Elly in the public sphere.

As we're seeing right now, the reason Elly has launched herself on this ridiculous crusade is that someone made the mistake of angering her enough to forget all about the silly old poems because the need to stop people from tearing down the wonderful place she just learned about so they can build their horrible arena of playing the team sports that bore, confuse and frighten her because she got her nose broken by a pop-up fly ball once and she won't get over it because that would mean that crap like that happens without anyone intending for it to happen. Since she immediately wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper instead of heading to the new town hall to ask what the deal was, it seems to me that Jim never bothered telling her how the political process worked because the old goat assumed that her husband's job was to supply her with her opinion on that sort of matter. This is why she was hopelessly confused when Radcliffe tried very patiently to explain that he'd have loved to help out but quite frankly, there isn't much interest in saving an old building whose fate was sealed pretty much the same time that her highest priority was getting a stupid child his own potty because some other idiot had brain failure and forgot to bring it with her. The end result is that, as I said, she wound up looking like the clueless idiot she sort of was.

This, of course, is not to say that things would have gone much better had John or Sue told her to go down to the new town hall to speak to someone about the problem. Not only would she make a wild and stupid accusation about how they were trying to keep her in the dark about the process when they told her that if she'd wanted to do something when it had mattered, she should have responded to one of the many flyers they'd distributed about the subject, she'd have accused them of trying to lie to her when they tried explaining that the arena and the town hall had nothing to do with one another. I can see a situation in which they're going to hold the sort of meeting Elly attended and do all the other stuff she wants funded in something called a cultural center they had built for that purpose. Explaining that what she wants has a new, better home that isn't going to take money they don't have to get up to code isn't going to fly because she takes everything too God-damned personally. Having a nice new theater is going to be a defeat because they want her to stop talking and never have an opinion on anything. Simply put, she'd rather do something futile because she wants the right to say stupid things...stupid things about how awful it is that we have clean drinking water and rivers not fouled by our excrement when we could be funding interpretive dance.