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As I reminded you yesterday, one of the more annoying Halloween arcs concerned the destruction of John's model train set by a group of local youths who took advantage of his stupid need to create an opportunity for mischief by leaving it out all night and Elly's stupid refusal to get that back gate closed properly. A few weeks later, Jermy-wormy Jeremy told April who smashed the crap out of John's vandal magnet; it turned out that it was two good kids from good homes revved up into doing something bad by a bad kid from the wrong side of the tracks. This, sadly, was not the first instance in which a character's background was assigned a moral element; we not only had to contend with the implication that Kortney's boyfriend was a born thief because he was of a lesser breed without the law, we also had our noses rubbed in the 'fact' that Gordo's parents bashed him up because that's what the lower ranks do.
This snobbery, this blank-witted insistence that income is destiny, this snobbery would be hard enough to bear on its own were it not for the fact that the Pattersons stand revealed as a band of hypocrites. After all, one of the things that most seemed to agitate Deanna in her "Please, Please, PLEASE!!!! hate Mira" letter was that she was a social climber whose greatest known crime was forbidding Dee from associating with The Wrong Sort as a child. The funny thing about all of Deanna's squealings about her mom is that we have no context by which to judge her; it could well be that as a nurse, Mira might have heard about how a member of that clean, hard-working family was a pedophile and acted to protect her idiot daughter. Given how full of shit Deanna is at the best of times, it's clear that when she does the same thing, she'll join the rest of the Pattersons in not being honest about it.
That's what galls me the most, you see; it's bad enough that the Pattersons are white trash who think that they're better than other people or that they presume to randomly damn everyone who isn't of the right background, it's that they don't have the decency to admit it. I can take snobbery when it's given its right name but I cannot tolerate the sort of denial that is almost as necessary to the Foobs as oxygen.
This snobbery, this blank-witted insistence that income is destiny, this snobbery would be hard enough to bear on its own were it not for the fact that the Pattersons stand revealed as a band of hypocrites. After all, one of the things that most seemed to agitate Deanna in her "Please, Please, PLEASE!!!! hate Mira" letter was that she was a social climber whose greatest known crime was forbidding Dee from associating with The Wrong Sort as a child. The funny thing about all of Deanna's squealings about her mom is that we have no context by which to judge her; it could well be that as a nurse, Mira might have heard about how a member of that clean, hard-working family was a pedophile and acted to protect her idiot daughter. Given how full of shit Deanna is at the best of times, it's clear that when she does the same thing, she'll join the rest of the Pattersons in not being honest about it.
That's what galls me the most, you see; it's bad enough that the Pattersons are white trash who think that they're better than other people or that they presume to randomly damn everyone who isn't of the right background, it's that they don't have the decency to admit it. I can take snobbery when it's given its right name but I cannot tolerate the sort of denial that is almost as necessary to the Foobs as oxygen.
