Day vs. Gately: deep and hard to actually do

Here the stakes turn literal. The gap between "just say" and "actually do" is the gap the whole theme lives in: the slogans are easy to mock and murderously hard to enact, and Day — who can say anything and do none of it — is "a dead man for sure" if he keeps "steering by the way things seem to him." Irony is redefined from a style into a fatal navigational error: trusting appearances in the one domain where the saving truths are the ones that look worthless. Gately isn't defending the clichés' cleverness (they have none); he's testifying that the practice they encode is deep work irony's surface-reading will never reach, and that getting this wrong is how residents go "back Out There and then go to jail or die."