David Wallace - Infinite jest

SEC. STATE: A kind of ecological gerrymandering?

TINE: The president invites you gentlemen to conceive these two visuals as a sort of before-and-after representation of ‘projected intra-O.N.A.N. territorial re-allocations,’ or some public term like that. Redemise-ment’s probably too technical.

SEC. STATE: Still respectfully not quite sure we at State see how inhabited territories can be sold to the public as quote expendable when a decent slice of that public by all reports inhabits that territory, Rod.

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh.

TINE: The president’s pro-actively chosen not to hedge that high-cost tough-choice possibly unpopular lonely-at-the-top fact one bit, guys. We’ve been moving forward full-bore on anticipating various highly involved relocation scenarios. Scenaria? Is it scenarios or scenaria? [157]Marty’s on-task on the scenario front. Care to bring us to speed, Marty?

SEC. TRANSP.: We foresee a whole lot of people moving south really really fast. We foresee cars, light trucks, heavier trucks, buses, Winnebagos — Winnebaga? — commandeered vans and buses, and possibly commandeered Winnebagos or Winnebaga. We foresee 4-wheel-drive vehicles, motorcycles, Jeeps, boats, mopeds, bicycles, canoes and the odd makeshift raft. Snowmobiles and cross-country skiers and roller-skaters on those strange-looking roller-skates with only one line of wheels down each skate. We foresee backpack-type folks speed-walking in walking-shorts and boots and Tyrolean hats and a stick. We foresee some folks just outright running like hell, possibly, Rod. We foresee homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods. We foresee BMW war-surplus motorcycles with sidecars and guys in goggles and leather helmets. We foresee the occasional skateboard. We foresee a strictly temporary breakdown in the thin veneer of civilization over the souls of essentially frightened stampeding animals. We foresee looting, shooting, price-gouging, ethnic tensions, promiscuous sex, births in transit.

SEC. H.E.W.: Rollerblades I think you mean, Marty.

SEC. TRANSP.: All feedback and input welcome, Trent. Someone junior in the office foresaw hang-gliders. I don’t foresee demographically significant hang-gliding, personally, at this juncture. Nor I need to stress do we foresee anything you could call true refugees.

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhhhhhhh.

TINE: Absolutely not, Mart. No way a downer-association-rife term like refugee is going to be applicable here. I cannot overstress this too assertively. Eminent nondomain: yes. Renewal-grade brand of sacrifice: you bet. Heroes, new era’s breed of new pioneers, striking in bravely for already-settled good old settled but unfoul American territory: bien sûr.

SEC. STATE: Bien sûr?

PRESS SEC. [w/ queer combination of bangs and bouffant and pair of bifocals on slim bead chain around neck and resting in cleavage]: Neil over in Spin has been poring through resource materials. Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if both — I’m quoting direct from Neil’s memo here — if both, a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20 % of the total number of children under six in transit. It’s true that Neil’s key resource here is Pol and Di-ang’s Totalitarian’s Guide to Iron-Fisted Spin, but they’re thinking this fact can be spun away from without much to-do, over in Spin.

GENTLE: Hhhuuuhh.

TINE: Marty and Jay’s staffs have been day-and-nighting on strategies to forestall anything like ostensible refugeeism.

PRESS SEC. [Holding brillantined head at that angle people in bifocals have to, to read]: Anything bovine with curvy horns gets shot on sight. Rod’s top U.S.O. operatives in shiny trucks at strategic intervals handing out free toddler-wear courtesy of Sears’ Winnie-the-Pooh line, to nip nakedness in the bud.

SEC. TREAS.: Still hammering out the boilerplate on the Sears agreement, Rod.

TINE: The president has every confidence, Chet. I believe Marty and Jay were just getting to the transportational coup de grace.

SEC. TRANSP.: We’re soliciting bids for signs for up there making it legal to drive really really fast in the breakdown lanes.

PRESS SEC.: South-bound breakdown lanes.

ALL SECS.: [Harmonic murmurs.]

SEC. STATE: Still don’t see why not just retain cartographic title to the toxified areas, relocate citizenry and portable capital, use them as our own designated disposal area. Sort of the back of the hall closet or special wastebasket underneath the national kitchen sink as it were. Hammer out systems for delivering all national refuse and waste into the area, cordon it off, keep the rest of the nation edible-off as per Johnny’s platform.

SEC. H.E.W.: Why cede vitally needed waste-disposal resources to a recalcitrant ally?

TINE: Billingsley, Trent, and yet who as I stated says we can’t utilize these territories for just this purpose no matter whose nation’s name they’re in? Interdependence is as Interdependence does, after all.

PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V–C O.N.A.N.: ¿Qué?

GENTLE: Hhhaaahh?

TiNE: Yet Billingsley’s right that this kind of sprawling, depopulated, newly Canadian territory can accommodate the tidiness-needs of this whole great continental alliance for decades to come. After that, look out Yukon!

PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V–C O.N.A.N. [Face green and mask wetly dark over upper lip]: May I respectfully ask President Gentle how you are proposing to ask my newly succeeded Co-Vice Chair of our continental Organization to possibly be able to accept vast arenas of egregiously poisoned terrain on behalf of his peoples?

TINE: Valid question. Simple answer. Three answers. Statesmanship. Gamesmanship [counting, now, on fine strong white clean fingers]. Brinksmanship.

W/ now more — and rather more jejune — journalistic f/x spinning out of the black at high-camp speeds to a 45-rpm playing of custodian Dave (‘F.D.V.’) Harde’s ¼-rpm disc of ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’:

GENTLE TO CANADIAN PM: HAVE SOME TERRITORY — Header;

CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: NO, REALLY, THANKS ANYWAY — Header;

GENTLE TO CANADIAN P.M.: BUT I INSIST — Header;

BLOC QUEBECOIS TO CANADIAN P.M.: ACCEPT TOXICLY CONVEX ADDITION TO OUR PROVINCE AND WE ARE OUT OF HERE SO FAST YOUR HEAD WILL SPIN ALL THE WAY AROUND — Header from That Guy Again;

CANADIAN P.M. TO GENTLE: LOOK, WE’RE SWIMMING IN TERRITORY ALREADY, HAVE A LOOK AT AN ATLAS WHY DON’T YOU, WE HAVE WAY MORE TERRITORY THAN WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ALREADY, PLUS I DON’T MEAN TO BE RUDE EITHER BUT WE’RE ESPECIALLY UNKEEN ON ACCEPTING HOPELESSLY BEFOULED TERRITORY FROM YOU GUYS, INTERDEPENDENCE RHETORIC OR NO, THERE’S REALLY JUST NO WAY — And Again;

abon26-MEMBER EEC ACCUSES U.S. OF ‘EXPERIALIST DOMINATION’— Header; THIRD-WORLD VEGETABLES HURLED IN U.N. IMBROGLIO — 10-point Subheader;

GENTLE TO P.M.: LOOK, BABE, TAKE THE TERRITORY OR YOU’RE GOING TO BE REALLY REALLY SORRY — Header;

SIN CITY SHRINK: NATION’S VELVETIEST VOCALIST WAS HOSPITALIZED TWICE FOR MENTAL ILLNESS — Tabloid Header;

PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY OF ‘EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY’ ALLEGED BY LAS VEGAS M.D. — Respectable Header;

MY GARDEN NOW’S GOT TOMATOES I COULDN’T LIFT EVEN IF I COULD HACK THROUGH THEIR VINES WITH A MACHETE TO EVEN REACH THEM — Tabloid Header, Dateline Montpelier VT, with Photo That Simply Has Got to Have Been Doctored;

F.E.C. CALLED TO INVESTIGATE C.U.S.P.s — Header; ‘STRATEGIC MISREPRESENTATION’ OF CANDIDATE’S PSYCH HISTORY HAS PUT NATION, CONTINENT AT RISK, DEMS CHARGE — 12-point Supersubheader;

TOP AIDES HUDDLE AS WORRIES OVER GENTLE’S ‘PATHOLOGICAL INABILITY TO DEAL PROACTIVELY WITH ANY SORT OF REAL OR IMAGINED REJECTION’ MOUNT IN FACE OF CANADIAN SHOWDOWN — Meth-Dependent Headliner, Now at Third Daily in 17 Months;

‘Both financial and diplomatic communities have reacted with increasing concern to reports that President Gentle has isolated himself in a small private suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital with several thousand dollars’ worth of sound and sterilization equipment and is spending all day every day singing morose show-tunes in inappropriate keys to the U.S.M.C. Colonel who stands near the Dermalatix Hypospectral sterilization appliance handcuffed to the Black Box of United States nuclear codes. Unspecified Services Office spokespersons have declined to comment on reports of such erratic Executive directives as: ordering the Defense Department to commandeer department store giant Searsco’s entire inventory of Winnie-the-Pooh toddler wear under National Security Emergency Proviso 414; requiring Armed Forces personnel to take target practice at cardboard silhouettes of what appear to be oxen, water buffalo, or Texas longhorn cattle; preparing the release of a Presidential Address to the Nation cartridge that purportedly consists entirely of the president seated at his desk with his head in his gloves intoning “What’s the point of going on?” over and over; instructing silo personnel at all S.A.C. installations north of 44° to remove their missiles from the silos and then reinsert them upside-down; and ordering the installation of massive “air displacement effectua-tors” 28 km. south of each such silo, facing north.’ — Anchor’s Lead for Kind of Semi-Cheesy Weekly Lurid-News-Intensive Summary Cartridge;

‘UNPRECEDENTED’ WHOPPER REVENUES IN THIRD QUARTER CREDITED BY PILLSBURY/BK TO GENTLE’S ‘CREATIVELY PROACTIVE’ RESUSCITATION OF POST-NETWORK ADVERTISING — Ad Week 14-point Full-Color Header;

GENTLE HAS COMPLETELY LOST MIND, CLAIMS CONFIDANT, O.U.S. CHIEF TINE AT PRESS CONFERENCE: THREATENS TO DETONATE UPSIDE-DOWN MISSILES IN U.S. SILOS, IRRADIATE CANADA W/ AID OF ATHSCME HELL-FANS — Header; ‘WILLING TO ELIMINATE OWN MAP OUT OF SHEER PIQUE’ IF CANADA NIXES RECONFIGURATIVE TRANSFER OF ‘AESTHETICALLY UNACCEPTABLE’ TERRAIN — Pretty Obviously Homemade Subheader.

This catastatic feature of the puppet-film’s plot — that Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner threatens to bomb his own nation and toxify neighbors in an insane pout over Canada’s reluctance to take redemised title over O.N.A.N.’s very own vast dump — resonates powerfully with those members of the movie’s E.T.A. audience who know that this whole parodic pseudo-ONANtiad scenario is actually a puppet-à-clef-type allusion to the dark legend of one Eric Clipperton and the Clipperton Brigade. In the very last couple years of solar, Unsubsidized Time, this kid Eric Clipperton appeared for the first time as an unseeded sixteen-year-old in East Coast regional tournament play. The little Town-or-Academy-Hailed-From slot after Clipperton’s name on tournament draw-sheets just said ‘Ind.,’ presumably for ‘Independent.’ Nobody’d heard of him before or knew where he came from. He’d just sort of seepily risen, some sort of human radon, from someplace low and unknown, whence he lent the cliche ‘Win or Die in the Attempt’ grotesquely literal new levels of sense.

For the Clipperton legend derived from the fact that this Clipperton kid owned a hideous and immaculately maintained Clock 17 semiautomatic sidearm that came in a classy little leather-handled blond-wood case with German High-Gothic script on it and a velvet gun-shaped concavity inside where the Clock 17 lay nestled in plush velvet, gleaming, with another little rectangular divot for the 17-shot clip; and that he brought the gun-case and Clock 17 out on the court with him along with his towels and water-jug and sticks and gear bag, and from his very first appearance on the East Coast jr. tour made clear his intention to blow his own brains out publicly, right there on court, if he should lose, ever, even once.