Mario's ONANtiad: the ironic I-Day gala and its celebratory disguises — "Everybody’s supposed to wear some sort…"

The frame is itself political: the founding myth is screened every Interdependence Day as "the gala but rather ironic annual celebration" at an academy "whose founder had married a Canadian," everyone in mandatory "celebratory disguises" (hats, from Avril's witch-steeple to Hal's preacher-brim). The nation's founding is metabolized as costumed irony — the O.N.A.N. holiday observed as a dress-up party — which is exactly the "absolution via irony" the Canadian students can't share. (The disguises-as-masks material is surveillance-disguise's; landed here as the ironized-founding frame.)