Foobonia and Points West.

The interesting thing about Elly's punishment is that once again, she might be right to do something for the wrong reason. The reason she's inflicting a ban on television is that she sees it as a corrupting influence that, if not stopped, will lead to the sort of super-crazy no-way fake impossible Armageddon that dropping trumpet lessons, going to video arcades or dressing as Adam Ant for Halloween were supposed to lead the kiddies. Since Lynn created the strip for people like herself (out of touch, ignorant and fearful people who don't like, believe or trust their children that anyone could notice), Elly sincerely believed that she was saving him from perdition because only things from outside could possibly hurt the family and no, it's not fair or right to call her out on using language that would make a stevedore faint in front of them because things that might make her look bad can't count, MOTHER!!!!!

What she doesn't quite get is that it might be good to get him away from the television for another reason. As I've said before every time I allude to his passive box-watching, Mike is a pliable and gullible dolt who trusts and believes people who don't yell at him or make him feel weak and stupid and bad. Television never tells him that he's wrong or dumb or useless and it always gives him the approval Elly withholds. This is dangerous because the box is the ultimate saboteur friend pretending to be his pal to get something out of him: money in exchange for thinking that life is like what he sees on the tube. Since he's a clod, he stands there all gutted looking when life turns out to be like life and not like what some drone scriptwriter says it is.

The fun thing about Liz is that we can have her make a smug remark about how silly it is for April to act like one of her friends is trying to ruin her when she herself has the same drive to make a movie monster out of real people. This makes an even uglier fool of her than it does April because there's a child involved in her casting a real person with real needs as a cardboard villain whose only hope is to see her ruin.

I am, of course, talking about Thérèse. As Anthony's bio makes a point of saying, Liz's rival is an ill-used woman who ruined her life trying to please her stone-hearted and pea-brained ass of a father. She didn't follow her heart and marry her artsy type True Love because she was following an evil, distracting star of her own: a star that led her to marry a man she didn't really love and have a child she couldn't raise in order to make a worthless bum father proud of her. Since this put her in the path of an idiot who can't understand that a person can inconvenience her and also be a good person worthy of love, happiness and friendship, Lizardbreath looks at someone she'd be cheering for normally and sees a soap opera monster who plots her ruin because she watches too much goddamned television and also thinks that she's the protagonist. It doesn't seem to occur to her that life isn't television and no one is the star.

You'll have noticed over the last decade or so that I'm rather fond of pointing out that April has gone out of her way to misread her frienemy Becky because she looks at a lucky one-hit wonder who wonders why her pal hates her and sees a big celebrity monster trying to crush her and the other idiots in that damned garage band with her star power so she can laugh at their carcasses. This is because the Martian is what TV Tropes refers to as being 'wrong genre savvy'. She and her creator think of themselves as being the protagonists in some sort of Karate Kid kind of thing wherein the plucky underdog has to fight back against a bully who wins all the time when it's just two dumb teenyboppers engaging in a tiresome rivalry because they can't admit that they're functionally the same person. (This, it should be noted, is the same narrative engine that drives the Dork Diaries series.)

The reason that I mention this is that it's really terribly obvious that April sees Mira not as she is (which is to say "a fatter, louder version of her mother") but as a soap opera monster plotting the family's destruction because Elly let television raise her. We know that the Pattersons go out of their way to try to shut the woman out because we know that Elly doesn't want to admit that she and Mira are the same person. We also know that Elly loves how Deanna seems to hang off of her every word and is willing to do anything for her. We know that because of this, Elly wants to live in a world wherein Mira grovels pathetically and agrees that she was wrong to ever want anything from the Pattersons and to go away and not interfere with Deanna because that's wrong. We also know that April is too dense to question this because she sees the loud voice insisting on standing up for itself and sees the family as being under attack by a monster who wants to do to them what they do to other people.

Since tomorrow, we remember those who died to preserve our freedoms from enemies without, it behooves us to have to remember that Michael has always had a rather poor grasp of what Jim had to go through. As we'll see next year, Mike looks at footage of men dying in the Battle of Britain or carrier warfare or some other example of the crimson results of the failure of the politicians to keep the peace and wishes it were in colour. While it's clear that Elly thinks he's a ghoul who's a fan of violent death and as well as being actively indifferent to the plight of widows and orphans, this might not be the case.

This is becase it seems to me that Michael is unable to quite understand that World War Two wasn't some sort of movie. In his experience as a passive box-watcher, the man who got gunned down like a dog on last week's police procedural is a comic hindrance on this week's office comedy and a bit player in something else the week after that. This means that we're dealing with something of an immature mind that can't really understand how death works. He doesn't quite manage to see the suffering as real because the maniac thinks that life is a drama put on for his amusement....which makes him a far worse person than the ghoul Elly thinks he is.

As we know, as I type this, John and Elly are currently living in what we call the Tiny Train House. As we also know, John pitched a fit because there were certain problems with the place despite being reassured that Stibbs had taken adequate care of it. What seems to have happened is that he didn't understand what the real estate listing meant by 'meticulously cared for'. He took it at face value when, if he knew anything at all, he would have realized that it meant that while the old man kept the floors swept and the counters cleaned, he couldn't afford to fix or replace out of date appliances, furnaces or bathroom fixtures.

The reason that I mention this is that the Pattermanse of 1987 could also be described as meticulously cared for owing to the fact that the range and oven are out of date and only someone used to cooking on a wood stove could produce edible meals. John's reluctance to spend money on that sort of thing because he buys into the media image of the impractical wife trying to spend her husband into the poorhouse is really against his best interests but he can't not get reluctant because he shares the same mental infirmity with the rest of the family: a belief that the government would not let the media lie to him.

As I said yesterday, it seems to me that Lynn is too shallow and oblivious to understand war. I simply can't read strips like the ones I talked about or a Lynnsight like the one I quoted and believe that she understands the issue on any sort of realistic level. Her breezy comment about how all that needs to happen is for the women of the world to sit the silly, conflict-causing men down so that they can shop in peace betrays her as being so transfixed by the cults of woman-as-apolitical-domestic-angel and man-as-silly-child-in-need-of-female-guidance that her judgment on the matter is, at best, suspect. Despite her paying lip service to the sacrifices of our veterans most Novembers, I can't help but feel that she sees war as a folly visited on the world by people too lazy and cruel to be bothered keeping the peace and maintained by men too in love with team sports to not participate. For her, a childhood disagreement, a hockey game and the brutal slaughter that she learned about in history class are different versions of the same scary thing: violence that hurts people who aren't supposed to get hurt.

The reason for this is that she's made it quite clear that she sees most forms of violence as being wonderfully funny because they don't really matter. The woman was raised to believe that certain targets of violence either deserve it and that when violence happens to other categories of people or animals, it can't be said to really hurt and thanks to the miracle of the confirmation bias, nothing has happened to change her mind all that much. Watching Farley get abused is loads of fun because dogs are just big, furry clowns here to amuse us, children beating the crap out of one another are funny because nothing that happens before you're eighteen counts and watching weak little women like Liz and Elly pretend like they can hurt big, strong men is fun because, well, female-on-male violence is harmless. The only form of violence that counts is one she only depicted the once: male-on-female abuse. That is not funny because someone who shouldn't be hurt got hurt. War is bad merely because of its potential to hurt mothers and children, school yard beefs are bad because they scare helpless girls and all sports fans are monsters who bash up women; her mother said so so it must be true.

The problem of trying to explain to her that female-on-male violence or kicking a dog that bothers her are as bad as male-on-female violence has a lot to do with her reluctance to question any of the moral precepts she was raised to respect that aren't an inconvenience to her. It's like trying to get Liz to see that while she might find it unfair that she can't see a married man whenever she wants to, common sense and common courtesy bar the door for her.

So far, I've covered how Elly fears paying attention to her children lest she get sucked into their lives and never emerge as someone to be taken seriously. I've also covered how she fears knowing what they're doing because of her inability to understand what constitutes a risk. What I should remind you of is that she has a very simplistic view of the outside world.

It seems to me that the same person who rants and screams at Mike and Lizzie because they follow network television's lead far too closely and fumes angrily at the irresponsible men in the mass media who aren't guiding her destiny for her in a way she approves of is something of a hypocrite. Since her mindset congealed into its current configuration when she was eight, it looks to me as if she shares Mike's belief that she's the protagonist of a sitcom.

This, it seems to me, would explain a lot of things about her failure to take heed of the world as it is. In the world of television, a child is simply a small adult who cannot read, write or use grammatical English and should thus be treated as an adult; the notion that this is not the case is not one Elly would willingly admit because acting as if they are what the guidebooks say they are take time her poor time management skills has robbed from her. It'd be like admitting that dogs aren't midgets in suits, that problems don't vanish in time for the Alka Seltzer ad, that bullies aren't losers who need to win and that war isn't a glorified game of freeze tag. We can even blame her disregard for her children's safety on her over-reliance on television as a guide to life. Not only do sitcom kids never come to real harm, Marian probably sent her out of the room when the Scare-em-straight ads came on to warn people to not get mangled.