Foobonia and Points West.

1. Her mother: When you take what Lynn has said about the woman and sum it up, you get the following: "My mother expected me to behave like a human being instead of a selfish little monster and to do things that bored me....PITY ME!!"
2. Her teachers: We get much the same need to be pitied because of their insistence on her not acting like a destructive, defiant jerk as well as applying herself to things that bored her. Further pity is required because they didn't take the time to look past the sullen need to attack anyone who allows as how she doesn't know what's good for her to find the nice kid buried under the screwed-up twit.
3. Her brother Alan: When she's not whimpering for sympathy because he was allowed more freedom despite being younger just 'cause he has a penis, she's moaning because her parents never admitted that he had to obey her.
4. Men in general: Every so often, Lynn whinnies about the crazy, no-way fantasy world-wide conspiracy of all men everywhere to destroy her freedom of expression and to chain her to a stove.
5. Her ex-husbands: When they're not cheating on her, they do things that annoy her. This means that we are asked to pity her.
6. Other women: I've already talked about the other super-crazy impossible fantasy cabal of all that attractive women in the world to steal any man Lynn might be interested in so that they can laugh at her as she dies old, miserable, ugly and alone so I shouldn't really have to repeat it.
7. Her children: Since she believes in the ridiculous myth of the writers' trance, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that we're expected to lavish pity on her because they want her to waste her time on the unimportant things that bore her called 'their childhoods.' Well, that and she's expected to also clean.
8. Hating Haters who Hate: When she's not dealing with awful people and their baffling need to have their personal lives not appear on the printed page, she's bleating about the need to be pitied because horrible, cruel, unfair people expect the too much of her that is called taking the time to not churn out crap.

As we're bearing witness to, this current arc shows us Connie at her lowest ebb, her least sympathetic. That's because we see a woman who built up an elaborate and essentially dishonest fantasy relationship based on casual sex and polite but essentially meaningless conversations faced with a dilemma: should she pursue the matter further and ignore the son who pines away from her for so long as it takes to get thoroughly humiliated or cut her losses, admit her folly and rush home while cursing herself for losing sight of what really matters? Since she chose the former option, we start to see that Connie has a tendency to put her needs ahead of those of her children when push comes to shove. She is thus a character with an obvious and well-defined flaw and, as such, joins such other heroes as Elly-the-ungrateful, John-the-entitled, Mike-the-envious, Liz-the-clingy and Anthony-the-filthy-abomination. As we all of us know, these people are not the nice, friendly bunch we thought they were when we only spent a minute or two thinking about the strip; they are, instead, a bunch of low-lives with crippling defects that hamper their ability to live their lives. This might sound a bit odd but I often ask why Lynn doesn't simply embrace their assiness and make it a selling-point. She could say "Look at my family of anti-heroes! They make you feel good 'cause you're not them!" This, of course, would mean that she herself spends more than thirty seconds thinking about her strip. Since she doesn't, she joins Inman and Ryan W from Seattle in thinking that the Pattersons are a swell bunch of guys.

When I first saw last Sunday's strip, I expected a certain reaction on Coffee Talk based on what I'd seen before. Let's use the strip that had Elly steamroll Michael into agreeing that throwing away the rest of his Halloween candy was a good thing as an example of said trend. We started with people who think like we do angrily denouncing her for being a bully, ogre, idiot and twerp; this was followed by the usual reminders that it was simply a comic strip and thus not worrying about and letters that explained that we didn't see what we thought we did. The consensus amongst Lynn's defenders is that Elly thought she was helping John in his campaign to protect the family's teeth. This led me to expect that we'd have seen letters that referenced Amber alerts as well as comments from retail workers who resent the implication that they're free babysitters for the Ellys of the world followed by rebuttals that stated that a) Elly was actually in the same theater as Mike only we couldn't see her, b) if Lynn says they're old enough to go by themselves, they're old enough to go it alone, c) let them have childhoods, pickyfaces or d) get a life, they're not actually real unless they do something I like. What we saw was one letter that questioned Elly's parenting chops floating in a sea of letters about everything else. This tells me that whoever's in charge of screening Lynn's e-mail didn't want to touch this with a ten-foot pole but didn't want it to look like the subject was being totally ignored; they're probably waiting for the heat to die down so they can move on.

clio_1 noticed something odd about John yesterday. That odd thing is that John sees the things that Elly does as having a positive value, as being important in and of themselves, as being able to provide meaning to someone's life. Unlike Elly, who doesn't think that her life as a stay-at-home-mother has any purpose, he actually does think and goes out of his way to state that raising children, cooking, cleaning and the rest of the housework that she does is a worthwhile way to spend one's time; he's thus baffled by the notion that she denigrates all the good and useful things she does as a waste of time. The idea that housework is time lost is not something that seems to occur to most of the people who tell Lynn that she has a camera in their house either; they may sympathize with Elly when she gets frustrated because they get frustated sometimes themselves. What they don't do is realize that they're happier and nicer people than the woman they idolize because they don't think that they're pissing away their lives doing nothing that makes an impact. They also don't notice that Elly's smirking goofball husband is on their side with respect to how good their lives are.

As you know, Lynn’s fans fear and hate the day when they don’t get new material; that’s because, as has been said by wiser voices than my own, that they live for their daily hit of Foob. If Lynn were to do what she really probably wanted to do and retire, they’d be beside themselves with confusion and rage. They’d also look for someone to blame for the inevitable disappearance of the strip as a phenomenon. Sadly, they have a commonality: the hatred of critical voices. The same people who view the strip as being real when things that move or impress them happen call it a light-hearted romp when someone tells them to think about what they’re reading. They’re convinced that Lynn actually reads her mail and is heart-broken because people say her column is bad; this, they think, will cause her to give up creating new Foob for them to gush over so we haters are who’ll they blame when she decides she’s bored with the strip and wants to take up painting landscapes like a serious artist.

As you know, there's been a lot of speculation as to when the new-runs are supposedly taking place. Some people think that we're seeing a distorted version of the 1980s while others think we're in a timeless void wherein the passage of time has no meaning. The thought that we're actually reading the adventures of a new group of Pattersons living in a retro-cool version of 2009 is one that few of us are willing to accept. Sadly, accept it we must for a while; Lynn's latest decree is that the new-runs are happening in the present day. This makes fools of all her gushing fans eager to see back into the Patterpast when they're actually reading what could be called Ultimate Foob. This also gives Lynn a nifty way to deflect criticism for the recent rash of re-reruns; when the strips we recently saw were reprinted last summer, we were meant to think that Elly was reminiscing about being a testy failure way back in 1980. She likely intends to explain their re-reoccurence as the misadventures of the Elly of Earth-2 for whom these things are happening for the first time. Since she can't really keep track of what she's doing, though, we can expect to see strips from after the start of the new-runs appearing soon all over again.

As I mentioned before, the new-runs have one commonality with the original strip: in both versions of history, you could be forgiven for assuming that the Pattersons don’t have a dog. Farley was pretty much a big, shaggy no-show while he was alive, after all: his fame, as we all know, was due to his unnecessarily heroic death. The buckets of crocodile tears the inept twits who had neither patience or respect for him when he was alive convinced a generation of unobservant suckers that he was some sort of wonder-dog that was the center of attention in the Pattermanse. Now that whoever’s left reading the new-runs are beginning to see how little he really mattered, it might occur to them that Lynn played them. Then again, they might be stampeded into blaming the mean, cruel people who insist that Lynn’s creation make sense and adhere to the moral precepts that we all must live with.