The Concavity Cabinet: "give it away" — with Gentle on pure oxygen

pivotal · Gentle-Era onset; the "16 January meeting"; resolves nothing on authorship

• When: the seminal Cabinet meeting is dated in-film only as "the 16 January meeting," amid the toxic-waste catastrophe north of the Buffalo-to-Northeast-Mass. line; O.N.A.N. already exists (the Mexican Presidente attends as V-C O.N.A.N.), placing it just after event 3
• What: At the meeting that produces the Reconfiguration, Gentle is present but nearly wordless: "taking a little pure oxygen today," he communicates almost entirely in respirator sounds ("Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh") while Rodney Tine, as his authorized "oral proxy," unveils the Concavity map and the plan to make "an unprecedented intercontinental gift of certain newly expendable northeast American territories" to Canada, keeping U.S. waste-displacement access — with the fleeing population re-spun as "new pioneers," not refugees. The film's whole staging raises the authorship question this page must leave open: it implies Tine "is the real dark force," with Gentle "a slightly unbent but basically genial and befuddled figurehead, content mostly to twirl his mike and immolate his epidermis so long as his office is clean and his food's pre-tasted," Tine "essentially pulling Gentle's strings all through the Concavity Cabinet and subsequent Reconfiguration." The endnote gloss immediately hedges: this is "simply one theory and direction for finger-pointing," and it "tends to founder on the unexplained issue of just what would motivate Tine to undertake all this anyway." Whether the Reconfiguration is Gentle's madness or Tine's design is left open, as printed — and note that even inside the film the mandate invoked is Gentle's own C.U.S.P. platform (event 2). [Attribution note: dramatized by Mario's puppets; nobody who wasn't at the real meeting knows what was said, the administration having held that Oval Office recording equipment was "a veritable petri dish of organisms."]