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As we know, John seems to be content to keep himself at arm's length from the rest of his family's concerns. He justifies this stupid, chicken-hearted habit of letting Elly do all the heavy lifting because as someone of conservative temperament, he regards it as being her function in life to ride herd over the kids while he sits on his fat ass cowering behind a newspaper or on his stupid workshed. HOW he describes this is especially telling. As one of his letters about the chaos of the Housening that could have been mitigated had he the courage and decency to step in tells us:
All I can do is withdraw mentally a bit from the whole scene, become an observer, and try not to have any feelings about the situation.
Translated from Pompous Ass to Regular Person, what he, as I've said before, meant is that he doesn't actually want to get to know the people around him because it would 'muss up' his mind by having the evidence of his senses contradict his prejudices. He's been married to Elly for forty-six years or so but my gut tells me that he still hasn't the least fucking clue who she actually is because learning would make him out to be a closed-minded doughhead who actually was the bad guy. This seems to extend to the children he never actually bothered getting to actually meet or learn about. He sends them to farms to adjust attitudes and makes sweeping generalizations about people who he doesn't know and never wanted to.
The reason that I mention this is that despite it being next to impossible to care about someone as contemptible and dim as John, simple human decency mandates that one wish that it could have been otherwise. The world around him would have been immeasurably better if he hadn't stayed the oafish cluck who was too Goddamned chickenhearted to get off his ass, risk being proven wrong and be more than a dollar sign with a pulse.
All I can do is withdraw mentally a bit from the whole scene, become an observer, and try not to have any feelings about the situation.
Translated from Pompous Ass to Regular Person, what he, as I've said before, meant is that he doesn't actually want to get to know the people around him because it would 'muss up' his mind by having the evidence of his senses contradict his prejudices. He's been married to Elly for forty-six years or so but my gut tells me that he still hasn't the least fucking clue who she actually is because learning would make him out to be a closed-minded doughhead who actually was the bad guy. This seems to extend to the children he never actually bothered getting to actually meet or learn about. He sends them to farms to adjust attitudes and makes sweeping generalizations about people who he doesn't know and never wanted to.
The reason that I mention this is that despite it being next to impossible to care about someone as contemptible and dim as John, simple human decency mandates that one wish that it could have been otherwise. The world around him would have been immeasurably better if he hadn't stayed the oafish cluck who was too Goddamned chickenhearted to get off his ass, risk being proven wrong and be more than a dollar sign with a pulse.
