The wiener epiphany and the placemat meeting: Gentle green-lights Subsidized Time

pivotal · ~YW (onset of Subsidized Time); dating clash — see notes

• When: ~onset of Subsidized Time; the film stages Gentle's revenue "insight" as arriving at a bowl game he attends by portabubble, with the cabinet meeting following
• What: Facing the "staggeringly multi-zeroed" cost of his Reconfiguration — every folder emblazoned with the yawning red skull of the administration's bad-news memos — Gentle convenes the cabinet with ad-man P. Tom Veals and the pulchritudinous Luria P—— in attendance. He arrives fresh from a bowl game (the film names no teams) bearing two revelations: a punter whose kicks hang long enough to eat an entire wiener ("What was that cat's name again, R.T.?" — the film's wink at Orin), and the discovery that the Forsythia Bowl he sang the anthem at in '91 is now the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance-Forsythia Bowl. Tine articulates the Democratic Triple Bind (programs demanded, taxes refused, balance required) and recalls the Inaugural planks — "One: waste. Two: no new enhancements. Three: find somebody outside the borders of our community selves to blame" — and the Chinese-zodiac placemats at every setting supply the answer: sell the calendar itself. Corporate-Subsidized Time, the naming of the novel's years, issues from this meeting. In the film the "seminal, visionary" insight is Gentle's own high-pitch reverie with Tine as midwife; who really conceived it is part of the same open authorship question as event 4 (the Tine page carries the placemat "dark legend" from the film's other flank).