Foobonia and Points West.

I think that we can all agree that the advice Elly gave her children over the years about how to deal with bullies is at best useless and at worst downright dangerous. Mean people like Brad, Richard and Jeremy don't become suddenly wonderful if you avoid them or befriend them or do anything like Elly says to them. That being said, we're supposed to regard it as a victory for Elly's beliefs that Jermy Wormy Jeremy simply insults and demeans April and has for now foresworn hitting her. There's a good God-damned reason for this and also, a Foob Fact:

Foob Fact Forty-One: Elly is too damned obsessed with the surface impression she and her family might make when they do things and can't be asked to care about anything deeper than the merely superficial.

Not only is this why Elly is at pains to present a good image while either shrugging feebly or whining about persecution when asked to address anything deeper than how she looks, it's also why she has her children do stupid things against their best interest like this. She doesn't want to look like a bad person who doesn't give people a chance when people might comment on it so she indulges thieves and ignores evidence that tells her that her youngest child was getting the shit kicked out of her by a God-damned lunatic. She also ignores the fact that she's set things up so that her child doesn't even understand what was about to happen to her.

The really annoying problem with the whole "Mike and Lizzie dressing as punk rockers will cause the apocalypse" is not just that the non-existent problem is supposed to be so obvious that it doesn't have to be explained. The problem is what the problem is. As Mike and his friends realize, Nitwit Elly labored under the idiotic misapprehension that wearing the costume would either turn him into an anger-filled punk rock monster or get him arrested or do something or other that would lead everyone to judge her harshly. After all, that sort of thing is what happened in the screw-ball "Berate your children for their own good" social development films that make up her brain so it makes sense to panic over what Birchers see as heralds of the End Times. The end result of that is Mike's scruffy friends think of her as being what she is: a clunky old bore who doesn't like fun.

Not, of course, that she honestly seems to care much about what children think. She's far too busy whining about being 'rejected' and 'silenced'. As history teaches us, Elly does not take kindly to any sort of criticism of what she does. From the earliest days in which she interpreted Mike's wanting her home-made costume to look right as his haaaaaaaaaaating her to her getting pissed off at a tired child who didn't understand what the Hell was going on because she was a naughty child who CLEARLY hated her pooooooor mother, Elly makes too damned much of a big deal of things because she assumes that the slightest inclination her children have for not thinking exactly as she does clearly means that they TOTALLY reject her and TOTALLY hate her and so on and so forth into the idiotic screaming match in which Liz finally describes the condition of Elly's mind: "Closed for business since 26 August 1951."

This, sadly, explains what the problem is supposed to be: "Elly's ungrateful children selfishly reject their poor mother and all the sacrifices she makes on their behalf because CHAOS makes them EVIL!!" It also explains what the problem really is: "Elly is a narrow-minded jerk who got her ass in an uproar because her kids started thinking for themselves." This seems to be a problem endemic to imbecile baby boomers like her and John. While they don't owe the older generation either a dime or the least bit of respect because they all wanted to drop the atom bomb and send everyone off to die in wars, they also think that the younger generation owes excellent people like themselves not only every dime spent on them but, since they 'saved' the world, unquestioned obedience. Not only are they thus spoiled, soft, entitled and hypocritical, they're also dumber than a sack of hammers.