What would the neighbors think, part one: enemies of the Foobs.

It's well established in Lynn's mind that certain characters are meant to be bad examples. However, this tends to come a cropper since their moral failings of most of them aren't obvious to us, the reading public. I can accept the nastiness of bullying sneak-thief Kortney, brutish satyr Howard and Candace's sexual predator stepfather, while holding my tongue on Lynn's preferred method of dealing with the problem. You can't keep this sort of nastiness 'in the family' nowadays, thank you very much, ma'am. The reason they stopped doing that and going to the cops is 'coz it didn't effing work. The problem is that she seems to see certain sorts of normal, everyday people as a dangerous menace to the social order, by which she means St. Elly the Smug's bogus authority. I've already discussed Mikerobe's 'interfering meataxe' mother-in-law, who's busily being upbraided for doing the sort of thing that would be praiseworthy if done by the Foob matriarch. In the real world, she'd be a rather sympathetic figure, ill-used by an ungrateful daughter and her jackass son-in-law. In fact most of the people she sets up as villains are cartoon ogres who'd be objects of either sympathy or admiration in the real world. This includes 'bad girl' Rebecca. What has she done to earn the imbecile scorn and petty calumny (e.g. going 'roadside') heaped on her by the conflicted hate-tank in charge? Simple as pie, the girl reacts like a human being to the world around her. Does she mouth hollow platitudes about 'the differently abled' like our charmed circle of sham progressives? Nope, she reacts honestly. Does she stand around with a blindly optimistic smirk in the face of impending familial doom? Heck no, sailor: she acts on her frustration. Does she agree to stay in the hokey-ass garage band approved of by Kitschmeister Lynn? Again, no, she signs a record deal to get as far away from suburbia as she can. THIS is her great crime, for which she must be punished by the Halloween concert. She actually wants to move away from Mommie's love. To understand Lynn's screwed-up advocacy of Mom-worship, I recommend going to library and checking out a copy a 'Generation of Vipers' by Phillip Wylie. The similarities between Elly and the subject of the chapter 'Common Women' should be most enlightening.