Foobonia and Points West.

One of the things that we’re going to see as the years go on is that Mike has it in his head that Elly is never really there for him when he needs her to be. While it’s convenient to ascribe this to his listening too well to John’s stream of misogynistic rantings and observing that he’s “right” to demean the women around him, there’s more going on than his being brainwashed into becoming the next immature, entitled dolt patriarch. We have to contend with the fact that Elly actually is a reluctant parent; not only is she filled with anxiety about her place in the world, she’s not comfortable around children and it shows. The end result is a little boy who’s either wondering what’s wrong with him that she has to avoid him or what’s wrong with her that raising him isn’t good enough for her and who is destined to grow into a man who wants a wife who feels guilty about having a life outside the home. How fortunate for him that Deanna's need to not be Mira means that he has one. The curious thing is that Elly’s visible absence is what appeals to Deanna; the fact that Elly is in the background instead of a dominating presence appeals to our Stepfordized heroine who resents the well-meaning rhinoceros she calls a mother for looming over her instead of letting her vegetate like a Patterson. Her need to prove her hated mother wrong not only means that she deprives her children of things for their own good, she also cheers on every stupid decision her idiot husband makes. Given that Mike remembers how Elly was always in his or John's face when they did something dumb, this appeals to him.

• First off, he looks like a man but acts like a selfish little boy who thinks that his need to make a foolish spectacle of himself is the highest priority in the world; the needs of his family and society at large are a distant second place to his zooming around with a toy like a four-eyed Peter Pan.
• Next, one must contend with his complete lack of any regard for the feelings of the people in his life. He says and does what he wants and if other people get in the way, too bad for them. The upshot is that people who are genuinely hurt as the result of his inconsiderate and self-serving actions get mocked by a douchebag in a train engineer's outfit.
• He compounds his assiness by being amazingly sensitive to the least sign that he is not respected; like any brash pissant who gets off on riding roughshod over all the people in his field of vision, Johnny Boy is outraged at the least sign of disrespect. He also gets to define when he is disrespected so if you ask too many questions or don't give him the answer he wants when he wants it, watch the Hell out!!
• It's not bad enough that he's a self-serving, callous hypocrite suffering from the delusion that his family is trying to usher in primeval chaos because their hopes and dreams don't happen to coincide with the historically-shallow shibboleths he confuses with divine law; he's also a slow-witted clodhopper who needs three months' warning to figure out what's going on around him
• Finally, he's that most dangerous sort of hapless imbecile; the one that boasts about how he's smarter than any woman he's ever met. The idea that they have the right to tell him what to do depresses and confuses him because, well, he's an idiot.

The recent strip in which Michael, who was told to build a snowman with the kit he was given, instead built a freakish-looking monstrosity that no normal child his age would make is symptomatic of a problem he has. Simply put, he has the annoying need to antagonize people who waste his time trying to teach him things when he'd rather sit on his ass watching TV by engaging in moronic horseplay; this, of course, is because he hates the idea of people telling him what to do despite the fact that, left to his own devices, he can't think of a productive way to spend his time. Therefore, I think it's fairly to safe to describe Michael as a bland, dull, somewhat lazy, by-the-numbers drone of average intellect who needed a firm, even hand to grow up and grow out of being the dismally dimwitted specimen his panicky idiot teachers describe as a non-linear thinker and who slapped said hands away because his idea of paradise is sitting in a pile of his own filth and listening to the shrill cries of the people that he upsets doing so. This leads me to my point; it takes two sets of people to make sure that a dunce who thinks he's too smart to obey the same rules as everyone else does learns that the Sun does not after all shine out of his sphincter. The first group, of course, are teachers who have the patience to disabuse the buffoon of the idea that there's a pill he can take to be instantly good at something and that people respect those capable of sacrificing a bit of their time in order to excel instead of those who whine about having to do things they don't want to. The second group is parents who don't suffer from delusions of grandeur. The problem there is that Elly seems to suffer from megalomania-by-proxy which causes her to misinterpret what Mike's teachers say, as the following examples will attest:

The reason for Elly's refusal to see how incredibly average Michael is is sadly a simple one; if he's not destined for greatness, she cannot bask in the glow of his fame and herself have to accept being an ordinary mortal. It's also why she turns a sullen but essentially docile couch potato into an unstoppable menace; if he's a minimum cinch to handle, she not only can't wrap herself in the warm, comfy blanket of martyrdom, she'd have to admit that she was a high-strung idiot who screams about total non-events. Since admitting any of those things would mean that people who aren't supposed to know what they're talking about because they make a point of talking about how clueless and inept their parents are instead of slavishly following their example, common sense be damned, are right, she's not going to do it. She'd sooner swallow strychnine than her pride.

• Connie: Her initial reaction to this was to sit in her hotel room and wonder if she should do the sensible, decent thing and return home. Since she stayed in Montreal and groused about how she wasn't going let Fate get in the way of her seeing Phil, it seems to me that she might have thought that Lawrence had done this on purpose to make her feel bad and ruin her chances to get a man; what's more, when she lamented her stupidity afterwards, she didn't focus on what had happened to her son but more on how she looked. This tells me that she regards Lawrence as a threat to her image more than anything else.
• Elly: While she started out doing her typical "Look-at-me-and-how-overburdened-I-am" bit, she soon showed actual concern for her charge's well-being and remorse for her oversight. It's too bad that Connie managed to convince her that it was someone else's fault; after someone she trusts tells her that it's the child's fault for getting hurt, she's well on the way to standing beside a river wondering why April is trying to make her look bad.
• Mike: We started this mess with his being more worried about his bike than his supposed friend and we plod onwards with him being all pouty and selfish about how lucky Lawrence is to get all this special treatment. It would seem that the roots of his rushing into a fire to save a manuscript without thinking about his wife and children are fairly deep.
• Phil: He regards at as a misfortune that this might happen but, since he has no real idea how much Connie has invested in her screwball fantasy, doesn't realize that telling her to not worry because the same Elly whose negligence made the accident a certainty can at least not do more damage.

The reason, of course, for Michael's spotty record as a decision-maker is that he's one of the most muddle-headed characters on the funny pages. From the earliest days of the strip to the Settlepocalypse, we see him leap from one faulty conclusion after the other and it messes up life for everyone. Here are some of my favorite lapses in logic:

• The weird notion that his parents were about to put him out on the curb with the rest of the old trash they didn't need any more when they brought Lizzie home from the hospital; the end result of this was years of pointless nastiness that always got him into trouble.


• His constant whining every time Elly started discussing getting a job or go to night school seems based on the belief that she wants to work outside the home because she hates him and wants to get away from him. What really hurts is that years later, he wished that she could have somehow found the time to continue the education that her guilty conscience made her give up.


• The confusing notion that it's always the fault of the accuser when he's punished for misbehavior; to him, it's not about him being a destructive twit, it's about Lizzie/his mother/Teacher for not having a sense of humor. This is, of course, symptomatic of the baffling notion he has that no matter how many times he does a particular stupid thing, he won't get punished.


• Finally, we have to deal with his belief that, despite his being Nature's Perfect Patsy, he is large and in charge. This is why he never twigged to the fact that Deanna spent her life setting him up to take the fall for her attempts to get back at Mira for daring to impose structure and discipline into her life; no matter how many times we saw her goading him into exposing himself to unearned hostility, his vanity prevented him from seeing that he was being made a sap of.

You'll have noticed that the examples I've given all point to his infantile self-absorption, need to shift blame for his bad actions to his victims and smug ignorance; he never has grown out of thinking the world rotates around his whims, never admits that he might be the cause of his misfortunes and has never managed to correct what we may call a recto-cranial inversion. It would be bad enough if he were simply an exception to a rule; what makes it worse is that he was raised by chumps to be a chump. John is too impatient, foul-tempered and hidebound to reflect on what he's doing or why and Elly is either halfway to the loony-bin with rage or blaming everyone in the God-damned world for her mistakes most of the time so it's not as if he were exposed to clear thinking growing up. This means that he'll spend the rest of his life believing absurdities, spouting pseudo-profundities and writing books that show no sign that he understands how regular human beings think.

In a recent blog entry, howtheduck noticed that Lynn left a fairly large gap to be bridged before she can go to straight reprints. That's because she used a lot of the strips that surrounded the "Connie goes to Montréal arc" last year and thus cannot use them now. It seems to him that what she will do is to fill that in with strips that show us that Elly, despite being talented and wanting to do well in night school, will have her ambitions curtailed by an outside influence. Given that we're in for an extended arc that "shows" us that her not paying attention to Mike leads to his getting into mischief, it's clear that she'll be forced to scale back her goals because of him. This, as I said before, sort of colors what we will see later on; Michael will be seen as a sullen and more enduring obstacle to her hopes and dreams and thus a more appropriate target for her revenge than John. In the fullness of time, she'll own every last horse he has to pay him back for what he's doing in the here and now. The second bridging sequence will appear some time in the last few days of March as John and Elly get ready for the parents-teacher conference that will probably lead us into the era of straight reprints. After that, Elly will decide that she'd rather not buy a new electric can opener because it costs 'too much' only to turn around and bellow at John because he bought a stereo with his tax refund and we'll be back to where Lynn should have started over in the first place.

The nifty thing about the catalog is that it allows you to go back to pretty much the beginning of the strip and discover themes that might otherwise have escaped your attention. Since it's pretty much Michael's ninth real anniversary, let's explore how his love life was affected by the Holiday season:

• 1988: For some odd reason, John and Elly decided that the Pattersons should spend Christmas at his parents' farm in Aberdeen, Manitoba. This was sort of awkward for everyone given the cramped conditions, the fact that Mike and Lizzie weren't used to life on a working farm (which meant having to get up at seven instead of sleeping in like they were used to), the septic tank freezing due to a surprise flash freeze requiring them to use a honey bucket, the need Carrie had for quiet and the clash of personalities. What really made things suck was the fact that thirteen year old Mike was upset that he got dragged away from his friends in general and Martha in particular; Elly's response to that was to come to the inane conclusion that she needed to save her son from Martha's smothering embrace.


• 1995: The primary cause of drama was that his girlfriend Rhetta wanted to date other people while they were at school; her reasoning was that they should get all that out of their systems while they were in University so that when they got back together after graduation, they could settle down to a steady and quiet life together. Mike's response to this, of course, was to whine "Goodbye" and spend the rest of his life simpering about how a false-hearted woman tore his out and trod on it.


• 1988: This, of course, was when he declared his love for Dee by shouting it from a rooftop like a crazy person.


• 2000: The Secret Wedding; I've trod over this ground enough for you to know what I feel about it so I'll simply state my disgust that Dee gave her mother the gift of hypocrisy.

There's a unifying theme that I've noticed: Mike has being in love with being in love in common with Liz. He also shares her superficial nature; the thin layer of charm that people admire covers an endless succession of thin veneers. Once you peel them all away, there's nothing there as evidenced by the imbecilic reasons he gives for referring to his previous two love interests as Jezebels. Since he's a simpleton, he still doesn't know that Martha was the victim of Elly's campaign to drive a wedge between them because she represented the popular girls who got all the boy in high school while Elly, who probably trudged down the halls with a scowl on her face moaning that no one liked her, cried in her pillow because she didn't know why she was unpopular. As for Rhetta, she betrayed him by wanting to see other people when she was 'supposed' to have no social life at all; he, of course, was allowed to tomcat around like an idiot 'cause he was the guy.

Now that it's sort of obvious that the New-Ruins are more or less a director's cut of the original time line, it seems clear now that the writing class story arc is taken on an importance it never had before. As howtheduck said, Elly will be shown to have genuine promise as a writer only to have her potential squashed by her 'loving' family. The casual, unthinking malice and selfishness on their part will change how we see them and how we see Elly herself. This is because, as I've said, Elly seems to have spent her life trying to become a person in her own right instead of someone's something and never quite got there; her one shot at becoming Elly the writer instead of John's wife or Mike's mom having been taken away from her will inspire her to seek revenge by controlling their lives. Since we know she succeeds, let's see what they did and how she nailed them:

John: It seems to me that the arc will end with John issuing an ultimatum that more or less forces Elly to give up her dream until such time as her children are old enough to take care of themselves; this will be seen as the insanely panicky over-reaction to a non-event that less rigid souls would not use as blackmail material. The means of her vengeance will be to encourage his model train hobby; since she knows she's a boorish perfectionist, his need to tinker will drive away lesser enthusiasts, isolate him and turn him into a walking punchline.

Mike: It's not hard to see who causes John to go loonie and browbeat Elly into flushing her hopes down the crapper. Something that Mike does will so horrify John that he goes looking for something out of the ordinary to blame his own failings on; that something will, of course, be Elly's attempt to better herself. To put it bluntly, Mike has to become a flabby shnook churning out pabulum for Lifetime because his idiocy ruined Elly's life.

Liz: It seems to me that the Settlepocalypse is simply Elly getting teal-and-lavender revenge on her daughter; if she can't have an exciting life, neither can Liz. This is why she went out of her way to sell a man she knows to be the same sort of whining moral bully and smirking hypocrite as John.

It could also be that Elly's later refusal to take child safety seriously as she should is a nasty side-effect of John's cancellation of her destiny; since running around like a fool keeping idiot children from killing themselves is getting in the way of her happiness, she'll do so with great reluctance.