the Fully Functional Phil ad meeting

Tine Jr. states the stakes flatly, and the sentence is the Entertainment's whole effect in one breath: half the nation reduced to bug-eyed staring, whorls turning in their eyes, starving to death in the middle of their own excrement. It's the attaché scaled to a civilization again (cf. Fortier's bus-window vision), delivered here not as horror but as a bargaining chip in a marketing meeting — the threat that justifies the ad budget. The obscenity the scene keeps deadpan is that this apocalypse is being discussed by people haggling over dissemination charges and product tie-ins, the end of the species as a line item. The pleasure-death end-state is named precisely and then immediately subordinated to whether Glad wants "the Year of Glad" to be the year it happened.