. I referred more earnestly to the early bombings and shootings as the Troubles. It seemed right to me, because I thought the militia attacks might turn out to be like the decades of organized violence in Northern Ireland, continuing sporadically for years and years. Ash objected to that one too. “You like it,” he said, “because it doesn’t take a side. And you’re a twee Anglophile even when it comes to these gangs of mass-murdering fascists right here, right now.”
“Keep calm and carry on,” I replied. “Although in this instance? Actually more Hibernophile?” Writing down and reading this touché of mine now, I am reminded how comments like that can be annoying in a marriage, as opposed to a movie or a show or a novel.
Calling the mass shootings and bombings and assassinations and kidnappings and disappearances a rebellion or an insurgency or an uprising, Ash said when they started, unless modified by Christian-fascist or white-nationalist or neo-Nazi, “just romanticizes these psychos and their ‘anti-tyranny’ delusions.” In another conversation that first summer, he referred to them as “your psycho friends,” which prompted a big fight. “My friends” because I grew up in Tennessee.
It was a war, and wars are ghastly. Things fell apart. Anarchy and a blood-dimmed tide were loosed upon our world for a while. Twenty-eight thousand Americans were killed, half of them innocent civilians, and another 45,000 wounded. But it was a brief, manageable war as wars go, 18 months long. Altogether not much compared with longer and/or ghastlier wars, like the U.S. versus Iraq or Ukraine versus Russia or Israel versus Palestine or Iran versus Israel.
I couldn’t bear the people who immediately, eagerly started referring to it as Civil War II––or, worse, Civil War 2, as if it were a game. If what we’d put ourselves through had really been equivalent to what our American great-great-great-great-great-grandparents put themselves through in the 1860s, a hundred times as many of us would’ve fought and maybe 10 million of us would’ve died.
On the other hand, Ash said to me a year ago: “So you’re happy to call the big one that didn’t succeed a civil war, but not this smaller one that did?” Fair enough, professor. I finally ended my semantic resistance. Okay, I told Ash, if history repeated and this counts as our second civil war, the first one was tragedy and this one is farce plus tragedy. But my favorite remains the term Walt Whitman used for the first one, the War of Secession.
God knows the past decade has been painful. Crushingly. It’s a lot. It’s the most. And I expect the sadness to linger for the rest of my life. But we don’t all now inhabit some Mad Max or The Blazes or The Last of Us hellscape, do we? To quote a catchphrase of my father’s, who lived through the Cuban Revolution: “Podría ser peor,” and occasionally “Pudo haber sido mucho peor.” Could be worse. Could’ve been lots worse. So annoying to me when I was a kid unhappy about something, yet so often seems so true now.
I’m a writer, fussy about words. I’ve always thought way too many things are “tragedies” in America, mainly as a result of media hacks defaulting to that cliché every time they possibly can—robo-empathy, I called it before AI newscasters became a real thing. Life is half tragedy, for Christ’s sake, maybe more than half, which is one of the reasons I grade almost everything on a curve. And don’t we all, really? If we didn’t, we’d come undone contemplating the numberless tragedies, one occurring every instant in some life somewhere.
The violence was horrible, a nonstop psycho-stravaganza filled with daily terrors and tragedies that made me cry often. I still think of the random towns such as Inkster, Michigan, and Chuichu, Arizona, that nobody had ever heard of until their name became an overnight synonym for mass death or another horror. Until a week or two afterward, when some unfortunate new nowhere became suddenly infamous.
Come to think of it, that happened 180 years ago, when little towns such as Chickamauga and Spotsylvania Courthouse got famous overnight. For decades after that civil war, Americans were familiar with those battlefield names. But have you heard of them, let alone do you know where they are? (Not far from where I grew up and not far from where I went to college, respectively.) You’re reading this, so you probably do know what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki a hundred Augusts ago, but the other day, I saw a poll that found that more than half of Americans have no idea.
My point is that almost everything’s got a half-life, and surely you sense the half-life of our own recent trauma. Yes, cutting up the country still feels weird, and probably always will. But it’s 2045, and the acute, constant fear is gone. The pain is fading. Easy for me to say; the violence barely touched me. Nobody I loved was killed. That’s not counting a very close friend of Asher’s. Or two of my childhood friends and a cousin I met once. And the ex-husband of a college friend murdered in federal prison while serving time for the Fort Lewis attack of 2037, the cockamamie military-prison-breakout scheme in the state of Washington that involved a homemade 10-man submarine painted to resemble a penis.
But beyond the individual tragedies endured by individual Americans, I sincerely wonder: In the fairly near future, how great of a tragedy will most people consider the whole thing? In 25 or 30 years, when our children are our age, will it seem to them like such a big deal? Or to their hypothetical children?
I kind of doubt it. Given the way things are playing out. An improbable plan for “Disunion” was improbably agreed to, then supported by a large majority of us—large majorities, I should say, on both sides—and negotiated and renegotiated over the past seven years. Messily, fitfully, ruefully, exhaustively, meticulously, more peacefully than not. And now very nearly complete.
When he was president, Andrew Im loved saying “win-win” and “win-win-win” and “everyone wins” about almost everything, including Disunion. In my opinion, everyone lost. But everyone who calls themselves American, from sea to sea and border to border, is still using the same air-traffic-control and interstate-highway systems, eating the same Mega Macs and GimmeChimichangas, sharing intimacies with the same digital phantoms, and about to spend a Sunday all watching Super Bowl LXXVII. Kumbaya. And the U.S. stock market’s now back up to where it was before the war, higher, even. Plus ça change.
The people who negotiated the details agreed long ago, for tedious reasons involving fiscal years, that Disunion Day would fall on the 30th of June. Which turned out to mean that last year’s Independence Day weekend, from Thursday the 30th to Monday the Fourth of July, was also the beginning of the new era, the United States of America and the Free American Republic independent of each other. (I’m more of a Christian than not, Catholic, and I was pleased that, in the end, the FAR didn’t go with any of the Christian or Christian-y names under consideration, such as American Dominion and the Christian Republic of America. Apparently what eliminated the latter was its similarity to the Islamic Republics of Iran, Pakistan, and Mauritania.)
Such a perfectly strange, sad, can’t-make-it-up punctuation to our last couple of decades, our last 269 years. Asher’s Aunt Lizzie, whom I’d love to be at 85, says Disunion weekend struck her as “a trippy minor-key reboot of the bicentennial,” the Fourth of July in 1976, on which, she told us, she lost her virginity at Disneyland as the fireworks went off, backstage at a concert by a fictional-but-real band called the Monkees. “Of course,” she added, “the fireworks go off every night in Disneyland and Disney World, don’t they?”
Back in the 2010s and early ’20s, when I was in school, I thought that if some people could slake some of their fear and anger and unhappiness and confusion by rage-baiting and name-calling online, or getting off on Trump’s live performances, fine—go crazy. I thought it was like how porn and violent games are safety valves that keep some unhappy men from becoming rapists and killers. I figured that one point of a culture war was to avoid having an actual shooting war. In the early ’20s at Brown, where I got my MFA and Ash had his first teaching job, I said too publicly, after protesters splashed paint on an Israeli novelist giving a talk, that I was “grateful our activists are only paintball Red Guards,” that unlike the student revolutionaries in China in the ’60s, “they aren’t actually whipping and beheading the intellectuals.”
About politics, I’ve never been full of passionate intensity. But on the other hand, I don’t lack all conviction. I just don’t have much appetite for political arguments, especially about words and symbols. I’ve spent hours a day for half my life thinking about language, fiddling and trying to cobble something good with it. I never liked the unending politicized shouting matches about the meaning of this or that word or phrase among people who otherwise don’t give a fuck about language.
My father-in-law used to refer to Ash’s and my “civil-war shtick,” the two of us arguing about whether one was coming. The first time I stayed overnight at Ash’s apartment in Providence, in early 2022, I saw a government pamphlet called U.S. Violent Extremist Mobilization Indicators. The following year, when we were having dinner with the about-to-be-famous war correspondent Nicole Stokes, Ash’s ex-girlfriend, he was upset about one of those first-wave right-wing carnival-freak Washington rabble-rousers saying America needed to get a “national divorce,” red states separating from blue. I said to Ash what I always said: “Sweetie? Resist the bait.”
And his heroine Nicole agreed with me! She told us the intelligence community’s secret probability score for a U.S. civil war was at the lowest of the five levels between Impossible and Certainty: Almost Certainly Not, somewhere between a 2 and a 12 percent chance. I said the fear and rage among the people I grew up with in the South about library books and drag performers and trans swimmers and the latest elite mots justes back then (cis, Latinx, they instead of he or she) “were just not hills people by the thousands are going to literally die on.” I repeated versions of that for years.
During 2036, of course, I stopped being so la-di-da and dismissive. Asher and I could stop arguing about whether it would ever happen, and he could have the greatest told-you-so moment ever. I realize now I had indeed been in denial since I was a teenager wishing and sometimes praying it away. Because I so badly wanted the crazy experiment of the United States of America to continue defying the odds, as always.
Now I’m just trying to train myself to experience other people and the world more as I did when I was young. I don’t mean in a childlike way, recovering my innocence or rediscovering my inner girl or any of that. What I mean is how Americans thought of one another until the last 30 years. I’ve always resisted living life electronically, getting mesmerized by screens and software voices. And I really no longer want to be forced to think of everything as a political thing and everyone as a political actor.
Obsessive political thinking is like a tic that went horribly viral in the 2010s, a kind of sociopolitical Tourette syndrome. Right before the deadliest viral pandemic in a century, which made the problems of 24/7 digital everything even worse. But instead of lasting a couple of years, this politics illness became a chronic condition.
Maybe that’s too metaphorical. But it is a terrible habit, and breaking any bad habit is hard. Such as overeating, which was the bad habit Americans adopted right after weaning themselves off cigarettes and before taking up all the unhealthy bad habits enabled by social media and AI. Next time I talk with Ash, I should ask if he’s proud of me for having a thought that could pass for leftish. But you forgot to include Big Pharma and the gun industry, he’ll say, and probably mention the guns I own, and we’d be at it again.
You see? It’s a tough habit to break. Asher says he agrees and that he’s working on it too. He calls it an addiction, a rare figurative use of the word I don’t mind. Although “co-enabling and co-dependent rage addicts,” as he once said of us, was a bit much. But also dark and glamorous, like we’re Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Part of my rehab practice is reminding myself of arguments we had over the years that had no political content, the ones that became Things We Can All Laugh About Now.
The respite from political talk is no doubt a reason I’ve stayed here in Tennessee instead of moving to San Francisco with Ash. If politicized thinking soured too much of our life, if it became an addiction, then I’m out here for the same reason recovering addicts remove themselves from easy access to drugs and booze and their intimates who use. I hate to admit it, but I’ve found that when I talk with a moving picture of my husband on a screen, I’m much better able to control my impulses to carp and roll my eyes and snort and make political jokes at his expense and get into dumb, unnecessary fights. Even though escaping technomania is a reason I’m here too.
My biggest regret has been missing out on all these months of our daughter, Logan, who decided to live with her father. Of course, I’ve told myself, my day-to-day helicoptering utility to a 17-year-old is delimited and diminishing. Which is a lame rationalization. I know one of my main emotions from now on will be missing my children; it occurred to me that returning here may be a self-punishing head start on that with Logan, some sick parental version of breaking up with people before they dump you.
Anyhow, what I said earlier about the half-life of the war’s traumas is true. But what to me feels even better is the fading of what preceded it—the compulsive politicization of everything, the fear and hatred of the Other Side as an animating, irresistible everyday emotion. The active contempt has become less salient, diminished, including in rural Middle Tennessee. “I don’t disagree about the vibe shift, honey,” says my local best friend, Victoria, who grew up around here and lives 15 minutes away. “But isn’t it also true for you right now because you don’t have Asher around to bicker with so much?”
At first I found the term Disunion too clinical and wonky. But it is more correctly mutual than secession. And has some history, dignity, a touch of grandeur. I’m a fan of all of those. But I call it the breakup. It’s a little glib, but simple, factual, neutral, idiomatic, and broad enough to cover the whole era, beginning to end. It’s also a universally familiar concept, unlike Disunion. It’s relatable. Americans have been strange bedfellows in a mixed marriage for a long time. We grew apart. We stayed together, but finally came to find each other impossible. We fought. We had irreconcilable differences. We split. In a world where half the marriages unravel or rot or die of thirst or blow up. Or do whatever mine is doing.
A clichéd question about America since I was a kid concerned our national political “fever,” if and when it would ever break. The fever broke. Along with our beautiful, uncomfortable, brittle, breakable antique national governing arrangements, now being rebuilt and refurbished.
It could be worse.
This story is adapted from Kurt Andersen’s The Breakup: A Novel.
The post Disunion appeared first on The Atlantic.
