Blood Sister: the Attitude of Platitude
and to go back to the original slavish Substance-dependence, until that dependence has finally beaten them into such a double-bound desperation that they finally come back in with their faces hanging off their skulls and beg to be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their vacant grins.
Context
Boone's clever substitution-thesis exposed as the rationalization that kills. Her "Attitude of Platitude" reading — that AA merely swaps one will-obliterating "habit" for another — is intellectually valid and lethally wrong, and the narration follows it straight to the graveyard: the same ironic seeing-through that lets not-yet-desperate-enough newcomers dismiss the platitudes is precisely what sends them back out to the Substance that beats them down until they crawl back begging for the platitudes. The cleverness that sees through the clichés is the thing that keeps you from the clichés that work — and here the book makes the stakes explicit: irony is not a harmless style but, for an addict, literally fatal. (The AA substitution-mechanics are addiction-recovery's; OURS is the clever-ironic-reading-as-death-dealing-rationalization register.)