November, YTSDB

So I'm reading the venomous Human Events piece linked to below and it starts to remind me of something.

Mike Thompson wants to remap the United States, expelling huge chunks of the northeast and ceding it to Canada. He says he's just joking, of course, but this remapping reminds me of something I'd read before in jest — in Infinite Jest, in fact.

David Foster Wallace, writing almost 10 years ago, sets his tale in the remapped and reorganized "Organization of North American Nations." A chunk of New England and northern New York has been transformed into the "Concavity" — a vast repository for toxic waste — and ceded to Canada. O.N.A.N. is presided over by Johnny Gentle, a none-too-bright germophobe, but the real power lies in the hands of an agency called the Office of Unspecified Services. The remapped America has gone broke, so the federal budget is funded in part through corporate endorsements, included the conversion to "subsidized time" ("a revenue-response to the heady costs of the U.S.'s Reconfigurative giveaway") in which numbered calendar years are replaced with things like "Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken" or the "Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland."

All of this is a lot funnier in the book than it probably sounds here in this brief summary.

The increasing prevalence of video cell phones got me thinking again about Wallace's weird funhouse-mirror future. And then I subscribed to Netflix — which is very cool but also eerily close to the business model of InterLace TelEntertainment. And then Johnny Gentle got re-elected.

All of which is to say that I think remapping is a bad idea.

And if your next package from Netflix is postmarked in Quebec, don't open it.