6

The Federationist advantage was obvious from the beginning of the war. Over 80% of domestic armed forces, including the entirety of the officer’s corps, with a handful of notable exceptions, stayed loyal to the central government. Federationist territory encompassed 67% of the country’s industrial plant. And they had the talent of unity their enemies lacked. Ohio, Minnesota and Oregon were invaded while Kilor was still arguing institutional restructuring with his lieutenants. The defense lines in Baltimore barely held. Most of the waterfront district was destroyed in a series of cruise missile attacks.

The DUF would have collapsed altogether if not for the uprisings in the Pacific Northwest and northern California, where eco-terrorist groups and anarchist flying columns led a large scale arming of the urban population. By July, Seattle, Berkeley, San Francisco, and several Oregon cities were in full revolt. But the rebels had no popular support outside of the large cities. Their only success was in distracting the Federationists long enough to allow the DUF to finish consolidating itself. The major cities were cordoned off by armored units and then bombed from the air. The infantry units moved in afterwards, mostly for the purpose of cleaning the bodies out. Only Seattle held out for longer than a week. Fighting was street to street. It culminated in running gun battles through the financial district, which was finally finished off by artillery fire. A famous photograph showed six anarchists in a burned out Starbucks. Their heads were wrapped in black bandanas. Most of their brains were spattered across the scorched walls. A blackened body behind the espresso machine clutched an AK-47 in a fleshless hand. Most of its intestines were on the cash register.

Worldwide satellite broadcasts showed the survivors being marched out of the burning landscape flanked by tanks. Huge crowds surrounded them at the city borders and threw bottles and rotting fruit at them. A fifteen year old grenade maker in a t-shirt with “Power to the People” written on it was severely beaten by an eighty year old woman with a cane. Foreign journalists later discovered that the boy belonged to an eco-terror cell that had forced the woman from her house at gunpoint and turned it into a makeshift bomb factory.

Contrary to popular myth, there was no mass slaughter of refugees by Federationist supporters. Despite Kilor’s televised speeches about “imminent gas chambers”, he was already in secret negotiations with the RFC over the possibility of mass repatriation. The RFC had no interest in feeding and housing several hundred thousand refugees. They even agreed to provide the trucks. It took three months to accomplish the biggest mass population transfer since World War II a hundred and twenty years before. Every half hour for three months an army truck rolled across the border and disgorged another mass of petulant humanity into refugee camps in New York, Philidelphia, Newark, and a thousand others dotting the eastern seaboard.

A cease fire was negotiated in 2058. The RFC believed it to be the prelude to total capitulation. In fact, Kilor was already secretly organizing the Refugee Brigades.

The Refugee Brigades were entirely made up of survivors of the Western Rebellion, and were entirely the product of Kilor’s genius. He had immediately guessed the capacities of traumatized, starving, homeless masses of young people for acts of extraordinarily savage violence. Kilor organized them into storm trooper units based in the refugee camps themselves. The new soldiers were exhorted by their new generals to the cause of revenge. Revenge on those who had driven them from their homes, who had killed their families, annihilated their lives. They were called to take a pint of Federalist blood for every brick of their abandoned homes. To turn their unspeakable loss into an indescribable bloodbath. “Three Hundred Thousand Exiles, Three Hundred Thousand Guns, Three Hundred Thousand Federationist Dead!” was their most famous slogan. It was shown every hour on the hour on television screens across the DUF, usually accompanied by a computer animated clip of a Federalist soldier having his skull smashed in and his brains scooped out and eaten by a family of starving refugees.

The Refugee Brigades served as frontline troops on ever major front when Kilor broke the cease fire in July.

They became legendary overnight.

Suicide squads dressed in oversized uniforms filled with TNT and nails dipped in cyanide broke the Federationist perimeter around Cincinnati. Nearly a thousand Federationist troops were killed in a single night by two Refugee units outside Columbus, Ohio. The bodies of the Federationists were hacked to pieces with shovels, photographed by official DUF media units, then thrown into the Mississippi River. In the most outstanding example of Kilor’s ironic sense of humor, the images were broadcast directly to the Republican Federation by the official DUF satellite channel. The Refugee Brigades withstood a 70% casualty rate during the reconquest of Chicago. Most of the city was reduced to rubble. The media units used a helicopter to photograph an entire platoon atop the ruins of the Sears Tower, waving the DUF flag and firing their weapons into the stratosphere in triumph. It was later revealed that only two of them survived.

But it was the Battle of the District that truly created the legend of the Refugee Brigades. The reconquest of the District was Kilor’s waking dream. He wanted to return in triumph to the Capitol which had expelled him only a few months before, when the world seemed sane, and the events which followed impossible. He wanted it at any price. And block by block, street by street, corpse by corpse, the District became a Mephistophelean inferno of flares, tracer bullets, laser sights, muzzle flashes, bursting shells, erupting incendiaries, and the spitting, bursting plumes of exploding bodies. It was nicknamed the Devil’s Slaughterhouse. Piles of corpses filled the gutted streets. Insects, rodents, cats, dogs, and an encyclopedia of bacterial organisms fed on the severed limbs and rancid flesh. The stench of putrefying skin and rotted organs permeated the air until people began spontaneously vomiting into the sidewalks and garbage cans. Even this desperate concession to modesty was soon abandoned, and the streets filled with the detritus of collective nausea. DUF extraction units finally requisitioned and confiscated a fleet of municipal garbage trucks and outfitted them with armored plates. The Federationists used a barrage of Stinger missiles on them. The stench of burning rubber and gasoline temporarily overcame the stink of decomposition.

By the time exhaustion set in two months later, neither side had gained more than a few yards in either direction. Kilor decided to force the stalemate. He threatened a renewed offensive through secret channels. The Federationists threatened to respond with tactical nuclear weapons. Before long, they both started to talk about a cease-fire.

Initial meetings took place in the no-man’s land around the Jefferson Memorial. The regular field commanders were the participants. They all knew that a de-facto ceasefire had existed since the failure of the Refugee Brigades to pierce the Federationist defense line at DuPont Circle. The issue at hand was where the official Division Line would be drawn.

It became a wall and not a line. Officially, it was named the Jefferson Wall, after the location of the first negotiations. The official name never caught on. People called it the Division Line. It was two miles long and twelve feet high. A winding labyrinth of concrete, barbed wire, electric fencing, motion sensors, guard towers and security cameras. The final settlement left the Capitol building and most of the Mall in Federationist territory. The Refugee Brigades salved their wounds by raising the DUF flag over the remains of the White House and turning them into a permanent military headquarters. Kilor made a series of public statements pledging to move the DUF government to the District. He knew that such a move would have provoked an identical act on the part of the Federationist, and perhaps renewed fighting. It was a clear violation of the ceasefire agreement. He stayed in Manhattan and so did his government. It is considered likely that he intended to do so all along. The Federationists let the issue die. Moving their seat of government from LA was prohibitively expensive, and they had no grievances with the final settlement. They maintained control over the West District, which contained the major historical sites and the strategic advantage. Despite occasional exhortations to “liberate the East District” from some of the more bellicose Federationist politicians, no such plans were ever pursued. The Refugee Brigades followed a similar path. They sang songs about “sleeping tomorrow night in old Abe Lincoln’s lap” and raised flags that read “One People, One War, One District”, but the generals and Kilor knew that the DUF had only held the East District by the skin of its teeth. Intelligence reports indicated that the RFC was more than serious about a nuclear exchange. The Refugee Brigades had taught them the value of savagery. Nothing happened.

There was sporadic fighting along the ceasefire lines outside the District. Mostly in disputed territories like western Illinois and the upper Great Lakes, including a handful of skirmishes along the Ohio border. But there was nothing to match the slaughterhouse of the previous three years. No peace treaty was ever signed. The partition was accepted on a de-facto basis by both sides. Ironically, the shape of the respective territories was almost exactly that which had been predicted by Pelman. Excepting, of course, the vagaries of war. This was not predicted by Pelman. Pelman did not predict war at all.

This raised the uncomfortable thought among the post-schism intellectuals who finally noticed Pelman’s work. They were forced to entertain the disturbing thought that it was inevitable. That it was not worth fighting about in the first place.

History has a terrible capacity to state the obvious.

5

There is not and never will be an objective account of the Schism. Historians will waste centuries foisting their pretensions upon the subject. That which was once impossible will be declared inevitable. Architectures of thought will be constructed. And events will disappear.

The process has already begun. Origins are being discovered in the Civil War, the Continental Congress, in the beginnings of European settlement in North America. Bifurcations are being examined. Paradoxes exploited. The present makes a slave of the past. As memory dies. History makes its home upon the grave of memory. And catastrophe becomes words.

Here, my only living companion is memory.

In my dreams it begins in 2057. The words do not agree.

The others call it the “Pelman Mythos”. Some call it the truth. They remember words better than I.

Arthur Pelman was an obscure professor of political economy at Fordham University in the first half of the 21^st century. In 2045 he published a book entitled “Slouching Towards Apocalypse”, the title being a tedious play on Yeats. The rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem would later make Pelman into “the prophet of the Schism”. The book itself went almost completely unnoticed at the time of its publication.

Pelman’s thesis was not complicated: given current trends in economics, cultural mores, religion, natural resources, legal precedent and political philosophy, the inescapable conclusion was that the United States was swiftly becoming two separate countries. Divisions were forming which showed no signs of receding and were fundamentally unbridgeable. The center and south of the United States, as well as several large portions of the Western states were increasingly religious, mistrustful of professional politics, industrially inclined and ill-disposed towards centralized government. The demimonde regarded material gain as a positive virtue and avoided its attendant spiritual emptiness by their enthusiastic faith in a living divine presence which was an immediate and palpable influence on their lives. They admired individual courage and disliked deviations from established norms. Despite their traditionalist mores, they nonetheless harbored an ethic of militant individualism which manifested itself in an emotional hatred for politically imposed restrictions. This dynamic paradox was driving an increasingly coherent and uniform culture which was taking on attributes of a separatist nationalism.

The northeast and Pacific Northwest, as well as many of the states bordering Canada, displayed a mirror image of their counterparts. Fanatically secular to the point of atheism, predominately urban and therefore inherently collectivist, confident in the capacities of the political sector to manage social and economic complexities, they derided materialism and tended towards admiration for the secular arts and humanities as a salve for the inherent spiritual malaise of an irreligious society. They were excited by the unusual and eccentric, and harbored a strong reverence for the unconventional. They lived out an equal and opposite paradox to their counterparts. The paradox of cultural individualism and political conformity.

The most surprising of Pelman’s findings was the fact that, despite their cultural reverence for non-conformity, political opinions were more uniform in the north and east than in the south and central west. On both sides of the divide, the dynamic paradox was pushing the regional blocs into a militant uniformity suggestive of an emerging state. And these states were moving in entirely opposite directions from their double and opposite.

“It is now certain,” Pelman wrote in his conclusion, “that the consolidation of these regional-cultural-political blocs into coherent and entirely separate political entities cannot be prevented and is likely not desirable. We can expect a slow but increasingly public bifurcation between these two blocs in the very near future. Ultimately, the mutual advantage of a formal partition will become obvious to leaders on both sides. When and where the document will be signed is impossible to predict, but when it is signed it will be to the mutual benefit of two amicable, but nonetheless essentially different and separate nations.”

Pelman was prescient, but he was not a prophet. He was not even much of a historian. Despite ample precedent, he failed completely to predict the slaughter that was coming. I have counted only a handful of incidental references and footnotes in “Slouching Towards Apocalypse” that make mention of the rapid growth of liberationist militias in the south and central regions, and the concomitant activities of eco-terror groups and urban anarchist cells in the northeast and west. On page 169 he makes the unfortunate statement that “there is no doubt that these groups are a fringe phenomenon of no significant impact and will continue to be so. Nonetheless, they are indications of more significant and eventually decisive trends.” Despite his reputation, Pelman failed to prophesy the integration of these groups and their ideologies into the regular army units which quickly chose sides when the moment came.

Two years after his books unsuccessful publication Pelman died of liver cancer. He never saw the events of 2057. A fact which has been much to the benefit of his posthumous reputation.

The official breaking point was the debate over Commemoration. The original bill was introduced in late 2056 by Garson Kilor, senator from Vermont and head of the congressional delegation from the Democratic Unity Front. The proposed Kilor Commemoration Bill of 2056 declared that 2068 would be the Centennial Commemoration of Countercultural Uprising. A year of official events and ceremonies would mark the events of 1968. These included parades, national holidays and reenactments of historical events. Bobby Seale day was to be recognized on February 8^th. August would be Black Panther Month. The Symbionese Liberation Army Memorial weekend would replace Memorial Day. Official holidays were proposed to mark the founding of the SLA, the SDS, the Weather Underground, and the Baader Meinhoff group. Martyr’s day, an official day of national mourning, was to mark the combined assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luthor King, and Huey P. Newton, as well as Salvador Allende and “all other victims of counter-revolutionary violence and state terrorism.” The president was expected to attend Newton’s reinternment in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. The unknown soldier himself was to be moved to a newly designed memorial plot honoring the Unknown Victims of Imperialist Warmongering.

The year’s events were to culminate in a full scale reenactment of the 1968 Chicago riots. Actors were to be hired to play the assembled protestors and stuntmen to act as the rampaging riot police. A pyrotechnics team would be hired at great expense to simulate the tear gas, spurting blood, protruding bones, and other effects required by historical authenticity. A noted stage actor was recommended for the role of Hubert Humphrey.

Kilor introduced his bill with a speech in which he called the proposal “a too long delayed celebration of the tradition of dissent which makes this country great.” Bernard Thurman, leader of the Republican Federationist Coalition, rose almost immediately afterwards to call it “a reprehensible attempt to grant official sanction to ideologies and actions of treason.” The shouts of denunciation and approval were of equal measure. By the end of the week, the DUF had given notice of their attentions to boycott the next congressional session if the bill was not brought to a vote. The next day the RFC made a similar statement, with opposite intentions. Unless the bill was immediately withdrawn not a single party member would set foot on the floor of the Capitol. Upon his return to Vermont, Kilor was hailed as an uncompromising and courageous leader. He was burned in effigy in Atlanta and Dallas.

There were a handful of attempts at a compromise. Most notably, the Wehauken Summit called by president Flaherty. Despite his reputation as a moderate, Flaherty’s membership in the RFC likely destroyed any possibility of compromise from the outset. The DUF had spent a lifetime worshipping their grandparents. Compromise was unthinkable.

Pelman’s thesis was borne out by subsequent political developments. The DFU demanded an immediate floor vote. The RFC agreed. The bill lost. The vote went entirely along regional party lines. The DUF abandoned its initial demands in favor of a more extreme position. They announced their intention to boycott the next congressional session if the bill was not immediately ratified. Remarks were heard from the other side of the aisle referring to “legislative terrorism”. Exception was taken. The speeches dragged well into the night on the last day of the legislative session. At 3:30 am, his tie undone and his shirt stained with coffee, senator Kilor rose before a packed chamber of dozing legislators and gave his now legendary “consent of the governed” speech.

“The consent of the governed,” he said, “is irrelevant. Must be irrelevant to what is historically true and morally correct. If democracy cannot bring itself to recognize such elementary values as justice and truth, then democracy be damned! And damned be the United States as well!”

Kilor and the DUF delegation left the hall to cries of “treason!” and a small number of flying projectiles, mostly pens and ashtrays. They were escoted from the capitol by capitol police. This was necessary because of the pandemonium which had erupted in the District streets, with protestors from both sides hurling insults and, by the end of the night, Molotov cocktails across the police barricades.

At 4:56 am the M street barricades collapsed, and the crowds surged over each other in an orgiastic explosion of flying limbs and screaming wounded. The National Guard in full riot gear dispersed the crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets. Kilor no doubt appreciated the irony. Ten people were killed.

Two days later, the DUF secretariat published the Manhattan Statement. Rumor held and holds today that it was predominately written by Kilor. Citing the “police mass slaughter” of two days before, it concluded that “the farce called American democracy can no longer be maintained.”

The country had reached the precipice moment. It is here that Pelman’s thesis collapses.

This was not immediately apparent. The three months following the riot and the publication of the Manhattan Statement has now been named the Interregnum. It was the period of uneasy calm before the inferno. Historians have made comparisons between the Interregnum and the “false war” of 1939-40. This is not entirely accurate. Paramilitary units on both sides were arming at alarming rates. It has now been conclusively established that most of the weaponry was supplied by sympathetic National Guard units. President Flaherty quietly recalled 70% of the country’s overseas forces to the homeland. He was too late. They had been watching the news. Individual gun sales skyrocketed. America’s nuclear arsenal was secretly taken off its automated mainframe and placed under the direct control of the president. Kilor was rumored to be hiding in upstate New York, allegedly convinced that the FBI was plotting his assassination.

Flaherty was determined to make his plea for peaceful resolution. He was an idealist. The DUF had already delivered its Notification of Non-Participation in the 2057 legislative session declaring “representative democracy is the enemy of the people.” In response, the RFC petitioned the president for the immediate arrest of Kilor and the DUF leadership on charges of treason. They refused to take their seats until the demand was met.

The president decided to take his plea directly to the people. From the steps of the empty Capitol.

On 25 March, Flaherty mounted the steps to spit in the face of history. Standing behind a dais draped with the American flag and the seal of the president of the United States, he faced a weeping crowd holding signs pleading for reconciliation. Prominently displayed on television screens the world over was a twelve year old girl in the front row. She held a hand lettered sign on yellow cardboard which read “Don’t Tear Us Apart”. Those who witnessed what followed claimed that there were noticeable tears in the president’s eyes as he waved to her and put his hand in his inside pocket to remove the 4x10 index cards on which he had written his speech. His aides later claimed that it contained several quotes from Lincoln.

Eric McCandless was three yards away at the time. At the edge of the crowd. Leaning on a motorcycle. He was twenty-two years old and arson charges against him stemming from a fire which had leveled an entire Wisconson housing development had recently been dropped for lack of evidence. He was a member of Warriors for Gaia, an eco-terrorist group which was known for blowing up park ranger jeeps and setting fire to lumber factories. Their last manifesto declared that “The human race is the virus of the earth. We are the cure.” His motorcycle contained over two thousand pounds of explosives packed with nails and ball bearings. When he pressed the detonator, it killed himself, forty-five bystanders, the last president of the United States, and the twelve year old girl. She was never officially identified. An urban legend contends that her name was Faith. I think this is unlikely.

By midnight, 26 March, regular army units loyal to the RFC had occupied the District and declared martial law. A warrant was issued for Kilor’s immediate arrest on charges of treason and conspiring to kill the president of the United States. At seven o’clock that morning the DUF formally declared the Union dissolved and declared New York City its temporary capital. Garson Kilor was declared acting president of an emergency DUF war government. The northeast and northwest states joined them almost immediately. The southern states seceded for a second time on 30 March. The Midwest followed them a day later. By 2 April, both California and Maryland had been invaded by RFC forces, determined to prevent secession. The Democratic Union declared itself an independent state on 15 April. Three hours later the Republican Federation did the same. The United States ceased to exist.