![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
As the retcons and the strip itself teach us, John has no real use for any literature that isn't some form or another of an instruction manual. The reason that he doesn't like to read novels is, as I've said before, the same one that makes essay questions into a horrible and unfair ordeal his sadistic teachers used to humiliate and confuse him. The reason that he thinks of Elly's interests as being impractical is, of course, his fear of having to devote any sort of thought into what he believes and why he believes it. To do that is to risk the shame and eternal humiliation of having to realize that some of the things that he believes to be universal truths are not fit to be believed and his need to shape his world accordingly has made an ugly fool of him. Reflection also places him in the dire peril of having to see that his pursuit of ludicrous, destructive and self-serving phantasms that he was wrong to ever have even considered have made his decisions witlessly arbitrary and himself to an insensitive ogre who delights in the cruelties he maliciously inflicts thereby putting him in the terrifying position of having to apologize to people. Since he's as smart as a sack of hair, he assumes that if he apologizes, he won't be allowed to stop.
Since he'd rather not admit that having to ask himself why he believes what he believes and if what he believes is worth believing in terrifies him, he dismisses the whole scary phenomenon as being impractical and people who write fiction as pretty much making their money doing nothing much at all. It is thus that he tends to be a lot more fatherly to Gordon Mayes who works with machines and is thus sensible than to Mike who somehow or other isn't quite manly enough to work with engines like he should.
This unbelievable belief is as misguided and silly as all of the other delusions that bedizen the fatuous clot. Gordon, as a for instance, isn't animated by the same need John and Mike share to demean people to show them who's boss nor does he tell people that they need to lose the bothersome tendency to resent being called names. He also doesn't call the need to think of the feelings of those around him before opening his fat yap 'being muzzled' because he's not a spoiled brat. Since John sees things on a very superficial level, he can't see that Mike is far more like him that Gordon.
Since he'd rather not admit that having to ask himself why he believes what he believes and if what he believes is worth believing in terrifies him, he dismisses the whole scary phenomenon as being impractical and people who write fiction as pretty much making their money doing nothing much at all. It is thus that he tends to be a lot more fatherly to Gordon Mayes who works with machines and is thus sensible than to Mike who somehow or other isn't quite manly enough to work with engines like he should.
This unbelievable belief is as misguided and silly as all of the other delusions that bedizen the fatuous clot. Gordon, as a for instance, isn't animated by the same need John and Mike share to demean people to show them who's boss nor does he tell people that they need to lose the bothersome tendency to resent being called names. He also doesn't call the need to think of the feelings of those around him before opening his fat yap 'being muzzled' because he's not a spoiled brat. Since John sees things on a very superficial level, he can't see that Mike is far more like him that Gordon.
