The Road to Splitsville THE ROAD TO CCSA

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

The joke is on us.

When we were conceiving The Split, we had a lot of fun thinking spent months intensely meditating about what a country modeled entirely on red state “values” would be like. Many of the ideas, after wracking our brains and subjecting each other to rigorous cross-examination, came easily.

·         The right wing doesn’t “believe in” climate change or, for that matter, science. (Never mind that their, their parents’, and their children’s lives have been made possible by three hundred--let alone several thousand--years’ worth of scientific endeavor.) So our red state nation would not only do nothing to address climate change, its atmosphere would revert to levels of pollution not seen since the 1950s, and worse. Luckily, that pollution would never drift out to other countries that were working to clean up the environment. Oh, wait…

·         Similarly, they don’t “believe in” vaccines. We discussed having the Confederation of Conservative States of America (CCSA) be plagued with an epidemic of an oldie-but-a-baddie, like polio, but we never came up with a plot reason for it. And we mentioned pandemics.

·         For a number of reasons, ranging from supposed religious piety to simple misogyny, abortion, for any reason, would be absolutely illegal.

·         Conservatives, especially those employed by the wealthy to opine about it, think taxation is “theft,” so there would be very few, if any, taxes in the CCSA. Of course, taxation is the only way to create and maintain the public sphere and the necessities and luxuries it provides, such as decent roads and highways, street and traffic lights, sidewalks, and police and fire departments. So the public spaces, in all but privately-owned “enclaves” and Home Owners Association-like towns, such as Lorinda Moon’s Perfecton, would be a mess.

·         Taxation also makes possible government services, which Republicans hate until they need them. So there would be no examples of what is usually referred to as “the welfare state.” If that resulted in clusters of dispossessed senior citizens living in the equivalent of hobo camps, well, that’s what God wanted. Speaking of Whom--

·         Flaunted—indeed, lurid—religiosity is a key component of the red state world view. Thus, the CCSA would be, if not an outright theocracy controlled by what we’ve come to know as Christian nationalists, a capitalism/theocrat hybrid—i.e., displaying the integration of church and state.

·         Guns!

·         Another hallmark of red state culture, exacerbated by religious zealotry, is anti-intellectualism. The same people who don’t believe in science disapprove of “experts,” although that doesn’t prevent them from taking their broken car (possibly a Pyeonghwa Peon or a Shuanghuan Executive Suite) to a mechanic or their broken arm to a doctor. Instead of knowledge, they prize “common sense,” which is the view that everything obvious (the earth is flat; the sun moves around it) is true, and anything complicated is sneaky and suspect. For this reason, when the CCSA was formed, we imagined a brain drain, in which intellectuals, professors, and artists fled to the USA—mainly during but even after the Great Moratorium.

·         Combine the previous two points (religion; anti-intellectualism) and you get a bias against education itself. Why learn history if it reveals unpleasant facts? Why acquire a second language if there’s no reason to go anywhere? Why study psychology, and gain insight into your own personality, if it makes you feel bad? And so the CCSA educational system is one in which, for example, the study of English consists of learning what’s wrong and wicked and un-Biblical about the classics of the Western canon, and why you shouldn’t read them. The high school in the golf enclave seems to teach nothing but golf—oh, and football.

And so on. Like we said, it was fun arduous, but in the end satisfying, to create this hideous world. And, in contrast, we conceived of the USA, not as a sparkling futuristic utopia, but as normal—by which we meant, as a place of pro-Enlightenment, post-New Deal liberal values and institutions. Science, expertise, thinking, and rationality were respected. Women controlled their own bodies. Sensible gun laws imposed reasonable limits on who could own what. Religion was a private matter. And government taxed citizens and business to pay for a public sphere and for services that people wanted and needed.

It was, you have gathered, much like the world in which we live, in which The Split was written, although maybe a little better. Actually no. Wait. It was a lot better—because the USA of The Split was a USA free of the ignorance, prejudice, misogyny, stupidity, corruption, and earth-destroying greed that have long been a part of the actual USA and that, as of November 5, 2024, will have (at least) four years in which to metastasize, and to corrode, corrupt, and destroy the world in which we’ve been living and writing.

So yeah, the joke’s on us. Two days after publishing the final chapter, in which our heroine escapes the bad place for the safety and freedom of the good place, we woke up to discover that our actual (mainly) good place will soon undergo procedures to turn it into a bad place. For a year we’ve been wondering—fancifully, satirically, wishfully—if we’re on the Road to Splitsville. And all this time we’ve been on the road to the Confederation of Conservative States of America.

READER ADVISORY: This is the final “The Road to Splitsville.” It’s a little late getting out the door, for reasons you know all too well. However, we plan to continue publishing a newsletter, at least weekly. We’re not sure what it will cover, or what we’ll call it. But we’ll think of something! It will be free and, as subscribers to The Split, you’re already on the subscriber list. So watch this space. And thanks for sticking with us through Lorinda Moon’s adventure.