the Gentle Cabinet: the financing runs through the intelligence apparatus

The Reconfiguration's financing is engineered not by the Treasury but by Rodney Tine, Chief of the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services — and the film threads his revenue scheme through "the Rodney-Tine-Luria-P.-love-rumor-and-Tine-as-Benedict-Arnold thing," the Tine/Luria intimacy-channel by which the U.S.-Canada contest runs on adulterated affection rather than armies. That the man selling Gentle the calendar is also the spymaster compromised by a possible Canadian double agent is the political point buried in the audience's boredom: O.N.A.N.'s statecraft is intelligence work wearing a budget director's hat. (The espionage-romance as tradecraft is surveillance-disguise's; landed here as the financing-via-U.S.O.U.S. thread.)