the expulsion hearing: top five Strategies
Pemulis knew from Inc that Wayne’s pseudo-Tavis ‘I-live-in-fear-of-rejection’ ploy was actually in the top five or ten of the troubling ‘Strategies’ that Inc’s brother Orin the punter called up to Hal about employing to X young married women.
Context
The parody turns out to be documentation. Wayne's imitation of Tavis's confessional-candor gambit is not invented for comic effect — it's a real, catalogued "Strategy," "in the top five or ten" of the manipulation-scripts Orin actually deploys on married women (the same pose-of-poselessness Bain dissects in n269). The register-point is the seamlessness across the book's ironists: Tavis performs it compulsively, Orin runs it deliberately as tradecraft, Wayne can reproduce it verbatim, and all three treat manufactured openness as a numbered technique with a known success rate. Sincerity-as-Strategy isn't a one-off; it's an institution, a shared family/E.T.A. repertoire of weaponized candor, and the horror is how well-worn and effective the script is.