The competence conundrum.

The VERY interesting thing about watching Mike stand there and get lectured about how, despite his unshaking and unshakable belief otherwise, people aren't actually all bit performers content to be bystanders in the drama of the life of Michael T Patterson, Axis About Which This World Rotates is having to notice the real reason why the editor took apart his very good story: someone had to come in after the fact and tell the city editor who the Hell crashed in the first place!!!

That's right, people! Michael had the one job (find out what's happening and who it's happening to) and Mister "The Living Buried The Dead" was too busy being a pompous, grandstanding twerp to bother actually doing it. Not, of course, that Lynn or the Pattersons see it that way. Just as when a Patterson blurts out a brainless pseudoprofundity about how prairie and prayer HAVE to be connected, she's wise beyond her years instead of being a ferblondzhet idiot with an advanced case of recto-cranial loopback, we have to deal with the following truism:

The more obviously inept a Patterson is at what he or she is supposed to do, the more we are supposed to believe in his or her being scarily competent and also too awesome to actually live.

Hey, look, a distraction: the joys of exploiting focusing on the wrong thing.

Of course, the predictable thing about Mike not really getting the job done is that the Pattersons were so busy focusing on how insensitive he was to realize that having the common decency to care about who the subject of a story is happens to not only be the decent thing to do, it's also good business sense. If you insist on treating people as if they're random carbon blobs who do random unaccountable things merely to irritate or entertain you, no one is actually really going to trust your opinion. Good thing for him that he started wailing about how someone with the power to do something about his being Dick Van Head, Natural Born Shitty Reporter distracted his parents from actually understanding what his major malfunction is.

If that hadn't happened, they might have started to realize that as an observer of the human parade, Michael has the handicap of being a short-sighted mental pigmy who doesn't especially want to know why people do what they do. Why, they might even start to think that someone whose idea of a deep observation is the phrase "And the living buried the dead" was as blind to motivation as the dumb kid whose magnum opus is "Sum kidz wuz lost an'then waz fownd."