Big Buddy sessions (pp. 120–121)

Ortho Stice, himself a boy being Big-Buddied, sits in a lamplit circle and ventriloquizes Schtitt to his own little charges — "mein kinder," he calls them, glossing it himself as "it sort of means my family" — passing down the whole sacrifice-and-honor gospel ("what have you got to give," "he makes me proud to be American") to a fresh generation of ten-year-olds, and then seals it with this. The father-substitute (Schtitt, "that old man") is worshipped with a devotion Stice never shows any actual parent in the book, and the worship is already reproducing itself: the surrogate-son becomes a surrogate-father one tier down, handing the doctrine along. It's the substitution structure caught in the act of self-perpetuating — filial love with no father at the top of it, only an old Austrian with a pointer.