Tine architects the experialist Reconfiguration — the gifting of the toxified northeast to Canada

pivotal · ~B.S. 2001 (Gentle-Era onset); the "16 January" Concavity Cabinet

• When: ~final B.S. year into early Subsidized (the O.N.A.N. treaty is signed "on the very last day of 'B.S.' solar time," scene 083); the seminal "Concavity Cabinet" meeting is dated in-film to "the 16 January meeting" (scene 086)
• What: As Gentle's oral proxy ("The president's taking a little pure oxygen today, boys, and has authorized me as his oral proxy"), Tine engineers the administration's response to the toxic-waste catastrophe in the northeast: rather than clean it, "give it away." He unveils the Concavity map and sells the Cabinet on making "an unprecedented intercontinental gift of certain newly expendable northeast American territories" to Canada in exchange for continued U.S. waste-displacement access — experialism, the Territorial Reconfiguration that produces the Great Concavity. He reframes the fleeing population as "new pioneers" (refugee-denial spin) and coins the giveaway as pure statesmanship/gamesmanship/brinksmanship. Scene 083's news-montage corroborates the arc and shows Tine in his press-defender role ("U.S.O.U.S. CHIEF TINE: CHARGES OF AN OVAL OFFICE LITTERED WITH KLEENEX AND FLOSS A 'CLEAR CASE OF DIRTY TRICKS'"). How much of the Reconfiguration is really Tine's: the film's implication that Tine "is the real dark force" — Gentle "a slightly unbent but basically genial and befuddled figurehead," Tine "essentially pulling Gentle's strings all through the Concavity Cabinet and subsequent Reconfiguration" — is glossed by n.156 as pressed "maybe a little hard": "simply one theory and direction for finger-pointing," one that "tends to founder on the unexplained issue of just what would motivate Tine to undertake all this anyway"; who really drove the Reconfiguration is left open, as printed. [Attribution note: dramatized by Mario's puppet-Tine; the film's account "gets to stand uncontested by fact," scene 086, p. 0400.]