Foobonia and Points West.

The odd thing about the whole business about the Circle of Life bird's nest is that we have to deal with an annoying trend that makes the Pattersons look like worse people than they actually should be: their insistence on being abysmally ill-informed about pretty much everything while at the same time being convinced of their having the best words and the best knowledge. The reason for their being given a free pass for being a whole damned family of Cliff Clavin can best be summed up by the following rule of thumb:

If a character is attempting to appear profound, intelligent or worldly-wise and, in doing so, reveals him or herself to be laughably ignorant, we should take the incoherent and factually incorrect gibberish he or she pushes past his lips to be the Wisdom of the Gods.

which is balanced by the corollary

1. If someone who is not a Patterson offends a Patterson by saying something that most people would regard as both reasonable and sensible, that person is in the wrong.

2. If April is oppressing another Patterson by saying something reasonable and sensible that he or she doesn't feel like hearing, she can be considered a non-Patterson.

This is why April is an extra-selfish drama garbage troll princess person for making ill-informed and selfish drama queen noise about how Liz is big enough to get her own damned apartment and should also maybe feel guilty about rewarding a skeevy little thief.

Now, I think that it's pretty obvious that a horribly distorted body image such as Lynn's cannot exist in full bloom unless it's on a leafy-green background of projecting her belief that really, she is too ugly to deserve love onto the world. This is not only why we have Elly and Liz staring holes in the mirror convinced that they are too hideous to be worthy of the affection they crave, it's also why we have to deal with the very superficial Connie being praised for what Mira is an evil person for wanting WHEN she gets her bowels in an uproar because Dirk Dagger isn't conventionally handsome.

This is rather idiotic because Dirk could, despite his looking like he died ten years ago but came back for his car keys and his lack of interest in talking to older people ginned into hating him by a news media looking for the next great moral panic to scare the rubes with, be a pretty good guy and the best male bargain Molly could hope for. The problem is that raindrop shallow Connie sees ugly grandchildren who are ugly and people blaming her for the ugly children. It's also why Eric pulled much the same shit Howard Erk did but Lizardbreath doesn't want him off the planet because ugly people need to die.

Now, to get back to the blizzard arc, it seems to me that we get to see three examples of characters making fools of themselves because they answer a vital question incorrectly because they fail to understand the people around them. Said question is, of course, "What did you think was going to happen?"

First off, we have to deal with Elly's angry astonishment when confronted with something she actually should have seen coming. While she'll deny it with her dying breath, she shouldn't have actually expected John to be honest about the Yellow Penis-Mobile Of Overcompensation's ability to handle a Canadian winter any more than she should have expected him not to want to glom on to her ride. She should have remembered that he and the kids see the non-job she has too much of her identity invested in as a sort of paid hobby and also remembered that he saw taking a cab to work as being almost as big a humiliation as riding the bus.

Second, John should have remembered that Elly wasn't going to just let him borrow her wheels no how. He should have remembered that she hates the idea of being stuck at home because she hates the idea of being thought of as the organic adjunct of a gas range just because he doesn't seem to want her to get the degree of being treated like his equal.

Finally, we have Mike who seems to have expected the city plow crews to leave the town immobilized just so he could sit home the following day instead of going to the evil building of being told that he's a lazy ignoramus with an inflated self-concept. About the only person who didn't flunk that question was Lizzie and that's only because she didn't notice that her teachers are chicken too.

Of course, the really irritating thing about the way Deanna treated April is that she shared with John the idea that she'd allayed a concern instead of confirming a decision. John has yet to truly acknowledge that when he'd tried to reassure April that a fait accompli was simply spit-balling, he hadn't fooled her at all, Deanna has yet to get it through her Romulan hairdo that April immediately realized that someone who made glib comments about turning her into a servant thought of her as hired help.

I'm not sure exactly why it is that the Pattersons really tend to suck at reassuring people as regards their intentions but I do know that they don't even realize it. This tells me that the reason Therese is suspicious of Liz is that the Breath only thinks that she didn't do anything to agitate the woman. Given how she had to be told not to make a big, ugly spectacle of herself at Therese's wedding (all the while complaining about the cruel unfairness of not calling attention to herself or upstaging a boyfriend stealer like she was in middle school or some such malarkey), it's quite likely that she made an immature fool of herself and couldn't wait to tell Therese what a bad person she was intruding in her friend's life. It's like watching the title character from the webcomic Candi get all judgmental and huffy because she seemed to think that she had right of first refusal on who someone she was never gonna date had relations with.

This leaves us, of course, with the question of who a Patterson thinks he or she is fooling in cases like this. The answer is either 'no one' or 'just themselves.'

If you'll allow me, I'd like to transition from reminding you how Elly warped the children to showing how she and John teamed up to ruin them before talking about his solo contribution to making Mike, Liz and April a drag on society. The first thing that should be noted is that both she and John seem to believe that the worst thing that a person can do it to make them feel guilty about an activity that pleases them. The strip is marred by one of them doing something selfish and stupid only to turn around and bitch about the terrible people who want to deny them their harmless amusements and pleasures that affect no one and infringe on no one's rights.

This is owing to a sort of wishful thinking on their parts. They want their actions to not have consequences or to inconvenience other people in order to preserve an illusion of perfect innocence therefore anyone who might be run over in their quest to seek out comfort as if it were the sovereign goods either ceases to exist or actually knows that they should get out of the way but, owing to a love of chaos and hatred of the good, stand in their path with their demands. Since the children learn how to see people by emulating them, we see children who want to run over other people who blather about wars being declared by pop stars they aren't jealous of and pregnant women willing them to slip on the ice when they're called on for violating the standards of common decency.

One of the themes that we're going to be bludgeoned over the head with in a few weeks' time is that math is something of a hardship. We have Mike's constant beefing about he hates stoooooopid numbers because it's tooooo haaaaaard and he haaaaaaates it and teachers just make him do stoopid math because they hate him and want to torture him. Also, Lawrence's section of "The Lives Behind The Lines" has him be confused and angered by anything that involves an equation as he questions the need for something he's never going to use in real life so getting a C should be just fine.

The form Lynn's anti-mathematics propaganda is going to take is a strip in which Liz's first grade teacher talks down to her because she has yet to figure out how to do addition in her head. Like a lot of well-meaning but ineffective dumb people, Miss Blais probably spent her career never having realized that not all children develop at the same rate. As someone who was treated like a side-show freak because I could sort of read at a grade two level before entering school, I can attest to the horrid power of the institutional failure to admit that children aren't interchangeable, act-alike, think-alike drones who are all at the same level. What this means is that children like Lizzie (and Mike and Lawrence) fall through the cracks and end up having their enthusiasm for a subject destroyed by a teacher trained to ignore common sense in favor of a dogma.

The ultimate end result of all of this is to produce adults who struggle to understand how to budget because a Miss Blais killed the part of his or her brain that can learn math. This, I think, is why Mike and Dee were so pooooooor despite both of them making loads of money. The little boy who hated stoopid math and stoopid numbers because his stoopid vanity and stoopid need to avoid effort collided with his stoopid teacher's stoopid need to think of him as being stubborn and bad because he wasn't able to do what some abstraction said he should became a stoopid man who stoopidly wastes his money because he can't picture in his head where it's all going.

The odd thing about this particular summer is not that it's spent watching John and Phil act like panicky idiots because Lynn wants to prove that men are crazy and wrong and silly and stupid for taking pride in shared discomfort instead of whining piteously about it like she would. The odd thing is that this and the next are the closest Mike and Lizzie have to a normal summer at home. Sure, this summer is wasted by having to walk on eggshells because John is what Heavy Weapons Guy would call "a tiny baby man" who can't take being laughed at while the next is spent watching a short-tempered idiot girl land on both feet on Mike because she's too stupid to close her blinds in a neighborhood filled with idiot boys who want a peep show but they do actually spend time at home without someone screaming about surviving contact with her horrible children who want to devour her brain.

This sort of thing is why I miss aprilp_katje's "April's Real Blog"; that's because howtheduck's Michael would, if prompted, deliver a long-winded, distraction-laden and pompous defense of his parents' overweening need to deny him and his siblings a normal summer that would somehow manage to point out the flawed logic behind it. My guess is that he'd be made to say something like "The neighbors have an odd habit of saying that they prefer my having my children play with the junk I spread all over the lawn like some kind of farmer to having the shrieking idiot who used to live there screaming at children she just let wander around aimlessly until all hours" while at the same time not realizing that they're actually talking about Elly. This is because the Michael Lynn created would probably be saying the same thing for the same reason. He defends the stupid way Elly raised him in such a manner as to be an indictment of said method's pernicious uselessness.

Of course, distracting yourself from the realization that you yourself might be a monster isn't the only thing they're good for. John's need to believe in monsters so as to avoid having to agree with Porkypine when he said "Don't take life so serious, son....it ain't nohows permanent!" is counter-balanced by April's need to not face the fact that her family are monsters.

First off, we have to remember that April is blessed with a mother who blames her for the loss of options she would have been too chicken-hearted to explore in the first place. It really isn't April's fault that Elly has no idea how to function in the modern labor force and tends to lose interest in attempts to get that degree she'd like.

Second, we have to remember that she also has a father who had no use for her because she wasn't a "real" little girl. When one considers that this means that he wanted a passive doll-child who'd stroke his ego, flirt with him and not challenge him, one is less than sympathetic to his plight and perhaps wishes that rabid cop Elliot Stabler would show up and adjust his attitude.

Third, we have to remember that she has had an older brother who ignored her, an older sister who sees her as part of the reason that no one wants to talk to her and who thus needs to be slapped down and a sister-in-law who regards her as someTHING to be exploited. The realization that April sometimes makes is that no one really wants her around unless they can get something from her and are trying to get away from her. The problem is that the people who treat her like crap don't want to admit that their motives aren't virtuous so encourage her fears about this person who makes her feel uncomfortable. This means that she has to ask herself the same thing Ol'Porkypine told Pogo and Howland that Churchy La Femme should have asked when faced with the minor dilemma of having three predatory idiots using a witch-hunt to make him into an entree; she too gotta decide which is most insultin': to be cooked by such monsters as is agin her or WITH such monsters as is for her.

As we know, one of the plot threads involved in Lynn's current attempt to nag Rod about how bad an idea pursuing his love of dentistry when the superior destiny of caring for someone who was busy willing herself into becoming helpless awaited him is her nagging Aaron about expecting his mother to actually do the odd bit of housework so that his classmates wouldn't ride him about how odd the dentist's wife is. When he isn't wailing about how deprived he is because his mother hasn't been forced to put her life on hold just in case a lazy, selfish, thoughtless little rat bastard idiot kid might need his shoes tied or some damned thing or how he's been reduced to the sort of horrible slave called a housewife, he's busy conjuring up a doomsday scenario in which his vindictive parents will make him work and work and work and work and never play or laugh or be happy if he doesn't peel carrots.

This sounds somewhat familiar to me because it reminds me of a scenario in which Elly clearly seemed to believe that the police were going to gun him down in the streets like a dog because nuclear war made him turn his back on happiness, kindness and goodness and dress like Adam Ant for Halloween. It also reminds me of an insane scenario in which John thought that the princess he'd had no idea that he'd raised wanted Mike and his family to freeze and die so she could have her bedroom because teenagers are short-sighted....not to mention how Liz is still convinced that Therese is an evil, puppy-kicking reptilian alien who wants her to die alone because she can't quite figure out that Anthony isn't the last best hope but just the one most convenient for the people of Milboring. It even reminds me of how April is still probably convinced that Becky wants to crush everyone and laugh because the alternative is admitting that yes, she is jealous of her talent. In all of those cases, crazy-ass bullshit apocalyptic scenarios are preferred to the truth because the truth is a lot harder to take. In Mike's case, the fear has the rather obvious source of his being made to admit that now that Lizzie is here, he's just the old model and has to settle for less in life. Every damned thing is seen as a sign that he can't be listened to or allowed to enjoy things because no one wants to have him around now that they've got the baby who can just burp and she's loved and no one is listening and no one loves him.

In this, he's rather similar to Elly and her fear that no one wants to listen to a word she says. Behind her shrill screams about how much trouble Mike would get in for wearing the costume of anarchy and ugliness and war and doom is a woman who feels as if she's supposed to have her voice surgically removed because she's just a housewife. The problem is that the two of them are too similar to really communicate all that well.

Michael is, of course, the example of the Pattersonian inability to appreciate what and who they have in their lives that's currently being the most annoying. The blanket refusal the characters have to accept people around them for who they are and be glad of their presence is something that will ruin their lives for quite some time. Even unto the latest days, the Pattersons are never happy with what they've got and who they have to share it with. This, I should think, is because the Pattersons tend towards believing that appreciating what you have right here and right now is for quitters. Since whatever they have right now is obviously far worse than what the people who clearly have to be lording their blessedness over them have, they can't be grateful for the mere pittance a cruel fate allotted to them lest they have to accept the cruel mockery of people who think that they're better than they are. Trying to explain to them that no, no one is trying to enslave them with their family politics or crush them with their star power isn't going to work because the depressive element of their narcissism needs to see cruel enemies that want to kick them and mock them for wanting to be happy because otherwise, they're a bunch of grasping jerks who are consumed with jealousy and besotted by egomania.