Schtitt & Mario: the hedged apologia — "It sounds almost frighteningly simple-minded, though…"

The book's earliest statement of both the hedge-reflex and the Mario register, five hundred pages before either gets named. The narration cannot utter Schtitt's earnest Old-World values except through a gauntlet of ironic disclaimers — yes, OK, granted, may, admittedly, nevertheless — qualifiers piling up like flinches, permission-slips the sentence has to file before it is allowed to mean anything; and when the Kanto-Hegelian citizenship creed is finally laid out plain, the narration taxes it again on arrival ("It sounds almost frighteningly simple-minded"). The one listener who needs none of the hedges is Mario, "across the redwood table, listening" — the single-entendre receiver already in position. Schtitt's diagnosis of the U.S. — a State that is "a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears" — is the theme's U.S.-cynicism sociology in embryo. And this is the closest the book comes to enacting the Interpretation's thesis clause in its own prose: a simple truth discounted as simple-minded in the very sentence that states it.