the Separatism primer: the apolitical American's queasy induction
actually developing something of a layman’s savvy for Canadianism and O.N.A.N.ite politics, topics he’d previously found for some reason not only dull but queerly distasteful.
Context
The primer's reception is itself a datum about the O.N.A.N.ite polity: Hal, who sees himself "at his innermost core apolitical," finds the anti-O.N.A.N. insurgency material not just dull but "queerly distasteful" and finally "queasy," "as if someone had been reading mail of Hal's that he thought he'd thrown away." The nation's official incuriosity about its own founding grievance is rendered as a personal flinch — the citizen's trained aversion to looking at the machine he lives inside.