Split-Screen Horizon

Folks, this is not our best work

Today’s the day July goes belly-up and friends, I have concerns.

It’s three months - at least - since I stopped knowing how to answer when people ask me where I am.

Six months since a freely elected mad king and his feebleminded band of sycophantic bumbling money-grubbing power-hungry fools went tripping over their dicks into another illegal war.

Twelve since I woke up wherever I woke up on August 1, 2025, which was a different place than I woke up the year before, which was different from the year before, and the year before.

Twenty-four months since I drove from California to Michigan to embark on a series of in-depth profiles of voters in swing states that ran on the front page of a legendary newspaper during the run-up to the election in 2024.

Biden had already dropped out of the race. Project 2025 had been released months before, only to be widely dismissed as yet another stir generated by clickbait-driven corporate newsrooms and those hysterical reporters who never let us have any fun - omg remember when they were going on and on about how Roe was going to be struck down? which everyone knew perfectly well could never happen - while the groundwork for Project 2025 was put in place.

Not two weeks into reporting that series, I sat down at the Scamp’s dinette table to draft an email. My message was urgent; I wrote carefully, but quickly. I was letting a couple of people know what was going on, what I saw on the ground. I said they needed to protect themselves, to plan and prepare; and I said I needed help.

The email began,

“Dear ____ and ____,

The government is going to collapse.”

I hit send.

The email was ignored.

---

I think nearly every writer believes their words can, or at least could, create change. We operate on the assumption - insane, naive, arrogant, delusional as it may be - that language and stories wielded with intention and care have the capacity to move people; it’s that belief that drives us to the page.

We keep at it because we still believe that people are fundamentally rational; many of us believe people are fundamentally good. Therefore, we reason, if we do our part in bringing facts and stories to light, people will get something from it - insight or perspective that helps them think newly, feel strongly; and as a result of being moved intellectually, ethically, and emotionally, they will act.

Writing that series of profiles changed me, and it changed my life. It was the privilege of a lifetime to sit with those people. To be freely given their stories, entrusted with their unscripted, unedited words; to carry their stories carefully back to my desk, to sit with their voices night after night.

I worked with a greater level of intention, focus, and effort than I have ever worked in my life. I worked to do them justice; I worked in the hope and belief that if readers only knew what other people are dealing with, how other people live, they would understand where the country was, where it was headed, what it had already become. I hoped that understanding would illuminate some corner of their own lives, give them a sense of being more connected, less alone; it might re-ignite the flame of their own moral imperative, and that might inspire them to do something differently than they would have in the absence of whatever understanding or knowledge the story unlocked. Knowing more, I thought, would change how people feel, what they believe, what they do.

I didn’t think what I was doing would change the world. I didn’t even think it would change votes. At most, I thought it might create a little connection, a little awareness, a little recognition, a little empathy where those things were sorely lacking. I thought it might let some people know that stories and lives like theirs mattered, and so did their votes. I thought maybe stories, if nothing else, might finally begin to break through the sickening arrogance and myopia in which so many people I knew had sealed themselves off.

The assignment cost me. I had no contract. I traveled more than 10,000 miles and spent four months reporting at my own expense. I was paid not quite 70 cents a word - less than one-third what I earned as a freelance journalist in 2005, at far less prestigious publications, with twenty years’ less experience; in the current market, it would be considered a ‘generous’ rate of pay. I made back about half of what it cost me to report and write the series. I lived on packaged ramen and barely slept.

It was the best work I’ve ever done. It was worthy work in many ways. And it mattered, as far as it went.

---

We’re three months away from an election in which you bet your ass we need to vote but/and for which the president of this fair “democracy” has already secured long-term housing in the nation’s capital for an illegal paramilitary force of untrained, unvetted civilian thugs that serves at the whim of one man and is answerable to no legal authority whatsoever for a period of time that extends well into 2027 - months past Election Day - to ensure that should the election be met with any disruption, which has only happened once before in the history of the nation, when that same president openly and publicly called upon a then-unorganized band of untrained, unvetted, unhinged, uninformed civilian thugs to assist in his efforts to overturn the results of an election he lost, that now-organized, untrained, unvetted, illegal, and legally untouchable paramilitary force will be on site to shut any form of civilian activity formerly known as the exercise of rights, including but not limited to actions explicitly protected by the First and Second Amendments, the latter of which was put in place due to the Founders’ concern that one day the citizenry might need to defend itself from the tyranny of its own government.

A stern old fellow sternly warned me the other day that this most certainly is still a democracy and would be for so long as “people still vote for elected officials.” I didn’t think it was the time to mention that the people of Russia vote for elected officials, too; but I did realize that he was operating with the same mental split-screen that seems to be shaping a great deal of cultural discourse and behavior of late. Half of him is still barking that “the Constitution is very clear” on the point that officials are to be elected; half of him is at least intellectually aware of plain facts.

It’s not that those facts aren’t readily available. It’s not that they aren’t being reported. It’s not that people don’t know what’s going on.

Americans are being arrested on trumped-up charges, prosecuted by kangaroo courts, and convicted and imprisoned for crimes that sound like they were concocted by the Red Queen.

We know.

Innocent civilians are being targeted, harassed, assaulted, kidnapped, and killed. They are being detained, without due process and without cause, not only in deplorable conditions but in detention centers for which there is no rational or legal justification to exist.

We know.

The number of girls and women “becoming pregnant” in those sex-segregated illegal detention centers is staggering; the kid-glove language used to handle these reports is sickening. Let me rephrase.

Girls and women are being raped in detention facilities by an illegal paramilitary force that serves at the whim of the convicted sex offender who was knowingly elected to the “highest office in the land” by a bunch of bigots, many of whom have since claimed (or will soon) that they didn’t know.

They knew.

That same illegal paramilitary force is systematically being moved, by a corrupt judiciary, further and further beyond the reach of any form of accountability or law.

We know.

That same president - who, since taking office, has handsomely enriched himself, turning a multi-billion dollar profit in the past 18 months through blatantly illegal business practices, to say nothing of blasting through every single guardrail designed to prevent and check corruption - is openly preparing to make every effort to prevent a peaceful transfer of power through, at minimum, election interference.

We know.

The government increasingly functions as a form of organized crime.

We know.

Millions of people cannot afford both healthcare and housing. Many cannot afford either one.

We know.

But what are we even supposed to do?

How the hell would I know? I’m just some old broad who really thought the truth would set us free.

---

For the past decade at least, I have watched people I know, like, and love, become people I do not and cannot respect.

I have watched people abandon each other. Their commitments and their communities. The needs of others; the imperatives of the future world. Their values, their ethics. Themselves. I’ve watched them pull up every ladder once they’ve climbed it and burn every bridge once they’ve safely crossed. I’ve watched them do it while clutching their pearls and arranging their faces in a permanent expression of shock, outrage, heartbreak, concern. I’ve watched people with whom I once felt at least ethically aligned get lost in their own maze of necessary lies.

And I get it.

I don’t like it; I don’t respect it. But I get it. Same as I don’t like to see the guy at the truck stop diner on his second shot of whiskey at 9 a.m. But I get it.

I can’t do it; I can’t afford it. I put the bottle back on the shelf a long time ago, and it’ll stay where it is. But I get throwing back that second shot with breakfast and ordering a third. I understand. I always will.

If had the resources to burrow more deeply into whatever form of comfort I could find, I bet good money I’d do it. I’d love to believe that’s not true. But I bet it is.

It’s not that I’m doing anything better or right. I just see the world from a different angle right now, and what I see gives me different information, and that information suggests different actions I need to take. There’s nothing noble about the vantage point from which any of us views the world; it’s just the point of view we have, and it gives us a specific perspective - not good or bad, better or worse - on the direction we can proceed.

The difference, I think, comes down to access and preference. I can’t access the level of security or comfort that would allow me to believe that things are better than they are. And I prefer the terrors of reality to the terrors that attend when millions of people choose to live in a split-screen world.

At least this way there are fewer surprises. Because from where I sit, I can see what’s coming from a long way off.

Addendum

I’ll be posting less consistently through the month of August, during which time I’ll be in the woods and - hopefully - well out of range.

There are a couple of reasons for this, primary among them the fact that I’ve got to focus on work that pays the bills. I’m finishing edits on a forthcoming book and beginning work on the next three. Secondarily, this platform’s recent decisions involving AI - to say nothing of its lack of transparency and tiresome doublespeak - are so self-evidently grotesque that while I don’t see value in adding my voice to the cacophony of response, I also don’t see any reason to spend time on original work that will be fed to the big brother machine and contribute further to the enshittification of valuable professions, public discourse, social contracts, and creative thought, nor to work out my feelings about a platform on the platform in plain view of a readership that is well aware of my position on the extractive, exploitative, manipulative, surveillant strategies by which all value is systematically stripped from human labor and life so a couple of fucking guys can have a circle jerk and congratulate each other on how cool it is that they made all this money without ever once having had to grow a personality or have an original thought.

Because many of you also publish newsletters on this platform, I don’t want to clutter your feed with a detailed disquisition on the material issues at work here, but for those of you who aren’t immersed in the exhausting junior high lunchroom nonsense that is as rampant here as it is in any other workplace, a few details:

Due to several changes in the platform’s strategy - all of them defensible and understandable from a corporate profit perspective, and this is in fact a for-profit business, not a junior high lunchroom or the free market or a fever dream of the egalitarian future of publishing - for most people who write here, paid subscriptions have plummeted, subscriber growth has plateaued, we’re working more and more to earn less and less, and since we’re already paddling in circles with one oar in our leaky little rowboats trying to cram in some kind of actual life between our day jobs and side hustles and ever-increasing numbers of barely-paid and unpaid gigs we’re urged by people with salaries and/or trust funds and/or spouses who help pay the bills to “drive traffic” and get people to “convert” from free to paid when most people can’t afford to pay and those who can afford to pay often don’t, because they can get it for free.

The people who say they value what we do - write, edit, think critically, teach, have our intellectual property stolen and our work sold out from under us to companies who then use it to train their entirely uninteresting big brother machines - are often the same people who expect our stuff to be free.

And - all due respect - it’s absurd to have to keep begging people who are clearly reading our work to like or restack it in every single post. Some of you do - bless you - but the vast majority of our readers - who we know are reading not only because we can see our analytics but because they often respond, at length, in detail, off the platform - do everything OTHER THAN the thing we are literally begging them to do, the one thing that would actually help, which is to like or restack the damn post.

Friends, for the love of god I am too fucking old to keep begging rational adults to click a fucking heart.

Long way of saying - the platform isn’t the problem. Platforms gonna platform. Fascists gonna fascist. Corporations gonna do like corporations do. People gonna take what they can and run. Rest of us just gotta muddle through however we’re able to muddle through.

So for a good bit of August, I’m gonna head out.

I’ll be back on schedule with book news, upcoming classes, and more of this writing nonsense next month. Till then, you can catch me over at the Caravan Writers Collective and @marya.hornbacher on Instagram.

Peace. -M