Day / Gately interface: analyze, or hang in
You can analyze it til you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can.
Context
The book's central debate in pure dialogue, and its resolution is that there is no resolution — only outlasting. Day's ironist rigor is genuinely unanswerable: the AA Denial-paradox (deny you belong and you prove you belong), the axiom that forbids questioning axioms, the charge that it's "something totalitarian… un-American." Gately refutes none of it, because he can't and doesn't try; he simply declines the argument. Analyze until you break tables with your forehead and you will find a reason to walk back out to the Disease — or you can hang in. The single-entendre decency does not win the debate, it survives the debate, and staying alive is the only rebuttal it offers. This is "the banality of cliché that works" at its purest: a truth indefensible by logic that works anyway, and whose working is the whole of its defense.