deLint & Steeply: 'We chew statues?'

Steeply answers the creed with pure sardonicism, and deLint names it outright: "Get sardonic with me all you want." Two professional deflectors trading the register back and forth — deLint's earnest-through-cynical creed met by the interviewer's reflexive sardonic parry, neither man able to occupy plain earnestness for a sentence. The scene keeps swapping masks for creeds and back: a sincere doctrine of self-transcendence, delivered as a sneer, received as a sneer, the whole exchange conducted at one remove from the thing both of them are actually circling.