Holiday Greetings From Splitsville or Thereabouts
The Not-That-New-Anymore Newsletter for Readers of The Split
Let’s imagine that we, the authors of The Split, could time-travel back 25 years to 1999, find a room and a couple of computers, and write a factually-correct account of the ascent of Donald Trump—yes, that Donald Trump--to the White House. We’d probably open with Brit-born TV producer Mark Burnett casting Trump to play a successful New York real estate mogul in the reality show The Apprentice. We’d point out that Trump was a good choice and a bad choice: good, because he was already somewhat-famous (especially among people from New York and New Jersey) for his constant, widely ridiculed PR shenanigans; bad, because he was equally famous for his grandiose, overleveraged Atlantic City casino failures. How successful, or even just competent, do you have to be, to not lose your shirt owning casinos, FFS?
Because The Apprentice was, like other reality shows, not actually set in real-life reality, the cast members were playing highly controlled—if not word-for-word scripted—roles. Trump, the star, played a brilliant, imperious leader, “Donald Trump,” who was always a few steps ahead of all the other characters. The royal chamber that represented his office was in fact a set built within a vacant area of Trump Tower, because Trump’s actual office in the same building was a shabby dump (a shithole, you might say) that Burnett felt wasn’t appropriate for the “Trump” character.
Those of us who had been observing Trump for years as a clownishly appalling piece of short-fingered local amusement paid little attention to his nationally televised anointment as the Great Business Genius of Our Age. We forgot, or didn’t realize, that television is, or at least was, a powerful medium. By the time Trump finished his run as “Trump,” he was a star—or, at least, a “star,” like the shiny, gold-foil stick-‘em paper awards we thrilled to receive for our third-grade book reports.
You know the rest of the story. How would our account have been received when we wrote it in 1999? We should first stipulate that few, if any, of the future viewers of The Apprenticewould have read our piece because…how to put it?...they don’t read. Those who did, or would have (or whatever the correctly tortured grammatical form is or should be or shall have been) read our piece would surely have laughed at us, and not in that funny-ha-ha way. That attention-starved buffoon Donald Trump as president? Satire schmatire. Don’t be ridiculous!
Yet here we are. One of the questions we had to repeatedly ask ourselves as we wrote The Split was: How is this [situation or character or moral dilemma] different from the reality show of real life in Anno Domini 2023-2024? (Another question we asked ourselves: Is it possible that this whole thing—life as we know it; our reality—actually is a computer simulation? And the computer is crashing?) There were times when it wasn’t easy to stay ahead of the news. We would say, “The red state nation would suffer a labor shortage and force drug addicts to work in civic construction projects.” The real world would say, “Oh, yeah? Well get this: An Indiana Republican state rep has proposed a bill ‘allowing’ children to drop out of school after eighth grade and work on corporate farms.” We felt like we were trying to write satire from within a computer simulation programmed by a nasty teenage boy.
And now look.
Simulation or no, we all now live in what we’re calling Splitsville, i.e., a situation in which two countries, each with its distinct values, mores, and fundamental understanding of reality itself, occupy a single geo-political entity. Half the fucking country—or at least half the electorate—still believes in that confected, contrived, and supremely false image of Donald Trump as hero businessman. After the manifest disaster of his first term in office; after the tragi-comic bumbling with COVID; after the 30,000 documented lies; after the punch-line failures of promise after promise (the big, beautiful Wall; the replacement of ACA with something cheaper and better; Infrastructure Week); after a campaign of demented ramblings about Hannibal Lecter…after all that and more, half the country voted him into office again.
It's a tribute to the gullibility, stupidity, and brainwashed delusionality of the American people, yes, but let us not forget the four immigrant horsemen of the apocalypse who helped drag and push millions of Americans down the road labeled “Spltsville.” Thank you, Mark Burnett, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. Your services will be noted in all the better history books, to the extent that any will be permitted to be published. At least that’s what many people are saying.
We, Ellis and Steve, thank our readers for bearing with us. If you don’t hear from us for a week or two, it’s because we’ve Split for parts unknown, possibly without our computers, to celebrate and commiserate with our loved ones.
We’ll be back.