Foobonia and Points West.

As I type this, I do so in the knowledge that we're in for a very telling zits and vacuuming arc in which Mike is berated for finding unrewarding yard work unrewarding. The reason that I mention this is that when we contrast his eagerness to help the kindly old lady who used to live next door and his being a more thoughtful person at school than he is at home, we remind ourselves of a blind spot that John and Elly have: they don't believe in making the person doing chores feel good about doing them because they think that since they don't throw them out to fend for themselves, they're owed free labour.

This presumptuous need to turn a moral obligation into sleazy blackmail would be bad enough were it not for their stupid, irrational and destructive fear of smiling and having fun where the kids can see them. For some idiotic reason, they live in a mad world wherein if they're known to be able to laugh, the kids will never obey them. This results in kids who fear growing up and behaving maturely because they think that once they turn twenty, they're never going to laugh or smile or enjoy life ever again. They'll be grim, grey and joyless old fogeys who aren't even going to notice when they die like Mom and Dad (because they're not really alive in the first place) are and this is supposed to be good.

Of course, the realization that Molly is just supposed to endure taking crap from people because she isn't instantly wonderful about a stupid change in her life is sort of par for the course. After all, the whole move to Milborough was as well-thought out as the removal of Connie herself was. Greg did a stupid thing that probably messed up his career trajectory in order to avoid a boy that frightened him and Connie thought that she could work miracles by shoving wonderful things down Molly and Gayle's throats and that would make them instantly wonderful children who loved her better than the mother they were probably supposed to forget. In the words of probably about to become a cyborg detective Sterling Archer, that is so classic Connie.

This is because an outside observer would perceive Connie as being the perennial victim of her own unrealistic goals. After all, one of the first extended arcs had the needy, clingy idiot hare off to Montreal to fling herself at someone who just wasn't as in to her as she wanted and neeeeeeeded him to be and the collision with the reality that Phil will always sort of see her as an ex-girlfriend who's got too many issues to make any sort of relationship tenable made her saaaaaad while her current status is someone who's all disappointed that no one will let her be mother of the bride because Lawrence won't pretend to be straight just so she can be the center of attention. She lacks self-awareness so she doesn't know that her whole life is a series of self-induced crises that she willed upon herself by having eyes bigger than her stomack.

Said observer would also see Elly as being a terrible friend for not calling Connie on her own stupid crap but instead cheering her on as she destroyed herself. In this particular instance, Elly is aiding and abetting a folly by trying to pit the siblings against one another so that they might be normal and fight like scorpions. Sadly for her, Molly is too smart not to see what Elly is trying to do and manages to convince Gayle that the nice lady is not really her friend. This, of course, makes her an evil dark person because Elly is ENGLISH Canadian first and foremost and has the Anglo-Saxon tendency of having her feet planted firmly in the middle of the air while being able to see anything except that which is in front of her owing to a racial tendency towards fecal encephalopathy. There are no canny Scottish people in the strip using good old-fashioned common sense to save all those fatuous Sassenachs from themselves and the result is telling.

As I said yesterday, John's major malfunction is the fact that he doesn't want to do much to earn his big cookie and that he confuses monotony and the avoidance of anything like an inconvenience even for a good cause as being the sovereign goods. This and his lack of any sort of inclination to find out who the people around him really are and what they actually want and need because that's too damned much like work and might require genuine sacrifice on his part is why his life is a mess.

What I would like to stress all over again is the fact that Elly is transfixed by the notion that no one loves her or ever has or ever will and that they expect her to work and strive and suffer and never allow her the slightest hint that what she does is actually appreciated. She's enabled in this disastrous belief by a moron husband who actually does think that this should be the case because it's hormones that make her think she deserves more out of life that thankless toil because the alternative is his actually giving a shit about anything. Since doing that means that the contents of his skull have gone rancid, he's going to keep on asking what she does all day and never notice how much that hurts because he wants to live his life numb to the suffering of his family because empathy is too much like work. Since he's an influence in his children's lives, they too are blinded to her need for love and her hope that she gets more than Mike idly wondering if maybe his mother didn't exactly like her life and possibly deserved more fifteen years after she dies.

The problem is that you can't have a horrible obsession like this without a psychic cost. I should think that John's blank-minded insensitivity warps her perception of events and deprives her of the ability to remember that children don't freeze in place when she isn't thinking about them. It's bad enough that she ends up thinking every little disagreement is proof that she's expected to meekly struggle through life without any sort of recognition or approval without having to remember what it does to her and those around her. Simply put, if John weren't a stupid son of a whore idiot rat bastard who wants to drift through life without doing anything while expecting deference because he's larger, Farleygate would never have happened. Martian Picky-Face Princesses don't kill heroic dogs.....TRAIN MEN DO!!!

As I said yesterday, Georgia isn't the only person whose back story really doesn't much interest Lynn or Elly much. While I know I might get accused of going a bit too far by the analogy I'm about to make, I sometimes think that Elly has an awful lot in common with The Joker when she thinks about the people around her. Just as Mister J looks at a woman who saw him as a sort of really crappy boyfriend she's sort of ambivalent about and thinks of her as "woman with Bronx accent whose sole purpose is to open doors and make Batsy angry", Elly looks at Georgia and sees her solely as "person whose job it is to civilize my kid brother when my parents failed." Nothing else about her matters so knowing her past or what Georgia REALLY thinks about her and her family is not something that is deemed necessary because it doesn't serve Elly's overriding purpose of getting her mother to publicly approve of how she lives her life while at the same time admitting that she so is the boss of Phil.

The reason that I mention this is that she married a man whose sole purposes are "provide her money, appliances and status" and "back her up with the kids." It doesn't matter if he holds her in mild contempt, has no clue as to what makes her feel so lost and angry all the time, whines like a spoiled, sulking infant when his authority is challenged or hides away from his family for fear of looking in the mirror and seeing the bad guy. According to her, he materialized out of the ether for the sole purpose of giving Marian something to brag about and also making a mere traveling musician like Phil look like the failure she wants him to be. Knowing what his interests are, who his past loves were or anything other than his last name is too much damned information because it doesn't serve any useful purpose.