The Great Separation

Caution: this book is a document from the future, obtained through a highly experimental technology — and so sensitive, that its futuristic author must be identified merely as John Doe, Ph.D. Are you ready to find out how the United States finally split along party lines — into two separate republics, and its aftermath? Dateline: 2029. The past year has been tumultuous. After about thirty years of ever increasing political party animosities, the federal government was already gridlocked and nearly dysfunctional. Nothing of national importance seemed to bring the parties together. A contested 2028 federal election, a "natural" disaster, and a monumental bipartisan decision later, and already the former United States is well into, not another Great Depression, but the Great Separation — The "One Nation, Indivisible,….." finally divides, in 2029. This all happened so quickly, it requires a historian to catalogue these recent events while they still exist in memory. Bipartisan by birth, eminent historian John Doe, Ph.D. (real name withheld for national security reasons) compares the developing cultures in each of the two newborn countries, and tells us of his brave travels along the borderlands, where people still daily encounter others with — gulp— opposite political beliefs. He also uses the few bipartisan documents that remain in existence to examine the historical forces that brought America to a polarized standstill and recount the events that led to the Great Separation. Will the culture of "God, Guns, and Greed" ever again unify with "Science, Serenity, and Socialism," so the two countries become the Re-United States of America? or will they continue to grow farther and farther apart? And how will the rest of the world react? Because this book was written in 2029, readers of today may well understand this book as a work of political satire, and find humor in the events therein. Still, we are currently living through what Dr. Doe has chronicled as the last few years of Pre-Separation America, so it is left to the reader to determine what part is satire, and what part is a cautionary tale for our own future.