Mario's ONANtiad: the view from the enemy-ally — Wayne and the Canadians
Only John Wayne and a handful of other Canadian students sit unhatted, chewing stolidly, faces blurred and distant. This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them. The Canadian boys remember only hard facts, and the glass-walled Great Convexity whose southern array of ATHSCME Effectuators blow the tidy U.S.’s northern oxides north, toward home; and they feel with special poignancy on 11/8 the implications of their being down here, south of the border, training, in the land of their enemy-ally
Context
The founding myth reverse-angled, and the anthology's clearest statement of the grievance as lived: the Canadian students sit "unhatted," excluded from the "absolution via irony" the Americans use to metabolize their own founding. They "remember only hard facts" — the ATHSCME fans blowing "the tidy U.S.'s northern oxides north, toward home," their being trained "in the land of their enemy-ally." Wayne embodies it: the reconfigured border is not a joke to those on whom the waste actually falls.