IJ study archive

the boys' Concavity cosmology: Methuen, "The City That Interdependence Rebuilt" — the new border boosterized

quote

only once in a blue moon anywhere south of like the new-border burg of Methuen MA, whose Chamber of Commerce calls it ‘The City That Interdependence Rebuilt’

Context

The border town's civic spin caught in one slogan: Methuen, "the new-border burg," bills itself as "The City That Interdependence Rebuilt" — the coercive euphemism (086's "Interdependence is as Interdependence does") repurposed as Chamber-of-Commerce boosterism, the town nearest the Concavity selling its frontier status as renewal. And the political geography is felt as a live hazard: the "waste-rich terrain of metro Boston" is exactly what makes a hamster infestation plausible, the Reconfiguration's dumping ground reaching down to the city itself. The same word that named a mugging in Gentle's cabinet names a town's pride at the wall.

In anthology