C.U.S.P. sweeps to power; the Inauguration heralds a Tighter, Tidier Nation

pivotal · ~final B.S. years ("the millennial fulcrum")

• When: the last years of unsubsidized ("B.S.") time — C.U.S.P. is "a kind of post-Perot national joke for three years" before the quadrennial sweep; the Inauguration opens the Gentle Era
• What: Gentle founds and fronts the Clean U.S. Party — a "politically prescient annular agnation" of ultra-right jingoists and far-left granola-crunchers whose first platform plank was Let's Shoot Our Wastes Into Space — and, with a white-gloved finger on the pulse of a waste-choked, Menace-less, self-loathing electorate, sweeps to victory "in an angry reactionary voter-spasm." His PR is run by Boston ad-maestro P. Tom Veals, who consents to manage the fringe candidacy of "a former crooner and schmaltz-mogul who went around swinging a mike and ranting about literally clean streets and creatively refocused blame." The Inauguration is pure Vegas: he is the first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during the speech — and, shuddering, the first ever to say shit publicly — attendees scrub and mask and walk through chlorinated footbaths, and the Address lays out the whole program of the era: a Tighter, Tidier Nation; American renewal as "an essentially aesthetic affair"; a retired World Policeman cleaning its own side of the street; tough choices he promises to make for us ("asked us simply to sit back and enjoy the show"); Novel Sources of Revenue no predecessor had seen; and above all an end to Americans blaming one another — the podium-pounding demand that "there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame," with the promise to find "some cohesion-renewing Other." Early-administration housekeeping runs the same direction: the new administration's Title-II/G public-funded-library-phaseout "fat-trimming" initiative, which Avril Incandenza's Militant-Grammarians phalanx court-fights, unsuccessfully. Local texture: around ultra-liberal Enfield the grass-roots campaign was not helped by having E.T.A.'s own Gerhardt Schtitt among its earliest sign-carriers; only Mario understood that Schtitt's attraction was really to the athleto-Wagnerian implications of Gentle's waste proposals, "this business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return."