dreadedcandiru2 | Entries tagged with coffee talkers

As I type this, I do so in the knowledge that there are still people who follow the strip in the newspapers who probably don't think far enough head to remember that this is the year wherein everything changes for the family when Elly ends up being pregnant at 39 years of age. It will come as a complete shock to them because they want to believe in a narrative that doesn't actually exist about Lynn telling the real story of the family. Any people still lingering on her Facebook page will marvel at something that they could have predicted on their own by buying "What...Me Pregnant?" at a used book store.

The reason that I mention is relates to another narrative they were encouraged to believe back about ten or so years ago: the somewhat specious narrative of Liz and Anthony as star-crossed lovers cruelly denied chance after chance at happiness. This belief that it would be a miracle if the two of them were to marry blinded them to the fact that said miracle looked a damned sight more like a foregone conclusion and made them quite cross at people who wanted to either spoil things, jinx things or whatever for saying that "Have Liz and Anthony get married" was at the top of Lynn's to-d- list. The oddest thing about that is that Lynn acted as if she were one of the people most astonished by something she planned.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1064509.html

As we all know, Lynn has not only closed down Coffee Talk, she's also had it removed from her website. The reason for this is, I should think, rather simple: she got bored with having to have letters read to her when people were perfectly capable of putting pen to paper and a stamp on an envelop instead of e-mailing her or putting their comments on Facebook and other things that will definitely herald the end of literacy as we know it.

The problem is that every so often, she posts Lynnsights that practically beg for a response such as the one where she asked people if they remember any good jingles. Since she's cut off the means by which her fans got used to getting into contact with her, she'll probably end up thinking that there's a distinct lack of interest in her interests because she's barred the door to the flood-tide of gushy comments that would still be coming in if there were a means to.

As you all know by now, we're about to be subjected to Mike being allowed to sleep in the back seat of Jim's car in such a fashion that in an accident, he'd risk serious injury if not being killed stone dead. We also know that if there are notes attached to it, we'd end up not having to wait for the pious simpering about destroying childhood we'd get from the amen chorus at Coffee Talk. After all, were it still around, the whimpering leukocytes who see it as their mission to defend Lynn would have trotted out their bog-standard "I didn't get brutally killed when I slept on the back seat so keeping people from doing that is a waste of time."

Of course, the people don't stop at mere cherry picking. Were they to limit their specious reasoning to the following dubious chain of logic:

Not wearing a seat-belt is a potentially risky behavior.
I never flew threw a windshield to my messy death despite never wearing a seat-belt.
Therefore, not wearing a seat-belt is not at all a risky behaviour and forcing it a waste of time.

we'd be dealing with stupid people who can be likened to shooting at something, drawing a bull's eye on what they shot and thus claimed to have perfect aim.

We're not dealing with mere slipshod thinking and dishonesty, though. We're also dealing with the same sort of nasty trick Eva Warzone plays when she doesn't want to have to care about what April is going through. Instead of appealing to shame, these people appeal to ridicule by distorting what people say in a manner that makes it look absurd. This is why Iris's retcons always had her make indulgent asides deriding the foolish people these days who whoop and screech about children cracking their skulls open; in her mind, wanting to keep people alive means wanting to take their right to be a child away.

What bothers me about all of this "I did it and I'm fine" business is that we're being asked to not look somewhere that drips like Lynn would prefer to avoid. Just as when Eva Warzone berates April for not caring about some hypothetical orphan working in a factory to feed her siblings when she really means that April should agree that her opinion on anything is meaningless, people who talk about how fine they are want us to avert our gazes from the people who did die. When asked to consider those who did, the chirping vermin state "Since X did get brutally killed, his or her death doesn't matter." All the simpering, all the nostalgia, all the ridicule....it's all a vast smoke-screen meant to protect the Lynn Johnstons of the world from caring about the people who weren't so lucky and being grateful that they were.

Well, there's that and what really pisses John and Elly off about their children: envy. More on that tomorrow.

It seems to me that given that we're dealing with a strip of, by and for small-minded, small town housewives who fear and hate the world outside their cage, the elimination of April from the strip would leave a gaping chasm that needs to be filled with things to be afraid of. I'll cover how to fill Elly with fear of the devil computers that require her to learn things in my next entry. What I'm going to cover today is what Lynn would have to do in order to fill up all the time not spent on Elly chasing after a small child and whining about how tied down she is. It seems to me that yesterday's look at how most of why Elly sent her children to Exile Farm was to step on relationships that frightened her makes me think that instead of kid strips, we would have gotten more ranting from Elly about how her children were too close to love interests they barely saw.

This need of Elly's to fret about the terrible possibility of the children not keeping themselves pure would, of course, have nothing to do with their well-being. As this strip clearly indicates, we're meant to think that it's right and proper that a dowdy wallflower who scowled her way through high-school because no one wanted to date a shrill, ignorant twinkie who lived to take everything the wrong way wants to punish the happy people for making her miserable. This need to avenge herself on people she's convinced herself want to destroy her trumps any minor consideration like the well-being of her irrelevant offspring or anything like a fact. The fact of the matter is that despite what she might think, her children would probably have been all right if left alone. A sane person would see that Martha and Rhetta would be two somebodies Mike used to know and not future Mrs Delicate Geniuses.

Lynn is not a sane person. Lynn is a defiant, angry child who never grew up and uses her strip as a club with which to bludgeon people she feels have wronged her. This means that instead of annoying cute kid strips, we'd have ended up watching more of Elly whimpering about the dangers of friendly, polite little girls and clumsy, ham-fisted attempts to imply that someone policed far more strictly than any Patterson ever was is a tramp. Also, we'd have to endure actually having to watch Martha be a fat, desperately lonely divorced mother of two with no immediate prospects so as to punish her for not realizing that Mike was her brain.

This sort of brings me to the real problem with Elly's need to step on relationships. The first part of the problem is that despite there being plenty of good reasons to keep children from rushing head-long into physical love before they're emotionally ready for the consequences, Lynn and her co-cannibals ignore the Hell out of them because they don't care if Tyler is too damned young to be a dad because they're too damned young to be grannies and would lose too much status in the process. The self-serving need to maintain their standing thus marches hand-in-hand with slut-shaming to make it clear that Lynn could have fulfilled her need to slam teenagers without having them people her strip. After all, a lot of teenagers these days say something dangerous when they make horrifying noise about how their mommy parts aren't the exclusive property of whatever man they happen to land.

I'd like to take a brief pause from explaining why the strip would work just as well without April serving as proof that Lynn can't write about anything she isn't currently experiencing to talk about the sort of people who are oh so glad to have the opportunity to tell the incompetent and very lucky woman what a brilliant author she'd like to think she is. There are two broad hints as to what sort of person agrees that we've been so cruel and mean to the bitter, ungrateful and vindictive clod. The first broad hint is that they all agree that Elly and John are the injured parties in the "I quit motherhood" sequence. They don't see a child being reminded that only Mommy and Daddy are allowed to have opinions; they see a defiant monster who needs a good smack in the mouth because she has what they call a bad attitude and what people aren't up their own ass call having free will.

The second broad hint is that when Lynn turned her strip into a moronic morality play in the Declining Years, they were on board. We might as well have been on the date Liz and Anthony had when they checked all of that stupid crap off their idiotic list:

Liz slept around like a floozy instead of keeping herself pure like Elly: CHECK.
She got cheated on by a Man Who Was Not Right For Her: CHECK.
She missed her chance to marry Sainted Assthony right after college: CHECK.
Anthony fell in the arms of an EEEEEEEEEEVIl, irrationally jealous career woman with evil ambitions: CHECK.
Liz suffered the torment of being in an evil Northern town where everyone was laughing behind her back when the man of snow cheated on her: CHECK.
The evil career woman left Anthony high and dry for no reason that anyone can mention and think of him as being sympathetic: CHECK.
Chastened by their experience with the scary, evil world outside of their beloved home, the two of them learn to trust in fate and faith again and marry so as to enjoy the same bliss as John and Elly: Check!!
A man named Paul J who lives in Saint John, New Brunswick retches in disgust at the repellent spectacle: BLAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH.

What sort of person honestly buys into crap like this? Small-town, small-minded conservative housewives who get defensive about how they live their lives because they're filled with free-floating rage because they don't have the happy life that they were promised and jealousy of people who clearly having a better time of it than they are. The interesting thing is that there is a smug, self-righteous bundle of ignorance, twaddle and gutlessness racing around in the strip. She used to be a fixture until Elly cut her dead because of a stupid misapprehension: Annie Nichols. It seems to me that she'd be the first to cheer Elly on when it came time to sabotage Therese because of that being pissed off at her betters thing she's rocking.

As we've seen recently, Lynn likes to tell a rather annoying joke in which a character makes a lot of noise about being decisive only to turn out to be a waffling idiot. The first version of said clinker had Evil Ted try to lure poor John to the Dark Side of the Force only to be revealed as pathetically dependent on others to make up his mind for him. The problem is that her favourite butt of this non-joke is the Picky-Faced Martian Creature Princess. I can think of at least two occasions in which April complained about not having input into her day-to-day life only to go into vapour lock when asked to decide something trivial. In the first instance, John and Elly go on vacation up to a cottage up North and only bother telling April about it a few days before they leave and in the second, we have to contend with her wanting to not be treated like an imbecile who has her decisions made for her by people who do NOT have her interests at heart only to not be able to decide what to have for lunch. In both cases, the basic premise seems to be as follows:

HUM! Since April can't make a little decision like this, it only stands to reason that she can't make big decisions. That means that she's a silly child who doesn't know what's best for her and that John and Elly are right to whatever they want without worrying about an opinion she doesn't really have.

The problem is that Lynn and her fanbase ignore possibilities that don't make a defiant, hypocritical idiot out of April. First off, they ignore the very real possibility that she's subconsciously afraid of deciding things on her own. You can't live in a house wherein a simple statement that you're very sorry about missing dinner but homework comes first turns into Elly bellowing like an idiot and John threatening violence unless you apologize for having free will NOW without developing a sort of protective submissive attitude. They also ignore the very real fact that even if Elly doesn't blow a gasket or John doesn't grumble about attitudes, the two of them will overrule her because they're afraid of her. In the first instance, they had it in their stupid heads that if April knew about their vacation plans, she'd somehow whine her way into making their trip up North go away while during the Housening, the clear subcontext seemed to be that ignorant, selfish April was so fixated on having a room she wouldn't get to enjoy much longer anyway that she didn't see the dire consequences of not being treated like furniture.

This leads me to a third problem I have with how they treat April. The same people who are terrified of her learning things that scare them have the annoying habit of expecting her to be an ignorant idiot that they have to explain what strokes are only to turn around and expect her to know that Mike simply cannot afford to buy and maintain a house. Why it is that they need to be safe from her knowing what's going on around her is something I'll touch on more fully later. Suffice to say for the here and now that their expecting her to know something that they keep from her when it's convenient makes hectoring her for being stupid a rather irritating thing.

Finally, the same sort of idiots who were clearly disappointed that John didn't haul off and belt April for 'defiance' tend not to want to see that the only reason that April is being singled out for being a waffling idiot in a strip peopled with prevaricatiing clods is that they've been ordered to. The amusing thing about watching her being yapped at for being clueless for not knowing what she wanted for lunch is that most of why her life sucked is because her allegedly adult siblings couldn't make up their minds about what to do.

Another reason that Liz finds her life less than fulfilling is that her destiny was being guided in such a manner as to delight the amen choir of people who love it that her life's path guided her not to defining life on her own terms but in such a manner as to serve the needs of her entitled, selfish and empathy-free asshole parents. While we see the bizarre, anachronistic and silly 'inherit the family farm' vibe given off as a good and life-affirming thing because it seems to comfort them that the kids don't have to live in the big, scary adult world.

It doesn't seem to be a problem to Kool-Aid Nation that by marching not towards being people in their own right but towards a resumption of their old childhood roles that Liz and Mike have tricked themselves into thinking that a humiliating loss of dignity is a victory and a vindication of their life plan. This is because I believe that they see it as a good thing is that John and Elly finally feel as if this parenthood racket is going their way.

When one looks at the tragedy of two people who could easily have clawed out lives for themselves were it not for their craven and destructive need to please worthless vermin like John and Elly immolating themselves on the pyre of self-defeating behaviour through the eyes of said slithering pieces of filth, it magically turns into a happy ending. For one, the boy-girl pair of children people are 'supposed' to have finally spend their time being cravenly grateful for the alleged sacrifices made on their behalf and witlessly apologetic for trying to stir remorse in their alleged parents' stone hearts. What a grand and glorious thing it is for a heartless dick like John to no longer have to hear horrible, vicious things about how his children weren't actually freeloading off of him; now that he's finally free from having to be told that his children would have starved to death gruesomely without his money, he's finally happy. As for Elly, she's finally happy that Liz understands that the desire that children have for Mommy's attention is an evil, horrible thing that only exists because evil children want to spread chaos and make Mommy miserable. As for the superfluous third child, they might not even care that she's escaped the hellish vortex of their entitlement, greed and lack of remorse; after all, with her gone, their family is how it's supposed to be.

What really irritates me about all of this is that whenever Kool-Aid Nation notices people like me, they say that we want bad things for the Patterson family. I can remember one person claiming that we wanted Anthony and his daughter to suffer some arcane, improbable and poorly-defined horror because we're awful, cynical people who have no sense of human. What we want for Anthony is for him to grow the Hell up and stop fixating on some pallid idiot who needs a spotter to remind her to breathe in and out, man the Hell up and do something with his life. What we want for Françoise is for her to not have a 'mother' who resents her. It turns out that this is probably the terrible ending that they have in mind. Other scary, horrible endings are "Mike realizes that being an author was Elly's dream and tells her to stop living vicariously through him", "Liz realizes that what she thought was homesickness was Stockholm syndrome", "Elly realizes that she's mostly why her life feels so empty" and worst of all "John finally gets it through his thick skull that he's the damned problem and tries making things right with his wife and children."

As you probably know by now, it's been decided that Coffee Talk has somehow served its purpose. It seems to me that any official reason would have to relate to Katie wanting to focus on raising her child instead of dealing with people wanting a look at the present-day Pattersons, other people saying that Lynn must have spy gear in their houses because they can't see any other way that a person leading a boring life like their own could possibly imagine bland normality, yet others who want things both ways by stating that it's only a comic strip when people say things about it that bother them and, most vexing of all, people who make points that bother her mother.

The last category of people that I mentioned are why it surprised me that those around Lynn were able to keep it going on as long as it did. As

howtheduck said, the last comment Lynn actually made can be boiled down to an angry rant about how simply awful it is that people want to persecute and humiliate her by asking her questions and seeing how her strip affects people. Combine that with what can only be her ordering Katie to not let letters from jealous, picky-faced mean people who want her to think about what she's doing and do things that bore her and you end up wondering why she didn't pull the plug back when people were creeping on her for letting Farley run around loose because of the Pattersons' stupid neglect.

What really hurts is that she won't give said official reason; it's far easier to rehash the threat she made to have the Syndicate yank the strip because people were trying to make the great unwashed use their brains than to say "Laura needs a mother more than you need to talk about my lovely column." That way, she can reaffirm their delusion that thinking about what you're reading makes you an extra-bad person; better to lock your brains in a box and be a good little mindless waste of skin.

As we’ve seen over the years and by her own admission, Lynn really doesn’t have much use for organized religion. She’s given varying reasons over the years but it seems to her that having to go to church every Sunday is sort of a waste of time. That being said, she sure does love strips that imply otherwise. From the earliest days, we had to deal with Mike asking Elly if church was such a good thing, howcome they didn’t go more often and in the latter days, we had Meredith wondering when Jesus was going to meet the Easter Bunny. What this says to me is that Lynn had realized fairly early on that if she were to play-act at valuing something she didn’t, she could get approval from those who did.

This is not only why we have Mike doing some uncharacteristic praying, it’s why Elly becomes an environmentalist on Earth Day and it’s why she pretends that she wants to get involved in April’s education when she wants to squeal about how horrible computers are. What’s repulsive about it is that the people she panders to don’t want to admit that they’re praising a huge phony and hate people who want them to not be deceived like Tweety hates Sylvester.

What really bothers me about all the tyrannical fathering we see going on in the strip is how popular it seems to be with Lynn's admirers. I would far rather contend with the weak-kneed, simpering imbeciles who assume that since I ask them to think about what they're reading instead of being a happy vegetable like they are, I'm a bad man who thinks bad things and says horrible, mean, cruel things like "Pay attention to your surroundings for once in your lives."

I'm also not talking about the chuckleheads and drips who simper that even if bad things happen, it's just a cartoon so we shouldn't worry about the impressionable clods who might emulate what the Pattersons do. Even if the deluded drips were to see someone yank a blanket away from his Michael, they still wouldn't allow themselves to see that nothing is just anything because that would, ta-da, require them to think about what they're seeing and that would be wrong.

If only Lynn's fans were simply a group of whinnying dolts who think that if they have to watch where they're going and think about what they're doing, the terrorists win. At least then I wouldn't be scared shitless at the prospect of reading Coffee Talk. That's because sooner or later, I know that I'm going to see someone congratulate Lynn for showing us the world as it is and should be when she shows us a character doing something discreditable. Worse still, these people seem to see what most of us would call 'common decency' as somehow being a threat to the family unit. It terrifies them that people like us believe that John's 'right' to be a shit to his wife and children should be challenged. They're as afraid of John having morals and restraint as they are of a world where Anthony would have had to endure the horror of living up to his original wedding vows or any man spending time with his children when it wasn't fun. Heck, they're even afraid of the idea of April not being treated like furniture no one wants.

As we know, Lynn has gotten into the habit of annotating her strips so as to explain what she thinks about things. What we usually get is a non-sequitur which reveals that Lynn is a very odd woman who believes that those around her have the ability to see inside her head as well as a fairly nasty person who seems to live to nurse decades old grudges. The notes attached to one of her more recent entries spell out quite clearly that she does, in fact, use the strip to settle old scores and complain about those around her. This would be bad enough in and of itself if she did not also take pleasure in admitting that up until now, she’d denied that she was doing that when asked. The problem, as I see it, is that Kool-Aid Nation might actually be okay with this. Up until now, all she had to do was to bleat “It’s just a comic strip” and those of us who try to inject common sense into the conversation were told to stop picking on her. What tells me that they’ll love it that she uses her strip to bludgeon people over the head because they irked a prickly, vindictive pain in the neck is that they’ll decide that it’s her job to use her strip to bleat about how simply awful her husband and children are. Will they stop to consider the need of the people she slams to not be slammed? Not as such, I don’t think. After all, they deny our right to criticize her because we don’t have public forums to beat people up with impunity.

As you might or might not know, we're coming to an arc that really annoys me. I'm not talking about how Phil won't admit that Marian played favorites or how John can't seem to interact with his children without threatening them because of his tendency to project his own need to bully others onto his children. Those stupidities will be covered later. I'm talking about the 'Farley gets garbage gastritis' arc. Once again, the irresponsible nitwits allow the poor creature to wander around loose swallowing down garbage and making himself ill. This would be bad enough were it an isolated incident but, as we all know, it's not. The one thing that we can count on is that the Pattersons never learn a blasted thing when their pets get loose or injure themselves.

This, I should think, is that the Foobs are pre-programmed by their creator with her belief that the misbehavior of pets is the pets' responsibility and not their own. A dog isn't a companion animal that has to be trained to live alongside human beings, it's a messy, slobbery, destructive clown of a creature there to make us laugh at the misery we stupidly inflict on it with our smug irresponsibility. The amazing thing is not that we see so many examples of casual brutality inflicted on innocent creatures by a creep. It's amazing that Kool-Aid Nation can look at the systematic pattern of abuse and think that Lynn loves animals.

The problem with most of Lynn's defenders is not just that they read the strip at the most superficial level and fail to miss the patterns that so alarm and annoy us. As an example, they don't see that the "I quit motherhood" mini-arc is not what they think it is at all because they'd rather believe that April always tries to blow off eating with her family than admit that John and Elly have a consistent habit of messing with April's head in order to remind her that they are the boss of her. What the problem is that most of them seem to be over-sold on the useless and amoral moral aphorism "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."

This need to not hear painful truths is based primarily on the self-serving and destructive delusion that if someone says something that isn't what the listener wants to hear, he or she is somehow destroying society. The need to not have to question what the person being complained about is doing to inspire the complaints seems to me to stem from a fear of not following the herd packaged as defending a helpless victim from a "persecution" that might be well earned. The same people who don't realize that doing something just because everyone else does it isn't really moral don't realize that someone nasty might be exploiting their generosity to keep from having to answer questions that might make her defenders realize that they've embraced something not really embraceable.

This makes them all into the Marge Simpson of the early nineteen nineties. The Marge of today realizes that Bart is a jerk but the one of old had it in her head that he was just misunderstood. As I recall, she told Luann Van Houten that Bart has what she called a spark inside of him; it wasn't a bad thing but it made him do bad things. It seems to be thus with the more ardent of Lynn's worshipers. While they're willing to admit that the strip has moments wherein the characters behave questionably and the artwork is possibly sub-par, Lynn is doing her best and cannot thus be criticized.

As we've seen over the last week, the chirpier of Lynn's defenders have soothed themselves with a logical fallacy that protects them from having to admit that they're eroding the meaning of the word "miracle" by applying it to everything that impresses them. The belief that sustains them is the ludicrous supposition that if a person doesn't gape in awe and call every single cool and impressive thing a miracle, he or she is completely and utterly unable to see the wonders around them.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. One evening, I was taking a walk around my neighborhood. Up until about, oh, a half an hour beforehand, the day had been overcast and gloomy but it was starting to clear up. In the eastern sky, the clouds were still dark and grey but in the west, they'd begun to break. As the evening went on, the Sun had come through the clouds. The best way I can describe the effect of the Sun shining on the objects in the East was that it looked as if it weren't the Sun illuminating them. The contrast between them and the grey clouds made it look as if the light were coming from inside of the trees and buildings themselves.

Was the sight impressive? Yes. Did it make me feel better? Yes. Was it a miracle of either divine or everyday nature? No. It was simply a cool optical illusion that I find pleasing. What sets me apart from the gang on Coffee Talk is that since I don't holler miracle, they think that cheery little scenes like that don't mean a thing to me.

There is, of course, another reason Lynn's fans praise her for her "unique" gift of observing the world as it is that doesn't rely on their belief in the ridiculous belief they share with Lynn about how the ability to create is bestowed by the Gods on a lucky few. The reason is one I alluded to earlier: the need for validation. Simply put, they like to see lives like their own depicted on the comics page. It reassures them that people like them are living lives as bland and boring and wretched as their own so they're going to love someone who tells them that it's okay to be plastic people living in a plastic world.

This, of course, is why we have so very many letters condemning Therese for having post-partum depression and resenting the fact that no matter where she turned, she either had to come face to face with an angry, pouty twit who wouldn't move on with her life or being reminding that said pathetic imbecile needed to be given preferential treatment because her mother is the crazy dentist's even crazier wife. It's also why so many idiots loved it when she was out of the picture and the unholy union that is the Settlepocalypse was visited on an unhappy world. They settled for less and balked at the unfamiliar and need to not be reminded that they sold themselves short.

Recently, I posted a letter to Coffee Talk decrying the over-use of the word 'miracle' to describe common-place phenomena that aren't in the least miraculous. This is owing to how much it bothers me that Lynn does so. Giving birth, living and dying (especially that last) are not what a reasonable person would call a 'miracle'. By Lynn's logic, gravity doesn't operate the way it does because it's a natural law that it do so, it's a miracle that not only cannot be understood, its workings should not be explored lest the world die. The example I used to highlight the absurdity of this appeal to too-easily-impressed ignorance was to make a nasty comment about how every time two plus two added up to four, it was a miracle.

That being said, it would have been a miracle if some deluded sap didn't rush to Lynn's defense. Said poor, benighted slob not only misspelled the name of my home town, he made pious noise about how miraculous it was that Lynn shared her supposedly unique gift for appreciating life with her audience. First off, Lynn only got her platform to ram her blinkered vision of the world down our throats because she was the married female artist who scared the Suits the least owing to the fact that her vision of the world was most like their own. Second, any imbecile can make the same banal and obvious commentary about the world that Lynn does. As a matter of fact, a right twit is doing so right now. Third, the Pattersons happen to be the blandest, dreariest, sorriest sacks of crap that ooze their way across the stage.

Oh, wait. I tell a lie. I can think of people who are more wretched than they are: the people who go on Coffee Talk to boast about how proud they are that they're more slug-like and God-awfully bland, beige and lifeless than the Pattersons. You want miracles? Read Coffee Talk and you'll find one: a man who thinks of Anthony as a dynamo who doesn't wake up every morning wondering why people keep putting dimes on his eyes.

I think that it's fairly safe to say that the only person in the world whose feelings John Patterson worries about are his own. We're about to be reminded that he thinks it's the height of comedy to compare his children to barnyard animals and that he thinks that Elly sits on her arse eating bon-bons. As the years go on, he makes one amazingly hurtful remark after another in smug complacency and, when confronted, either makes a dismissive remark about how people are needlessly sensitive or mewls piteously about being asked to consider the feelings of other people as if that is tantamount to being castrated. What's more, the merest hint that he too must be laughed at always enrages him.

This, of course, is owing to his refusal to consider the fact that other people's feelings really matter or entertain the notion that he is a mean-spirited, loutish, narcissistic jackass instead of the wonderful guy that he thinks he is. My guess is that Carrie Patterson is a lot like some of the more strident of the Get-A-Life battalion. What I've noticed is that his cutting remarks just wash over them as if they don't want to see how very repellent and churlish John really is. It makes a lot of sense that his mother just sat on her fat behind and just let the geyser of carbolic acid she calls a son spew his venom over everyone who couldn't fight back because boys will be boys.

I can say this in smug complacency of my own because he looks to me like the absurdity called a mama's boy. I can well imagine his every stupid move gushed over by a cooing mother as if he were the first boy to, as Lynn would so delicately phrase it, pop out of a gal's chute. This would explain his agitating habit of not thinking about things because it would appear that he was told not to. It would also explain why he thinks of Elly as a maid. Until he left home, women had been isolating him from the world his whole life so he needed to return to normality.

The very odd thing about the endgame of this arc is that's not what a person preaching the work-to-win sermons coming from the heights of Kool-Aid Mountain. I should think that they expect to see Mike learn that yes, chores don't hurt and yes, working hard is the only path to what a person wants. What they don't expect to have happen is what does happen: some little boy with nearly-new roller skates breaks his leg and has to sell them. Mind you, I don't honestly expect them to see this because they've never seen it happen before. There is something about their love of the Pattersons that blinds them to their heroes and their rather repulsive gratitude for the seemingly endless number of strangers whose misery and pain they can turn to their own advantage. They and Lynn can, for instance, watch Liz crow that she got a great job because her predecessor got divorced and lost her visa with nary a whimper of concern. Point out how heartless Liz is for doing it and you either get called a cynical monster who hates everything and is also just jealous or get lectured about how it's just a comic strip when your point of view makes a point they'd rather not face.

The reason I mentioned all of Lynn’s excuses yesterday was owing to something we all remarked on: the fact that the Gordon of 1983 probably wasn’t the child of an abusive, drunken father and a mother who worked two jobs to put food on the table. After all, he was able to bribe Mike and could easily afford new skates so it was fairly likely that he too had an upper-middle class background like Mike and Lawrence. It could well have been that Lynn had originally decided to make him into an Eddie Haskell clone; what was supposed to have happened was that he’d be a conniving jerk to his fellow children and an obsequious doormat to adults. The only parents who’d fall for his Uriah Heep act would have been fairly clueless. The clueless parent that I have in mind thought that she was ten pounds overweight when she came out of Marian’s womb, has no sense of humor and jabs her finger into the air like a lunatic while lecturing about things that she sees in the worst possible light. For some reason or other, she’d either decided to scrap the plan or been told by a relative of the person the character was based on to cut the monkey business because this was her boy’s life she was ruining.

The problem is that Lynn doesn’t want to admit to this because it would, as I said, mean that she could no longer be able to tell her fans that everything was set in stone all the way back in 1983. She’d also have to admit that repurposing Gordon was sort of stupid because she didn’t, after all, have too many characters. As a for instance, she could have remembered that Daryl Smythe existed and given him most of Gordo’s tragic past. That would free Gordon to be a sort of prototype for Jo Weeder. We could thus have seen the Pattersons praise him for not letting his distant patriarch define his life with his money power and build something on his own.

What we got started out as Lynn's nitwit moralizing about the inevitable effects of people actively stating that they'd like to separate and eventually divorce. After all, ALL children of broken homes (or of single parents) inevitably become delinquents who tempt good children like Mike with the evils of playing Space Invaders and using profanity; if they didn't, Lynn's ideas about the world would be revealed to be empty platitudes spouted by someone who only rebelled against parental authority to get attention.

Like most arcs, the "Mike and the roller-skate" saga is the inspiration for fairly predictable events. Not only do we have Kool-Aid Nation angrily come to Elly's defense and grumble about lazy and spoiled children, Lynn used the notes to defend her own failings as a creator.

The first irritating thing she did was try to claim that even back in 1983, she had a firm idea of what was happening to her characters and where they'd end up. Not only does that contradict her earlier statement about how she doesn't really focus too much on what goes on in her world, it makes little sense because she clearly seems to have no idea what she thought back then. The part of her that's irritated by the unwelcome habit other people have of quoting what she said in the past and why is irritated mostly by the fact that since she can't remember what she said, no one else should either. About the only people that would support this tendency are those who don't like thinking about what they read lest they discover things about it that raise questions about themselves that they do not want the answers to.

They also don't want to admit that her claim that she has too many characters is so much hot air. While they'd probably be willing to admit on a purely theoretical basis that yes, they can keep track of primary, secondary, tertiary and even ancillary characters, their need to bow to any idiot who claims to be an authority figure makes them meekly go along with Lynn's own tendency to mindlessly conform to suspect advice. Merely because Schulz had no use for a cast herd doesn't mean that she should follow his advice because his world is not her own.

They also seem to want to buy into her nonsense about having no time to tell whatever story she has in her head. Rather than admit that since they'd be (as by way of example) perfectly satisfied with John's telling Elly that he'll meet her and his parents at the hospital to check on April after taking Farley to the vet and have that be all that needs to be said about the issue, they say "Yes, Lynn, we need to be spoon-fed information because we're idiots. Tell us about the zits and vacuuming."

In short, the only reason Lynn is allowed to get away with outrages like that is because her fans let her do so.

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Page generated Jul. 12th, 2025 10:02 pm

Foobonia and Points West.

Four Panel Babylon

Entries tagged with coffee talkers

The eleventh year of the non-surprise ending and its joys.

The price of closing the coffee counter....

The hidden cost of deriding child-proofing.

Handwringing 101: How to fill a Martian-sized hole.

Annie Nichols: Queen of Kool-Aid Freaking Mountain....

The decision fallacy.

Look Homeward, Suckers......

The end of Coffee Talk: a snarker's perspective.

This strip conserves integrity: Lynn and pandering.

Keeping the family going.....

Officially Not Funny.

Animal abuse and other sources of harmless fun.

Kool-Aid Nation: Lynn's over-protective parents.

The miracle people: Kool-Aid Nation.

Vaildation Redux..

The miracle of blandness.

John's mouth and Kool-Aid Nation's deaf ears.

Wheel of misfortune.

Gordon Mayes, Concept Erosion and Kool-Aid Nation.

Lynn's excuses and what they mean.