Foobonia and Points West.

It should come as no surprise that it doesn't take very long for Mike to sequester discomforting thoughts and facts and revert to living in a fantasy world wherein he's a smarter, cooler and more attentive boyfriend and any inconvenient personality traits Martha might have that diminish him by being as important to her as his are to him. This is because of the most annoying consistency in Patterson behaviour: a refusal to live in a reality that they are afraid will hurt them which marches in lock-step with a comically sinister inability to understand what the stakes are in any given situation.

Let us apply this to the stupid note protocol. As we know, Mike was too damned worried about being laughed at by four boys that he doesn't want to admit only tolerate him because he can be goaded into doing something entertainingly stupid. He assumes that if he is revealed to have said this and done that, everyone will laugh at him forever because he's kind of a dimbulb and also kind of immature and dorky. What he's not prepared for is the reality that is the normal person telling him "Wow. I used to think you were cool having a girlfriend but if you let her get away because of a dumb reason like that, I guess I was wrong." because he was raised specifically not to understand how normal human beings behave. It wasn't intentional, of course....just damned convenient for parents who want to make him into a sort of servant who caters to their whims in their dotage.

The interesting thing about the current arc is that we're about six or so months away from the arc that inspires the title of the collection it's in: "If This Is A Lecture, How Long Will It Be?" which runs from last June to pretty much next May. The arc in question features Pattersons dealing with conflict in the inept and counter-productive way they always do and leaves both combatants feeling like they've been crushed under the feet of a ruthless, implacable aggressor.

It should come as no surprise that what touches off this spate of mutual recrimination is the very minor issue of getting Mike prised loose from the rec-room couch to set the dinner table. We know damned well that the imbecile thinks that he's this great big mature person who's too damned big and important to be a slave-boy and we know equally well that Elly rushes off to caterwaul to her fellow pea-brained incompetent failure Connie about how the by-the-numbers petulance of a stupid kid who thinks that having to set a table makes him the victim of all victims surpassing all others makes HER the victim of all victims surpassing all others. He's filled with nitwit hostility because he thinks that he's being treated like a mule and she loses her shit like the raging dough-head she is when he identifies her correctly as a loud-mouth with an overweening need to lecture people about how they're horrible monsters who can never please her.

The end result is that both people are both aggressor and victim at the same time and it's not their fault that they butt heads over non-issues. The less important a problem is, the more furiously they fight in order to distract themselves from the fact that when it really matters, they become paralyzed with indecision, doubt and fear. That's not their fault either because real problems that they need to take care of make them freeze up because they might be blamed for things if they go wrong. Since that can't happen, we can look back on their history and marvel that they didn't kill the fuck out of each other deciding on whose turn it is to walk Farley.

The very interesting thing about watching Elizabeth react to having done something wrong is having to watch Elly's being completely baffled by the fact that for some reason that eludes her, the reason Liz quotes for not fessing up as quickly as possible is her fear of being spanked. We know that neither she nor John would lay a hand on her because unlike a boy, their daughter has feelings that can be hurt so Mike gets his ass tanned for blinking funny while Liz could kill someone and just get a time out.

The reason that I mention this is that when Speedfreak McRichidjit vents his aggressive impulses by zooming around the passenger side of a stopped school bus and plows into John's Little Red Overcompensationmobile, Elly spends entirely too damned long either expecting to get slapped around or yelled at because she wants to 'feel better' by being subjected to the violence she either inflicts or wishes to inflict on people who mildly inconvenience her. Since she doesn't want to admit that John is more pissed off at Beardsly McLonghair for smacking into his joywagon than at her for getting smacked into, we get crap like what we're in for in four weeks' time.

We can thus turn this right back round on Lizardbreath and reveal her to be what she is: someone too timid to act on an impulse towards mayhem inflicted on people who make her feel like the pathetic drone she is.

The interesting thing about watching Connie be an inept fool who blundered her way into being an antagonist step-mother because she was too stupid to know what she was doing is not that she still doesn't realize that she brainlessly set herself up to fail yet another of life's challenges. The interesting thing is that her failure as any sort of effective parent to the Thomas girls reaches the point that their father has to do something Lynn finds to be unnatural and wrong and be primary caregiver in the face of his wife's incapacity.

This breezy assumption that a mother must resent the unrewarding necessity of being the only person competent to be a parent to a child seems to inform Liz's hatred and need to see Therese as her inferior. She can't live in a world where a woman would be indifferent to the need to nurture because it's been hammered into her skull all her life that her job is to pop out a squawler who will never thank her. Having a man come in and do her function as well as her or better means that her parents and friends are full of shit and not worth impressing and Liz isn't strong enough to face that.

Somehow or other, I've managed to find myself in the possession of the collection If This Is A Lecture, How Long Will It Be? and noticed something annoying. Not only do we have to deal with Lynn/Elly bleating about how men objectify women by having Mike a cloud that could either be Mickey Mouse ears or a pair of breasts as the latter, we have another piece of annoying interstitial art that has him scowl because either the school boards or Elly's idea of appropriate material for studying reproduction is a cutaway of a flower instead of the 'good' stuff. The reason that I mention this is that a certain fear of talking about sex is part of the strip itself and it ain't just her freaking out about Mike somehow getting a copy of a skin rag.

The arc I have in mind is all about Elly, her squealing about how it should be the State's job to save her from having any discussion about sex at all by making it illegal for kids to express any sort of curiosity about anything like that and the cowardly means by which she avoided doing so with April. While we are clearly meant to cheer her on for remaining woefully ignorant about her body and about human reproduction, the facts of the matter tend to cast her in something of a negative light. It's as if she's living proof that abstinence campaigns backfire because all three kids and Meredith were unplanned and came at super-inconvenient times. This wouldn't have happened if the dumb people allowed themselves to understand sex.

As we know, Elly never managed to disabuse herself of the notion that Mike's job is to take care of Lizzie for her. She's never going to admit that the worst possible person you could put in charge of (say) a three year old is a six-year old because even with all the good will and caring in the world, Mike didn't have the stamina, awareness, skills or authority to salvage the situation if it got really bad. Any hints otherwise and any anecdotal evidence that disproves Elly's philosophy would be waved aside because what happened to someone else couldn't possibly happen to her because she's a good parent.

The reason that I mention this is that now that we're in the middle years, it's getting even harder for Mike to actually do the job he actually shouldn't. Lizzie is large enough and fast enough and sufficiently articulate to subvert any attempts Mike might make to assert authority and he's complacent enough to assume that an older child would know better than to do things that would disturb him. The kid who understood that he had to keep an eye on her is being replaced by another improvident adult who lives and loves to tempt fate. Eventually, he'll howl Deanna's name because for reasons that elude him, his kids want him to look at them.

Of course, the real problem with April is not that in any real universe, she'd be having a rather depressing life being compared unfavorably to her idiotic drudge sister and lottery winner brother. The real problem is that we're dealing with a bunch of idiots who sort of think that she arrived when she did in order to inconvenience them all. It's probably futile to try to convince stupid people that no, there isn't a connection between a run-of-the-mill Alberta clipper dumping ice, sleet and snow on their stupid heads and closing roads to the hospital and the arrival of a child at home like farmers and poor people.

After all, Elly's cathartic poem of "I'll write a passive-aggressive pile of crap poem about sleepless nights attending to a colicky baby instead of beating it to death" reminds us that we are dealing with a very stupid and angry woman who doesn't understand that babies can't not react to pain and discomfort just so some overgrown five-year old who wanted a REALLY fancy doll she could put away when it became a bother can get some sleep. Assuming April was sitting in there consulting the weather forecast so as to determine the best time to make everyone's life worse is just par for the stupid course.

What makes things worse is that she's got an idiot husband who feels as if his peers think less of him because April wasn't born in a hospital like normal, said bovine twit sister who resents having to have ben her primary caregiver and said louse older brother who's still wetting himself when he has to remember being exposed to childbirth. Since the inconvenience of having a sister so much younger than they are is compounded by the melodramatic entry of said sibling, they too think that Family Guy is a documentary.

To continue merrily on from talking about how Michael made a mess of his love life by doing unto Martha what he would do unto Rhetta and how he basically hastened the permanent alienation of respectability-seeking hysterical idiot weakling Connie and Lawrence, it's fairly obvious that the horrible decision making process of the Patterson family seems to be the result of a fairly rigid pattern. As before, I will use the Housening as an example of this horrid decision making process because everyone is expected to like Mike's brain fart. How it was that Elly ended up having to play catch-up and April had to be defamed by a father in name only can be broken down in discreet steps.

• Stage One: Crisis Mongering. As we know, Michael insisted on not wanting to consider the many suitable dwellings suggested as substitutes for Lovey Saltzmann's Death-Trap Of Love. The ostensible reason is that most of the places were too expensive, too small or too run down but he gave the game away when he objected to having to deal with a lease. Mike and Liz seem to have been brought up to think that having to deal with a legal contract that explains what they are allowed to do as being a form of tyranny because they have idiot parents who don't like having limits set on their behavior. This inability to see the world properly also explains his fear of Mira. He can't cope with generosity because it's not something he grew up with so has to assume there's a catch.
• Stage Two: Self-imposed Blindness Michael might have spent most of his time talking about how hard things were on April but he never really did anything to defend her from her persecutors because he never really bothered understanding how the others reacted. He didn't take into consideration the fact that Liz was too preoccupied with the mess she stupidly made of her love life to care, he didn't want to look at his wife and see someone who wanted to turn the child into her serf, he didn't want to look at a mother who had decided to stop being a parent and he especially didn't want to look at a father who does not want to admit that children have feelings that can be hurt because doing so would make him look in the mirror and see the ugly fool we know him to be. All he could do was wish that he could move out but he had no solution to a problem that didn't involve being enslaved to Mira's family politics.
• Stage Three: Idiotic Deus Ex Machina Luckily for him, his need for a place that had an alcove wherein he could be protected from being part of his family coincided with John's infantile need for a smaller house that had land that could be wasted idiotically. Everyone was happy expect April for some reason that was probably just teenage hormones because the alternative is that they were dicks to her and that couldn't be the case.
• Stage Four: Sordid Victory The same asshole who wrote a break-up email because he was too lazy and blind and stupid to find out what Rhetta thought thinks that his bullying his mother and kid sister out of their home because he's a lazy, ignorant shmuck is a wonderful thing that everyone loves because the alternative is seeing that people are right to see him as a repellent joke.

We can plug anything into that structure and get the same result. We can plug in Liz getting all butt-hurt because Therese doesn't like her unwelcome presence in her life into it. We can plug Mike refusing to admit that Martha isn't trying to make a fool of him and also tell a crazy lie about crazy friends who have the crazy idea that her wanting to have a private life means she thinks they're better than they are. We can plug in his stupid belief that Lawrence tried to hide his sexual orientation in order to humiliate him. We can plug in April's refusal to admit that Becky brings out the jealous idiot in her. We'll get the same result: the Pattersons making ugly fools of themselves and thinking that they're great people.

At first blush, the Sunday strip that Elly not see any sort of use in all the hard work Brian had to do to programming his jumping man computer sprite because she can make a crude flip book in seconds looks like the bog-standard "Elly versus technology" strips that had her do battle with machines that weren't designed for an impatient idiot who resents the fact that the world doesn't have to freeze in place because she doesn't feel like catching up. The problem is that the computer is not really the problem. What I think that the problem happens to be is that Brian can't say "Computer....make a jumping man" any more that Phil can play something Elly can sing along to without having to do anything haaaaaard and baaaaaaad and wrooooong like thinking about what she's doing.

This is because if you look at the strip's history, you'll notice it's the hard work, dedication and skill that are the real problem the Pattersons have with other people. After all, whenever you see the Martian yap about the war Becky doesn't realize that she's declared, what she really means is that she resents that Becky is driven to get good at something because her parents declare that to be a pernicious and unnecessary hindrance to the good life. This ill-informed yapping about her turning her back on friends and fun to chase an evil, distracting star is little more than the balm people who don't have the stamina or will-power to get what they want use to soothe themselves when confronted with genuine greatness. It was ever thus, though. For every man or woman of genuine skill, there are at least a thousand resentful pygmies kicking at his or her shins because they won't put in the effort but still expect a pat on the head and a cookie for breathing.

Also, for those of you who talk about how much rushing about Elly does and how tired she always seems to be, let me point out that she wouldn't have wasted all that time if she put in real effort. If she'd learned to do the dishes and the laundry properly, she'd have saved herself at least ten man-years of wasted effort.

It occurs to me that a cursory reading of Annie and Steve's Liography leads one to a fascinating discovery. When you end up getting told that Annie's happy ending is worth more because she had to work like a piston to get it and that Steve's major malfunction is that he's a day-dreaming, apathetic, shiftless clod who waits for miracles and magic to happen when he should have worked and worked and worked and worked like he was supposed to, you end up with the realization that there's one law for pretty much everyone else on the planet and another law for the Sainted Patterson Family.

After all, most of the people who they deign to hate insist that they too must strive and be ambitious so that they can waste their lives and exhaust themselves and miss the miracle that Fate had granted them to balance out a life of privation and sorrow. Hard work is a wonderful thing for a Gordon Mayes because it serves the greater good and the sovereign cure to Steve Nichols because he's an ordinary man but plugging away at something and trying to be more than they are is a terrible thing for the Pattersons because it makes them bad people who want too much and also prevents them from experiencing the miracle of having what they want simply fall in their laps.

Now, a lesser person would assume that the strip is written by someone who's basically still a child who insists that while all of her classmates had to do the work and obey the rules that bore her and get in her way, she's a special snowflake that the rules don't apply to. A lesser person would also remember that such a person either doesn't notice the people who hold the door open for her or, like Mistah J, assume that people are put on this Earth for the sole purpose of holding doors open and needn't be thanked. Since most of the Pattersons are Lynn, what we end up with is a family of unappreciative clods who believe in a world of magic and unicorn farts because they refuse to acknowledge the people they're climbing over.