Pages 876–883
A document, not a scene: PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT of a snow-delayed meeting, 8th floor of the State House Annex, Boston, the afternoon of the same 20-November blizzard (a limo has just done "a 180 on Storrow"). Around the table: Rodney Tine Sr. — "R. the G." of p. 92 — his ruler-tapping son Tine Jr. (the Notkin interrogator of pp. 787ff), Maureen Hooley of InterLace children's programming, Buster Yee of Glad marketing, and ad man P. Tom Veals. Business: previewing the government's anti-Entertainment public-service cartoon for children. All dialogue, with bracketed stage directions doing the physical comedy.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corp. (p. 876) — the trash-bag concern; buyer and namer of the upcoming subsidized Year of Glad.
- P. Tom Veals (p. 876) — of Viney and Veals, the Boston ad agency from the tobacco-wars material (p. 412).
- Storrow (p. 877) — real Boston riverside parkway.
- Kruger Abstraction Scale (p. 877) — market-research jargon for a child's abstraction capacity; not a real scale.
- 'The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show' (p. 878) — InterLace's 82-share kids' program; it flickered past once on the attaché's viewer (p. 35).
- citrusy floral odor (p. 879) — Yee's recurring smell is an olfactory aura, a real pre-seizure phenomenon; embarrassment is his trigger.
- Pillsbury Doughboy (p. 881) — real ad mascot; the lethal cartridge is drawn with his "pudgy little harmless" limbs.
After you read: three things
1. The countermeasure is itself an entertainment. The warning is a thirty-second spot engineered to an "advertable attention-span of sixteen seconds," with "a traumatic graphic" timed for second fourteen, inserted into a top-share kids' show. And the scenario it dramatizes — a child finding the adults frozen bug-eyed before a viewer, spirals in their eyes, bodies melting into the recliner — is the attaché's living room (pp. 33–37, 78–79) as the state imagines it, iconography included. The apparatus can only fight spectation with more spectation.
2. Sincerity has a strategy problem. An earnest authority-figure warning would hand the cartridge a forbidden-fruit boost, so the icon must be a peer and a joke: Fully Functional Phil, a buck-toothed burro (every other species was copyrighted), eyes crossed "like he's just been whacked with a sock full of nickels," who "stands for the attraction of capacity, agency, choice." His predecessor, Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie, died in testing ("The word booger kept coming up. The singing didn't help"), and the planned adolescent version abandons sincerity outright: Phil's catchphrase becomes "It's your ass, ace."
3. Read the sponsors and the intelligence vacuum. Glad is protecting its purchase — "You want the Year of Glad to be the year half the nation stopped doing anything but staring bug-eyed at some sinister cartridge…?" — and note that Himself's own father spent his last working years as the Man from Glad (p. 492): the father's old sponsor now bankrolls the defense against the son's film. Meanwhile everything the state can actually tell a child: "it looks really entertaining," and "we know it's… Canadian" — a plaid cap and overalls standing in for a threat nobody has profiled. (The son's telescoping ruler, incidentally, rhymes with what p. 548 told you about Tine Sr.'s private morning ruler ritual.)
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.