Foobonia and Points West.

Now, as we know, the whole point of the Arnold-smugly-tells-Elly-that-her-place-is-in-the-kitchen strip is to have some horrible man come in and ruin Elly's attempt to have an identity because that's what men do. They come along and insist that women can't have identities that aren't about serving male interests because men are pigs, rats, dogs, snakes and pretty much every zoo animal that disgusts Lynn. 

The problem with Unfrozen Caveman Farmhand's dog-in-the-manger act is, sadly, the whole Apaches vibe this arc has been giving off. Simply put, Danny, Bev and Arnold would probably stand around watching Poface McDeathseeker and his crew race around the farm looking for ways to accidentally self-terminate without seeing a bloody thing wrong with what's happening. This, of course, is owing to Lynn totally missing the point of what was said. In real life, someone probably lit into her for witlessly endangering herself and those around her by joyriding. Given her inability to admit ignorance, she transmuted "Check yourself before you wreck yourself" into "Stay in the kitchen." The problem with that is by having a man who's a chromosome away from cretinism lecturing her, it looks like he wants to hog all the reckless driving for himself. 

It doesn't take a genius to realize that Elly's belief that exposing her children to nature doesn't have the desired effect of making them wonderful. As we know, they arrive back from Exile Farm making inconvenient and baffling noise about being out of the loop and having been treated like a shitheel by that nice Cousin Laura. The reason that Elly doesn't see that being isolated from friends as being a problem is that she doesn't seem to have had very many friends growing up and probably left them all behind when she latched onto a nerdy, controlling assclown owing to either a pregnancy scare or the belief that if she didn't marry Train Man right then and there, she'd surely have died an old maid. Since she lost track of her besties from middle school and since she cannot and will not admit that what her kids go through is kind of a big deal even though it isn't happening to her, the fact that her children end up playing catch-up isn't even a blip on her radar. As for Laura being an annoying, condescending pain in the ass who needs a prophylactic kick in the teeth so as to prevent her from being even more of a snotty twit than she already is, Elly clearly sides with the verbal abuser instead of the child receiving the put-down because she thinks that the child has the gratuitous insult coming. The same impulse forces her to love Eva to pieces.

John is equally disappointed because he thinks that by exposing his children to the farm labor he couldn't wait to get away from, they'll finally admit that they're freeloading off of him and, since they insist on acting and thinking on their own instead of when a smirking pile of ordure with a train fetish wills it, are horrible and ungrateful children. To them, it looks like they're being singled out for punishment because they exist and are expected to state "I really am a horrible child for having free will and should pay you back every cent you ever spent on me with interest as penance. I appreciate being called a parasite and want more verbal floggings."

The end result of all of this is to drive home a lesson that Elly and John didn't intend to teach. It teaches the kids that John and Elly don't give a brass razoo what they think and hate the idea of doing so. Too bad that they've been so crippled by John and Elly's selfishness that they need to be parented.

Well, here we are, weeks away from the first of many, many strips in which John and Elly come to the stupid conclusion that what their children need is to be packed off to a farm to learn the value of doing hard work that they hate as well as to have a bored snotty twit of a cousin call them stupid and useless because they miss their friends, miss their homes and above all miss not being woken at an insane hour when it's supposed to be summer.

We know, of course, that said constant failure to let children just have quiet, unstructured fun comes from John's need to have his children's unquestioning obedience (as well as to have them grovel pathetically for forgiveness every single freaking day for forcing him to spend money on them) and from Elly's need to step on relationships to avenge herself on all the pretty girls who did better at romance because they weren't slouching, frowning morons who wore dissatisfaction with their lot in life like a suit of armor.

The question we must ask ourselves is "Did their parents do anything remotely like that to them?" I could almost understand it if the Patterelders or the Richardses were in the habit of packing their children off to summer camp or something but I really don't think so. What we're dealing with is dumb, mean people making a hash out of what in the hands of competent, caring parents would be the favor of getting out of the city to see something new. All they see on Exile Farm is more adults griping about how lazy and spoiled they are.

As I’ve told you before, John and Elly seem to have it fixed into their tiny, self-serving brains that forcing their children to spend time on a farm is somehow magically supposed to cure whatever perceived imperfection that most bothers them. They, of course, vary in what imperfection needs to be addressed: Elly wants to cure her children of liking people that threaten her and John needs obedience from his children to silence the dying voice in his head that tells him that he’s an insensitive, selfish, dishonest, entitled worm who never did a God-damned thing to earn the respect that he demands.

As with all of their other great big schemes, this redemption-through-exposure-to-horses thing came a rather ridiculous cropper. Instead of the wise farmhands who’d guide their children on the path to righteousness television led them to expect, Mike and Liz found the sort of people John spent his youth plotting to get away from: abrasive loudmouths who exist to cut down tall poppies like train-obsessed dentists and the rocket-jawed wives they married. Not only that, there’s nothing to do and no one to do it, they can’t talk to their friends and any attempt they get to find a sympathetic ear is smirkingly rebuffed by their cousin-turned-babysitter.

The end result of this is to make them amplify and distort the hardships of country living. Were we to look at Dan and Bev’s place, we’d see a rather homey little spread that’s almost out of a postcard; Mike and Liz shudder in horror at the memory because they remember it as being the holdover from the late Victorian era depicted in Stone Season. If you’ve ever wondered why a farm in the early fifties was described in terms that made you think that Harvey Rood took Sheilaaarrrrrghhh back to the 1880s in his time machine, you’ve got John and Elly to thank for it.