The Concavity Cabinet — the experialist decision to "give it away"

pivotal · background, 16 January (the Reconfiguration year)

• When: background, the 16 January Cabinet meeting parodied in the film; the film calls it "the seminal meeting of what's come to be known as 'The Concavity Cabinet'"
• What: The public backdrop first: "TOXIC HORROR" headers over upstate New England, then Gentle declaring all U.S. territory north of a jagged Syracuse NY -> Ticonderoga NY -> Salem MA line a federal disaster, offering relocation aid, and claiming EPA clean-up funds "ARE NOT WITHIN THE MAP OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE." Behind the curtain, faced with the "almost staggeringly multi-zeroed" cost of detoxifying "the better part of four U.S. states" (the waste horror the O.U.S. itself secretly created under EPA-softball cover), and with Gentle's C.U.S.P. platform forbidding both waste-storage-at-home and new taxes, Tine (speaking for a Gentle taking "pure oxygen") proposes the only "viable option": give the territory away. It is framed as a "novel and pro-active resource" — an intercontinental gift of expendable land in exchange for continued U.S. waste-displacement access to it. See Rodney Tine character material (n156: the film overstates Tine as the "real dark force").