O.N.A.N. thread

Arc

O.N.A.N. begins as a problem of garbage. In the novel's prehistory the United States runs out of two things at once — places to put its waste and enemies to define itself against — and "sort of turned on itself" (2). Into that vacuum steps an entertainer: Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, a germophobe union boss whose one proven political skill is withholding a performance until a dependent audience capitulates (1). His Clean U.S. Party is a joke for exactly three years, and then the joke is President (2), PR-managed by a survivor of the advertising industry's own collapse (3) — because the same years have replaced broadcast television with InterLace's on-demand cartridge order, the media weather the new politics will be conducted in (3, 21). Gentle's program is explicitly aesthetic — a Tighter, Tidier Nation, streets hosed down, blame refocused onto "some cohesion-renewing Other" (4) — and the search for that Other proceeds by inversion: unable to find an enemy, the administration manufactures a dependent. NATO is dissolved, Mexico signs, Canada is blackmailed with its own geography ("CANADA 'NUCK'LES UNDER"), and the continental super-state is penned into being with Gentle in the Chair (5, 8).

The thread's true pivot is the Concavity Cabinet (6): confronted with the "almost staggeringly multi-zeroed" cost of cleaning up a toxic horror the government itself secretly made, forbidden by its own platform either to store the waste or to tax for it, the administration discovers Experialism — you do not clean your side of the street, you redefine the street as the neighbor's. The poisoned northeast is forced on Canada as a "gift" whose refusal Gentle answers by threatening to bomb his own country (7); the map gets a bite taken out of it; the euphemism apparatus ("Territorial Reconfiguration," "eminent nondomain," no "refugees" so long as no curvy-horned oxen appear) is built in the same rooms (7, 11). Two institutions then pay for and operate the giveaway. Subsidized Time sells the calendar itself, year by year, to corporate sponsors — conceived, per dark legend, on a zodiac placemat in the same scene where Tine's hand rests on the knee of the Québécois agent who will haunt the counter-insurgency (9, 10) — so thoroughly that the Statue of Liberty's torch becomes a rotating product and a federal engineer dies under a five-ton cast-iron burger (13). And the border becomes a machine: Lucite walls, ATHSCME fans blowing the teratogenic clouds north, E.W.D. catapults flinging waste-vehicles over the line into an annular-fusion ecology that oscillates between desert and monster-breeding jungle "[a]s if time itself were vastly sped up" (12), over territory whose displaced population walked south in the Year of the Whopper (11).

Everything the rest of the novel calls "the insurgency" is the bill for that gift arriving. Three-quarters of the Concavity's border runs against Québec, and while the other provinces take the Anschluss "like good sports," Québec's cells lose "their political shit" and turn a generations-old anti-Ottawa grievance south (14): first the mirrors dragged across I-87 at night — nearly two years of deaths misfiled as drowsy driving until a suicide "SMASHED THE ILLUSION" (14) — then a whole R.C.M.P./U.S.O.U.S. registry of séparatisteur cells from the merely scatological (the Fils de Montcalm's pie-shell on Gentle's second Inaugural) to the extremely violent (15). At the violent end sit the Wheelchair Assassins, a pre-Experialist death-cult that the Reconfiguration retrofitted with a cause: they call the giveaway "Sudetenlandization," kill the officials who tolerate it — "to hear the squeak" — and demand not Québec's independence but the undoing of O.N.A.N. itself: the territories back, the fans and catapults stopped, the annulars removed, Canada out (16). The thread's one genuinely destabilizing idea arrives late and secondhand: the meta-extortion reading, floated to Orin by his "Subject," that the pan-Canadian terror is a ruse and Separation is still the real goal — that the insurgency against the continental order is itself a lever operated on Ottawa (19). The spine records it as it records the founding: a report of a report, unresolved.

Because that is the thread's other constant: almost nothing in it is witnessed. The founding reaches us as a puppet show — Mario's kids' adaptation of his dead father's parody, screened every 8 November to a dining hall in festive hats while the Canadian students sit unhatted and unabsolved (20) — a film that flags its own headlines as possibly "dickied with" and concedes that nobody knows what was really said at the 16 January meeting (6); even its Tine-as-dark-force thesis is marked "simply one theory" (Dating notes), and its parent film wasn't even political — a doomed claymation romance (20). The history of the continental order is preserved by the novel's other great subject, entertainment, and the two fuse everywhere the thread touches ground: in the spectation culture of a nation watching at home under "Gentle and Lace-Forché" (21), in the E.T.A. classroom where the one hard course teaches Hal the insurgency's history and gives him the queasy sense of someone reading his thrown-away mail (18), in the coach who joined Gentle's campaign because expelling "what you hope will not return" sounded like his theory of tennis (23). By YDAU the order is visibly running down its clock — the very last sponsorable year is sold on 15 December (22) — while its consequences converge on Boston at street level: a burglar in a clown mask accidentally suffocates the liaison who held the anti-O.N.A.N. cells together (17), and two white vans idle on a Public Gardens hillside for a radio engineer (21). The spine ends where the plot threads take over: the order Gentle built to expel what America could not bear to keep (23) has bred, in the territory it expelled, the force now coming back for it — the A.F.R. hunt for the Entertainment runs through the AFR thread and samizdat, but the grievance they carry is this page, entire (7, 11, 16).