Foobonia and Points West.

Of course, Elly does have a certain amount of justification for her campaign to turn her children against her parents. As we're about to see, Marian has the lovely habit of not admitting that her habit of undermining her daughter as a mother, housekeeper and cook and then leaving her to deal with the resultant mess when she goes back to Vancouver constitutes a problem. As we see in this strip from an earlier visit, the old doll's idea of being a grandparent consists of spoiling Mike and Lizzie rotten and dumping the result on Elly's lap like a scalding-hot bowl of not-my-problem. This leads to what we're going to see for the next few months: Marian does nothing constructive like helping Elly out with the kids but does do something less admirable when she calls the person she won't lift a finger to help a bad parent who doesn't know what she's doing.

The reason she can do this is because she's aware of one thing that eludes most people who aren't English Canadians who wish they were British: she knows that no matter how angry Elly gets, she's been programmed to think that honestly confronting someone with higher status about something they're doing wrong is the worst thing you could possibly do. The way Marian looks at it, her being older allows her to be a total jerk to her child and not actually have to apologize because that's just how the world rolls. This is possibly because Lynn herself believes that complaining to people who can possibly fight back is a terrible thing that is terrible and results in us having to deal with passive-aggressive nonsense in which she uses her strip as a means of saying the things she dare not say because if she did, she might make the faux pas of getting someone who's wronged her to get upset enough about it to possibly realize that they should heed the fifty-first of Jethro Gibbs's fifty rules: "Sometimes, you're wrong."

The reason that this is a problem is that just as Lynn lost all respect for her mother when she got too sick to take care of herself, it's pretty clear that she thinks that people who make an honest effort to make amends for jamming it to her are worthless and weak.

The really very stupid thing about Phil's asking Elly how long he's supposed to be her kid brother is not that she takes out her anger about her parents' hypocrisy on him but that he suggests doing something she simply cannot do. The very stupid thing about Phil is that he expects Elly to confront them about it. Simply put, the dumb bastard has lived on his own so long, he forgot what his childhood was like back when he and Elly were growing up stupid under the Red Ensign. Complaining to the people you wanted to complain about was very bad form and punished harshly; the ideal situation in a lot of English Canadian households was that everyone would be pissed off about their crappy lives but never say anything about it lest CHAOS ensue. I blame the stiff-upper-lip, no-dissension-in-the-ranks bullshit that we got from Mother England. The more legitimate the grievance, the less the idiot enforcing a law she probably knew was stupid and counterproductive was willing to budge.

This, of course, means that Marian and Elly never, ever had a substantive conversation about how Elly felt about anything. The closest either of them got was the old doll grousing about all of the things Elly did that disappointed her. Funny. The dimwitted old hen witlessly pitted Phil and Elly against each other in the name of respectability and even on her death-bed never understood why they didn't get along. Jim is no help either because he'd rather not say anything because a) he fears what people might think of him if he starts dissing the contents of an urn and b) he never had any input in their raising aside from administering the punishments his boss Marian decided on so he can't have any opinion about how Elly was raised in the here-and-now.

That being said, I can still imagine he and Phil having a conversation after the Big Sham Wedding. What'd happen is that Phil would think back to this week's arc and ask Jim what Marian would have thought of what Mike and Deanna did. Jim would allow as how Marian would have been perturbed but begrudgingly gotten behind like she did in Phil's case. When told that Elly said that Marian would surely have disowned her if she had dome something like this, Jim would be baffled. Why would Elly mention a possibility that neither he or Marian ever saw coming. The Elly he and Marian knew would have never have done so in the first place because she, for reasons they never understood, accepted sight unseen the morals and expectations of those irritating social development films they showed her in Home Ec.

The supposition would then have been that Elly had deliberately invoked an impossibility as a means not of expressing a legitimate grievance but as a means of saying that she should have final say over how he lived his life.

The reason that I came up with that little scenario I’ve been hammering on is that by taking John out of the equation, something that has a severe negative impact on how Elly interacts with Mike and Lizzie would go away. It doesn’t matter if they got divorced or if Phil ended up having to dine on smug rat-bastard idiot to survive that doomed camping trip, having John go away would eradicate the feeling of being trapped that Elly feels. The desperation not felt because she had children before she was ready to be a mother is, of course, derived from her marrying a nerdy and entitled weakling with a need to tyrannize his family because dealing with the public makes the gutless, sunken-chested, witless douchenozzle feel like the man he’ll never be. Freeing Elly from having to ‘admit’ that she’s bullying him by insisting on being treated like a human being would allow her to have the breathing room to see that she shouldn’t be taking out her rage at being connected with a plum duff on their children.

As a for instance, she would have the peace of mind needed to see that her habit of shoving Mike aside whenever he wants attention is a piss-poor way to deal with the collapse of her hopes of returning to the university life that she never really wanted to live in the first place. She’d also be able to see that there’s a good God-damned reason her children try to get her to admit that she loves one child more than the other and always will: she acts the part because she can’t seem to find the time to play fair. Also, she’d notice that whenever she overhears Lizzie play Mommy and talk like a shrew, it’s not just her she’s quoting, it’s Marian. Figuring out that the mother she saw as a role model is an idiot who fears her would do a lot more for her than getting a diploma. It’d allow her to be an adult at long last.

Now, I’d say it was pretty safe to say that Deanna clearly sees herself as being a better mother to Meredith and Robin than Mira ever was to her. Strip after endless strip is, after all, predicated on the notion that Deanna has to defend the new, better way of being a mother from the evil criticism of the domineering monster mother who used her evil family politics to dominate HER DADDY!!!!!! and make Deanna’s life a misery. There is a problem, however, with the time-not-presents orthodoxy that The Sainted Elly preaches: it doesn’t work out so good because neither she nor Deanna seem to be willing to spend any time with their children. What generally happens is that the two dimwits stand there scared out of their tiny, tiny minds because children evilly refuse to do what they’re supposed to: sit quietly where ever it is that Mommy plops them down and not do anything or think anything or want any sort of mental stimulation. I can readily see Deanna shrieking that she cannot be asked to give her children attention either. Simply put, Deanna is a worse parent to her children than Mira was to her. All Mira wanted was a tacky wedding without that gay guy angering God by stinking up the joint and a son-in-law who isn’t a sponge-headed man-child. What Deanna clearly wants is to have the evil, scary, baffling tendency of children to move around, speak and think on their own initiative to go away so that they can become mindless drones who only move when she wills it.

This desire, this longing to abolish the free will of her children seems to be why she idolizes another pair of failures who think themselves superior to their better antecedents. Granted, Jim and Marian did do something wrong by giving the world a petty, manipulative and tyrannical imbecile woman and her yawping man-child of a kid brother and somehow, Will and Carrie messed up big-time by blighting the world with a grinning gargoyle with a train fetish but they’re clearly better parents and people than their children. April, as a for instance, pretty much owes her life to Jim’s presence in it and it shows. One could say that Jim saw her as a way of raising Elly properly. It’s kind of too bad that the old boy popped his clogs before he could crow about how his way is better but you can’t have everything, right? 

One of the things he wasn't allowed to have was a daughter who actually believed that he and Marian did a good job. Oh, they tried their best but they were hampered by a double standard and thus made her life a misery. This means that Elly sees herself as trying to raise her children the way Marian could have raised her had she not been brainwashed by the patriarchy. She thus differs from Deanna who wants to raise her children the way Mira should have raised her had she not been sick with the impulse to interfere.

As we all know, John really doesn't think that Elly is going to get her Bachelor of Arts degree any time soon; that's because he does things that are unfair and cruel and hateful. Those heartless things he does are called 'remembering the past' and 'drawing a logical conclusion.' He knows from experience that Elly's proud boastings always give way to whining about how hard the assigned material is and how the teacher is out to get her followed by her quitting in frustration and blaming him and the children for not being supportive of a thing she's not really serious about. We're about to be reminded that someone has had decades more experience of having Elly sneer at for plugging away at something because she thinks that dedication is for suckers; that's because Phil makes an offhand comment that echoes something John once said about learning something that she has some chance of actually using. That's because, as I said, he and his parents have dealt with Elly's smugness, victimism and defeatism for a lot longer than John has. He's also had to deal with the fact that a lazy, entitled blowhard who isn't going anywhere in life because she's too gutless to do anything doesn't respect what he does for a living longer as well.

As I have mentioned before, Jim and Marian tended to have little patience with Elly's claims that her life had slipped away and she'd become old before her time. Not only had they had to listen to nonsense like that since she was a high school freshman whining about her non-existent social life, they also knew that she wouldn't recognize maturity if the word were tattooed on her retina. She had the same irritating tendency to lecture, the same refusal to admit that she might be in the wrong, the same passive-aggressive habit of pouting if she didn't get her own way, the same spinelessness and the same lack of foresight she'd had since she was in pigtails. Since she hadn't substantively changed mentally despite having got herself a husband and children to play with, her claims that she was aged beyond her years were absurd. They never had to deal with that sort of foolishness from Phil; he might not have had the steady, regular life Elly had but he also wasn't as immature and silly. The only time he ever showed signs of being immature is when he got frustrated by dealing with the idiot sister who thought that she was the boss of him even after they became adults. It seems to me that Jim moved to Milborough with the purpose in mind of keeping the girl who didn't grow up from causing mischief; his son didn't need his help because he was a grown man.

As we all know, there's nothing more appalling than a Patterson attempting to be virtuous. A fairly good example of that was Elly sitting April down after the Housening and admitting that she and John should have probably tried to find out what was bothering her but now, after things were too late, she understands the issues she should have addressed when she had the chance. The revelation in the strip for 22 July 2008 that she's going to stay with Jim while Iris gets a well-deserved rest put a nasty idea in my head about how Jim was going to end up in Sunset Manor. As we know, Elly is fairly ignorant and gets frustrated really easily and quickly. Instead of stolidly and somewhat witlessly plodding along like Iris has been doing, she's going to want a fast, fast solution to what will seem to her an insoluble problem: dealing with her father's needs. This means that before he needs to and before Iris or April can object, Elly will check him into Assisted Living. Watching her justify a decision borne of impatience rather than real need will be almost as entertaining as criticizing the Coffee Squawkers who think that Elly's a saint.

Elly, as we have seen, loves to scream. There are a host of ideas and habits that simply infuriate our protagonist. Let's take cigarette smoking for a start. We read in one of her retcons that she thought it would be hilarious if somehow a group of poor slobs having a smoke could somehow burn half to death. What makes that infantile power-fantasy even more disgusting is that her father used to be a two-pack-a-day guy. This is a symptom of a deeper problem: Elly is ashamed of her parents. As far back as she can remember, they were too old to live. It's also not like they were grateful for all her and her brother's helpful advice, either. Sure, an outsider might see two ungrateful pseudo-hippie jackasses badgering their parents but that's because they're squares, too. In fact, most of the habits and values that antagonize Saint Eleanor can somehow be associated with her folks. Playing guitar to show off like she did is groovy, man! Playing for personal enjoyment (like Jim did) or as a career (like he wanted do), on the other hand, has to be stopped immediately. I was reminded of a particularly appalling story arc wherein she and her brother steamrolled their dad into selling his acoustic guitar so as to avoid 'embarrassing' them. This is also why she attended university thousands of miles from home: to avoid having to live near her awful, awful parents. It's a contributing factor in her marrying the Train Douche: she was practically trolling for a retrograde idiot who'd stand in the way of her continuing her education while her parents were alive. The most disgusting thing of all, of course, is that she will not tolerate her sort of hatefulness from her own children. They have to do exactly what she tells them, no questions asked, or they're in for some incoherent, vulgar, childish screaming. Old fogeys like her parents may respond to relentless yapping like hers by articulate, well-thought-out words spoken in a level tone of voice but not her. She's above that bummer logic trip.