IJ study archive

Prorector classes and the Separatism seminar

quote

The earliest unignorable strikes involved a then-unknown terrorist cell that apparently snuck down from the E.W.D.-blighted Papineau region at night and dragged huge standing mirrors across U.S. Interstate 87 at selected dangerous narrow winding Adirondack passes south of the border and its Lucite walls. Naïvely empiricist north-bound U.S. motorists—a good many of them military and O.N.A.N.ite personnel, this close to the Concavity—would see impending headlights and believe some like suicidal idiot or Canadian had transversed the median and was coming right for them. They’d flash their high beams, but to all appearances the impending idiot would just flash his high beams right back. The U.S. motorists—usually not to be fucked with in their vehicles, historically, it was well known—would brazen it out as long as anyone right-minded possibly could, but right before apparent impact with the impending lights they’d always veer wildly and leave shoulderless I-87 and put their arm over their head in that screaming pre-crash way and go ass-over-teakettle into an Adirondack chasm with a many-petaled bloom of Hi-Test flame, and the then-unknown Québecois terrorist cell would remove the huge mirror and truck off back up north via checkpointless back roads back into the blighted bowels of southern Québec until next time.

Context

Hal in Thierry Poutrincourt's Saturday Québecois-history seminar, 7 Nov YDAU, as the lecture reaches the present: the A.F.R.'s debut in the main text (the cell is named in n.112, quoted below with the endnote raws). The book's optics obsession weaponized — naive empiricism dying in a head-on standoff with its own reflection, every motorist out-brazening himself. The same cell will kill with optics again via the Entertainment; the mirror is the A.F.R.'s signature instrument both times. "transversed" preserved as written (see Flags).

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