The Québécois separatist backlash — the mirror-across-highway terror campaign

pivotal · YW-YTMP (2002-2003)

• When: the earliest anti-O.N.A.N. strikes; fatalities ran "well into the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad" (YTMP, 2003), undiscovered for "over twenty months"
• What: The Reconfiguration turns Québec's long-standing anti-Ottawa separatism south against O.N.A.N. and the U.S. — and the geography explains why Québec: "something like, what, three-quarters of the Concavity's northern border runs contiguous to Québec" (n110), so the province absorbs the airborne wastes, the E.W.D. overshoots, and the mutagenic seepage. Ontario and New Brunswick take the continental Anschluss "like good sports"; it is "the insurgent cells of Québec who completely lost their political shit" (070). The first "unignorable" strikes: a then-unknown cell out of the E.W.D.-blighted Papineau region (n112) drags huge standing mirrors across I-87 at Adirondack passes by night, so northbound (often O.N.A.N.-military) motorists swerve to their deaths believing a car is bearing down on them. For twenty-plus months the crashes are logged as drowsy-driving accidents — O.U.S. Chief Tine, "to his later embarrassment," even presses anti-drowsy-driving PSAs on upstate New New York — until a would-be suicide floors it into the mirror and, per the media headlines, "SMASHED THE ILLUSION," exposing an anti-O.N.A.N. malice "way worse than anything aroused by plain old historical Separatism." See the AFR thread (the mirror tactic is later attributed to the A.F.R.).