Foobonia and Points West.

Now that we're really getting serious about addressing old grievances, let's remember Elly's dethroning moment of suck. As we all know, the worst, most annoying thing Elly ever did was not push Anthony on a desperate-for-approval Liz; the worst, most annoying thing Elly did was to fail to secure the gate to the back yard when she knew how easily that a four year old could pry it open and keep April from damned near dying. We all remember the circumstances that led to that day; first off, Elly lied about how there'd be nothing for April to do on the cruise to shut her up, she failed to listen to repeated warnings to keep children within visual range because the Sharon river had overflowed because she herself wouldn't go down to the river so her child wouldn't, said child caught her in a lie and decided to have her own cruise and the rest is easily avoidable history.

Given that Elly was all about how something that was definitely someone's fault occurred because it was fated to and how John decided to buy peace by not letting the issue come up, the necessary confrontation with her own ineptitude, inattention, entitlement and thoughtlessness never occurred within the strip itself. Elly's refusal to learn her lesson from that led her to such triumphs as getting her ass in an uproar because April didn't want to make nice with a violent thug, not believing her when a thief threatened her and letting her asshole husband and cowardly idiot son steamroll the kid into accepting the Housening lest she become Deanna's maid.

This, of course, means that the biggest problem that would face a new team would be how to make Elly see the error of her ways without it looking completely unbelievable. It seems to me that the volunteer work Elly would be shown to be doing would be the best jumping-off point for her letting the skeleton out of her closet and putting it at the head of the table; what that means is that she'd have the sort of bad feeling everyone in the Star Wars universe has at one point or another when a certain child is concerned. It would seem to her that said boy or girl's parents weren't as attentive as they should be and, well, her own past as a negligent idiot awash in self-loathing and under-acknowledged doubt would galvanize her into action.

Said action, of course, would be telling the younger woman not to follow her own stupid example; it's not in Lynn to write Elly as the cautionary example she looks like to yours truly but a new staff would probably do so.

As you will recall, I'd suggested that at one point in my current series of posts that one of the turning-points of any sort of coherent new order would be Elly re-establishing her friendship with Anne Nichols; the reason why is that the new creative team would introduce a group of people Elly's age for her to hang around with with a view to making it a more palatable alternative to parenting her adult children. The reason this would be a good thing is that the strip doesn't actually speak to most people Lynn's age; reason: they're usually talking about how their children never write or call.

I know that I've talked before about how the last decade of the strip should have been about John, Elly and April living their lives and getting the occasional note from Mike and Liz. The reason that this did not happen Lynn's needs tended to turn the negative that is having parasitic adult children who could easily look out for themselves underfoot into the positive of Elly having something to do with her time.

The question that faces us is how one would go about making life in Milborough more like the real world. It seems to me that Liz, who'd have set things in motion by growing up and figuring out what she really wanted, would go first when she gets herself a teaching job in another large city; Elly would worry but that would be about it. After all, she'd have learned her lesson with Anthony and would be less likely to pry.

As for Mike, it seems to me that a good writer would ascribe his otherwise baffling need to move back to Milborough as being a side-effect of PTSD from the fire. We could then have him and Deanna work through their issues and decide that whatever the future holds for either of them, living in the Pattermanse shouldn't be part of the package. We'd have a moving little month or so as everyone danced around the idea of selling it; the complication that makes the most sense is their fighting the last war, so to speak, by being overly worried about what an indifferent April might have to say about the matter.

As for April, the most we'd see from her after graduation is the occasional letter or phone call from Calgary combined with a look at life in a large-animal veterinary practice.

By this time, Elly would be so busy with her new circle of friends, she'd shrug the feelings of emptiness off. For better or for worse, she'd finally have the freedom to do what she wanted and would hope the same for others.

Let's say, for sake of argument, that a new creative team would, as I implied yesterday, be true to Lynn's original vision of the strip by making Elly's sidekick the antagonist she started out as; the means, of course, would be Connie's fury that Elly had tired of dealing with an enabler who gave her good sounding advice with destructive results.

That being said, a re-evaluation of her friendship with Connie would lead Elly to reconsider how she sees Lawrence. While the old Elly was too filled with self-loathing to tell up from down, a woman who knew her own strength would deal with the admission that she'd been given the counter-productive argument that her children owe her things that they don't from a crazy woman and an ignorant man when she herself knew they were wrong by reconsidering the way she's seen by the community at large.

A resurgent friendship with Anne Nichols would seem to me to be the best way to do so; seeing that the woman she despised for being a doormat is a lot better company than the crazy woman she's defriending would do wonders for her. That's because, well, the way things look now, being with Connie seems to be a, well, rather suffocating thing. Connie, you see, would sooner admit that she was wrong to treat Lawrence like a burden than she would share. Anne, on the other hand, seems to be a more jovial, social type who'd help Elly get out of her funk and out of her shell.

The end result of gaining a human and humane perspective is that she'd finally start seeing that she and John were seen less as friendly folks eager to give the worthy a hand up and more as greedy jackasses looking for nest-eggs as a reward for doing the expected. Granted, she'd already have started to admit that she wanted things for her children that they didn't need to make her own life easier; this would just finish what Liz started.

The effect of that would be to finally start standing on her own feet and not expecting lackeys and children to do what she will not; granted, I don't expect her to totally give up her interest in the businesses that she and John invested in. I just expect her to take the phrase 'silent partner' more literally.

It seems to me that another annoyance that a new creative team might like to either purge or at least downplay is the extreme sibling rivalry that Liz and Mike have. This is because, well, most people aren't as insecure and immature as Lynn seems to be when her brother is concerned and they certainly don't think that the nasty behavior we see when siblings interact is in anyway normal and unpreventable.

The problem with that logic is that it was all perfectly preventable or at least could have been mitigated if certain things had not happened during Elly's second pregnancy and Lizzie's first year of life. The first thing, of course, would have been for Elly to not continually rant about how great it was to become a mother again and how lovely it was to have a new child within earshot of the younger without taking the time to tell him that there was still a place for him in the family. The second thing would be not act react is if she'd been asked to disembowel herself with a salad fork when he comes looking for reassurance and the third thing would be to try to remind him that other people's feelings are real.

This, of course, would have required Elly to behave as if she believed that what happened during childhood had lasting effects; while she herself reserves the right to resent Phil forever for all the crap he pulled while ignoring the fact that she gave as good as she got, she seems to not have realized that the rather vicious infighting, the name calling, the teasing, the bullying and the nastiness had any other effect than making her look bad in front of the neighbors. The extreme tunnel vision that seems to be her signature mental defect, of course, seems to require that she can only view the concerns of people in the exact same predicament as she's in as being in any way valid.

What would also have to happen is for Mike to listen to a voice that's been in his head all along; the same voice that told him that he was being a jerk to Martha and Rhetta because his stupid pride was hurt is also trying to tell him not to behave like a swine around Liz just because he feels left out; just as he never asked to be born to a father who selfishly assumed that he was owed every penny he spent on his children because he did what he was supposed to, Liz never asked to be born the younger sister to an insecure twit who lashes out because his feelings were hurt and because he was asked to be primary caregiver by someone who doesn't know what she's doing.

The sea change would, I assume, happen when he and Deanna started noticing that Meredith's grades were starting to suffer and, well, they'd gotten a lot of calls from teachers asking if they would kindly come down to the school to discuss a problem that their eldest won't talk about. Said problem, of course, would be that Merrie had been the target of the same sort of bullying and name-calling that Brad subjected Mike to back in the day. Under Lynn's hand, the whole thing, of course, would turn into an opportunity for leaden moralizing about how losers need to win and similar mush.

In the hands of a competent author, however, it would have finally gotten Mike to remember that he'd been an ass to Liz all his life because of things beyond her control; he could no more hide behind the petulant and self-serving whine that she'd deserved to be punished for being cuter than he could fly without the aid of wings and an engine. I, of course, don't expect him and Liz to suddenly (or, for that matter, ever) be best friends but what I do expect is for him to finally see the past clearly enough to know that he was a clod who could have and should have done a lot better.

We might even end up with a parallel to Funky Winkerbean; as you may or may not know, one of the former mean girls went around trying to apologize to a woman she'd picked on back in the day. What happened was the other character, while acknowledging the sincerity of the emotion, wondered what the point was; it's not as if the pain could be redacted or if it mattered any more. Batiuk didn't exactly, of course, come out and say "Repent and sin no more" but that seemed to be his intention; we could well see Liz dealing with the baffling need Mike has to atone for things she no longer cared about. The person who taught her the lesson that she needs, of course, is the subject of my next article: April.

As I've mentioned, the reason I'm giving for everyone finally getting their heads on straight is because they don't have a rock colossus of obdurate entitlement around to reinforce their need to be idiots; with John and his never-say-die-never-even-conceive-that-he-might-be-in-the-wrong viewpoint stinking up the joint, the others wouldn't have an excuse to ignore the conscience he never had.

That being said, it would not only affect how Elly viewed herself, it would alter how she treated her family. That would be a good thing because, as we all know, the Elly we see in the strip is all about appearances; she wants to be so many things because they look cool but doesn't have the stamina or attention span required to make her dreams come true. She tried being an author, a pet owner and a business owner because she liked the way those people looked but she lacked the skill sets and patience needed.

This would be bad enough on its own and be the source of a fair amount of angst. Trouble is, though, that she actively resists applying herself in areas in which she might excel and forge an identity for herself because she associates them with the hated identity of 'housewife'; this seems to have robbed the world of a fairly good caterer and given it a failed and frustrated author.

This, sadly, also is the inspiration behind her need to force Mike into a career path that he's unsuited for. Her need to live vicariously through her son and bask in his reflected literary light in order to make all of her self-induced hardship seem worthwhile has given birth to a third-rater scribble vomiting forth sixth-rate abuse porn.

What makes this a problem id that Mike not only confuses saying a lot with having something to say, he can't actually make a living as an author the way things are set up in the strip. Leaving aside the obvious fact that the sort of garret that Elly fantasized about and that Mike is trying to implement is regarded as a screwy fantasy by serious authors, he's pretty much making the same take-home pay as he would pouring coffee down at Tim Hortons' when he used to make a beatiful dollar at the job he resigned from because his employer asked him to make a real decision for once in his life.

This, of course, will mean that he will have to grovel to Gluttson to get a job as a junior copy editor somewhere in the man's publishing empire or teach English comp to bored housewives looking for a change in order to pay off the mortgage. Were he to do so in a manner that would relieve the stress he's inflicting on his self-loathing, self-martyring wife, she'd probably put aside her little hobby sewing school and get back to a real job pretty damned quick.

To cap things off, we can even have Elly make a stumbling apology for messing up his life because she discouraged his exploration of things he might have been actually good at because computers scared her. Her grudging realization that she wanted things for her children that they really didn't and probably shouldn't have been asked to take on would hurt at first but without the example of someone who doesn't have a conscience to stiff-arm around, she'd survive.

I think that it's fairly safe to say that despite the Strip of Destiny being a snap-shot of what the characters' lives would be like at given points in the 'future', the story doesn't have to end there. Any new creative time that might emerge would probably take the opportunity to reverse one of the less popular decisions that Lynn made towards the end and undo the popular-only-to-Kool-Aid-Nation Settlepocalypse.

The method by which that would probably happen is, as clio_1 said, fairly simple; it seems fairly likely that Liz would, after months of dealing with the fact that the man she thought had all the romantic answers was a morose, emotionally-stunted, distant, self-pitying, sunken-chested, humorless, charmless, witless doofus whose sole 'virtue' is his canine loyalty to her parents, would find herself in much the same situation as a woman she'd thought of as a devil for confusing her with a gold-digger and "cheat" on a man whose fairly obvious revulsion stems from the fact that she's not a talking blow-up doll whose only function is to tell him he's great. I'd like to think that she'd realize that she and Thérèse have more in common than she thought before having her affair with a human being from the get-go but I'd be willing to wait for that admission when she finally confronts her whiny shmuck husband about how, to coin a phrase, she'd made him up.

That being said, it's fairly obvious that the same Elly who didn't see that April shouldn't actually forgive a thug who'd wanted to kick the shit out of her because his dad played harmonica and didn't believe April's accusations because Kortney flattered her would, of course, take Anthony's part at first. Were John around to validate her need to not pay attention to her surroundings, Liz would be screwed because Mommy would be able to walk around with her brain asleep spouting nonsense. Without John to hide facts from her, things would, of course, end differently; she'd examine the evidence of her senses with great reluctance but, sooner or later, she'd see that she saw things in Anthony that weren't there because she wanted to and because he made her feel good about being self-serving and silly.

The realization that she'd more or less wasted her life getting everything wrong because being right was too much like work would hurt at first but, well, she'd survive. As for Anthony, he'd end up being viewed as most of us see him: a weak, crouching figure who doesn't have what it takes to cope in this world and thus must be thrown crumbs by his betters. The Elly of the new order would want better than that for her family so he'd be the cautionary example we thought that Lynn was making him into in the first place.

I'd like to expand on the point I started to make with my previous entry. The reason, of course, is that as much as Elly sort of resents John, she needs him to enable and to validate her strongish need to not make much of herself. We might find his inability (or, more correctly, sullen refusal) to admit that he's ever been unjust, uncaring or unsympathetic to be an appalling character defect; she, on the other hand, needs his steady entitlement to help silence her nagging doubts about the world.

Were the strip to continue, it, as I said, would be fairly likely she'd be deprived of her crutch and, for the first time in decades, really have to rely on her own strengths to survive. This, as I said, would be a fairly intriguing thing to see because, as we know, she's spent so much of her life in a holding pattern waiting for her chance to finally answer the question "Who am I?" For the first few months, of course, she'd answer that with the statement "John Patterson's widow" but I can imagine a crisis that would finally get her off her couch and back into the world again: the discovery that Anthony is not the man she and John thought he was.

If that were the direction the new team were headed in, they'd, of course, start to slowly skirt the issue of the sunken-chested, morose, marriage-destroying hoptoad's sole 'good' feature being his slavish devotion to the Patterson family. Sooner or later, of course, we'd end up dealing with a repetition of the mess Annie found herself in slightly before she was placed on embargo as Liz finally catches Anthony in a lie. The difference, of course, is how Elly would handle it without John around to enable her need to duck the issue; she'd be forced to confront a problem head on and the experience, although scary and novel, would, in the end, be liberating.

That's because she'd finally be forced to confront not only the fact that she likes to surround herself with lying yes-men instead of people who tell her what she needs to hear, she'd finally realize that the voice in her head that tells her that she's an insensitive, self-absorbed clod who doesn't want to learn from her mistakes is her best friend. Without John around to soothe her need to listen to that odd thing he doesn't have called a 'conscience', she'd do something he's too chickenshit to do: examine what she believes and why she believes it.

Having finally figured out who she really is and what she really wants, the Elly of this new order would be a lot more fascinating than the idiot we saw wishing to repeat the past; that's because she'd finally start surrounding herself with fewer idiots like Connie and more fairly-impressive types like Anne. She might even go so far as to admit that she didn't know what she was doing half the time as a wife and mother.