Lenz's counterfeit sincerity

The con-man's parody of the Program's register: sincerity as a tool Lenz wields flawlessly when it serves a Strategy — Xing a girl, "assuring a bad-complected Brazilian he hadn't stepped on a half-kilo" — but which paralyzes him the instant the feeling is real. Genuinely liking Bruce Green, he can't figure out "where the fuck is he supposed to look when he says it," because the fake kind is a performance you control and the real kind gives away power ("you drop something, you give up all of your power over it"). Manufactured sincerity is effortless; real sincerity is unspeakable. And the whole apparatus is wrapped in Program-parody — Lenz does his lines of Bing "in the very interests of sobriety and growth itself," the recovery register weaponized into a con-man's self-justification, the con-verts he sneers at as "not w/o a certain naïve charm but… basically naïve."