Marathe at Ennet House, the Dream-Duty screening
conveying his restenotic wife and entertainment-hungry children down from St.-Remi d’Amherst’s Convexity-ravaged wastes to live with him the rest of their lives down here among U.S.A.’s confusion of choices
Context
Marathe's fantasy of defection names the American condition in three words: "U.S.A.'s confusion of choices." He imagines bringing his dying wife and his "entertainment-hungry children" down out of the Convexity's wastes to live in the land where the problem is not scarcity but a bewildering surfeit of things to choose and consume. The children are already hungry for entertainment before they've even arrived, and what he'd be delivering them into is precisely the "confusion of choices" that the theme identifies as the vacuum the Entertainment fills — a freedom so total it becomes a kind of starvation. The next generation is pre-shaped for the appetite; America is where it gets fed to death.