Sans-Christe: the hated figurehead as seen from Canada

texture · standing (Gentle Era into YDAU); desert frame 30 April - 1 May YDAU

• When: standing condition across the era; the Marathe verdict belongs to the desert dialogue (30 April - 1 May YDAU); the Antitoi pranks run through the brothers' insurgency years; the brothers' phone post-mortem is I.-Day-Eve, 7 Nov YDAU
• What: To the annexed continent Gentle is "Sans-Christe Gentle" — the godless singer — and "chanteur-fou," the mad singer. The hatred runs from the puerile — the Antitoi brothers "taping bricks to the return-postage-paid solicitation cards of Sans-Christe Gentle's C.U.S.P. party" and distributing Astroturf doormats bearing his likeness — to the polled and the doctrinal. On the I.-Day-Eve phone call (the call is Orin and Hal's; Orin's "Subject" is the profiler Steeply), Orin relays the profiler's citation of polls "from when they were still bothering to take polls up there" — upwards of four-fifths of all Canadians wanting out of O.N.A.N. and hoping "President Gentle had a ghastly accident in his UV-booth" — and floats the era's own textbook reading, "a textbook case of Johnny-Gentle-type-find-an-enemy-for-a-divided-nation-to-come-together-by-blaming-and-hating theory in action"; Hal supplies the structural irony: "there's a nice little irony to Gentle's strategy ending up bringing Canada together at our expense, when it was pretty obviously meant to bring us together at Canada's expense." And on the desert shelf Marathe grants Gentle a single point, that the "fault of someone" instinct was correct ("Your Sans-Christe Gentle was in this one part correct: "Someone is to blame.""), while judging the man himself "crazy in his head" and the villain he offered a decoy for a self-inflicted national death. The enemy's most rigorous mind treats Gentle's one big idea as true and his person as beside the point.