Foobonia and Points West.

As we know, there's a certain element of sadism not especially well hidden in Elly's constant attempts to get Phil married. Everyone who isn't her can quite plainly see that she's still angry that Phil seems to have had a far easier childhood than she did and wants very much to punish him and make him regret ever having been happy when she was a SLAVE while he got to run around living the life of Riley while she was miserable and oppressed. Since she doesn't listen to herself and also doesn't admit to being an angry jerk who loves to feel miserable and lost and confused because she's a depressive narcissist, she thinks that he needs her help to function and isn't trying to ruin him so she can delight in his long overdue misery and despair.

This is why it's probably for the best that his low sperm count kept him from being a father. This is because his having a son or daughter is clearly a hidden danger to Elly's self-concept. After all, Phil might take to parenthood better than she did. It's bad enough that Phil is going to be grateful that despite the occasional flare-up of his acting like Red Green, marriage was the best decision ever made for him. Taking to being married and having bills to pay exceedingly well would be bad enough without his finding being a parent almost a breeze. Why, if Phillip were to be a good parent with a well-behaved child who respects him, the damage to Elly's self-concept would be almost impossible to repair. Once again, Phil would win and win and win and she'd be left with nothing.

The only thing that would be more damaging would be actually admitting that her parents don't actually love everything he does and use her as a bludgeon to beat him over the head with when they deliver the inevitable to everything who ain't her speech about his being a disgrace because he's a rootless drifter who lives out of his car while Elly has a family like she's supposed to have. Then again, we're probably dealing with a person who thinks that it's his fault that she feels miserable and angry all the time because she doesn't want to admit that she needs to feel miserable and angry all the time to make the world make sense. It would be like admitting that she's the reason Phil delayed proposing to Georgia in the first place. More on that tomorrow.

As I said yesterday, it irritates me to be told that explaining what's wrong with Foob is the act of a heartless cynic who lives a miserable life because he cannot experience joy and wishes to deprive everyone else of that sensation is that a close-in look clearly shows us that the Foobiverse is one of the most cynical places in fiction.

The image that should solidify that in people's minds appeared in the strip for 28 January 2007. As we all know, we were dealing with the first stage of the Housening and Elly did not like it one bit. Granted, there was a lot not to like. First off, Mike was sitting on his ass turning down apartment after apartment because he thought that the fire was a sign that leaving home was a horrible mistake while feeding Deanna pure-D bullshit about how none of them were as affordable or as nice as Lovey's Death-Trap of Delight. Meanwhile, Deanna was agreeing with him because she realized that taking over the Pattermanse and turfing John, Elly and possibly April would drive her mother bonkers. Third, Lizardbreath was holed up on her deathbed in the fetal position because she'd been mauled by an evil outside world that was scary and wrong because she actually had to deal with the real-life consequences of acting like a sitcom idiot. Finally, everyone was treating April as if she were a piece of furniture no one knew what to do with because treating her like a human being would mean that their behavior left a lot to be desired.

Sadly, Elly didn't give a fart in a high wind for any of that. Instead of being pissed off at watching the chickens coming home to roost and gasp in horror because their model train layout was being threatened, Elly wanted what she always wanted: to do stupid, short-sighted and self-aggrandizing things that sane people would tell her would backfire on her in the most horrible way possible and not have to deal with the inevitable results. John made the foolish decision to interrupt her furious grumbling about how children she raised to share her own utter lack of concern with the needs of others as if she were one of the others whose right must be trampled on by offering a remedy that doesn't involve Elly having her cake and eating it too only to bear witness to her standing there in her driveway bellowing "NO!!!!!!" like a spoiled toddler being told she can't just take things just because she waaaaaaannnnnnnnts them. The thing is that she's not just saying no to the immediate suggestion that she should take John's car. Elly is also saying no to thinking ahead, dealing realistically with the consequences of her actions, learning from her mistakes, admitting that she isn't the axis around which the world rotates and so on and so forth.

This, I should think, is because Elly became a jaded idiot at an early age because she confused being a bitter fool who rejected the world out of fear that it would hurt or disappoint her with being wise. I should think that this sort of thinking first started taking hold when she was in her middle teens and she needed a way to explain why her crush on a boy who saw her as a clingy irritant collapsed. Since it hurt too much to admit that she didn't know who the fellow really was and should maybe figure out what people are in to before committing herself, she came to the idiotic conclusion that people who told her things she didn't want to hear were bad people and those whose needs conflicted with her own were part of a vast conspiracy to ruin her and expose her to a very public humiliation. She might think that being "realistic" makes her smart but her idea of reality is really not that realistic.

As you might or might not know, Lynn plans to dedicate the 2014 calendar to a look at the teenaged years of Mike, Liz and April. Not only do we have to look forward to a depressing reminder that Lynn has such a poor memory, she no longer remembers what her characters used to look like, we have to endure an even more depressing reminder that John and Elly interact with their children, they always behave as if they're fighting for their lives. When you remember that that paranoid, hysterical imbecile Elly's reaction to Lizzie's entering the terrible twos is to all but give up on being able to control her and that she thinks that Mike's being afraid of coming home to an empty house clearly means that he wants to brick her into the crawl space so she can never leave, her inability to cope with placid children trying to establish an identity that isn't about being an extensiion of Mom and Dad's will is as predictable as her serving heartburn-inducing casseroles.

Also, since John clearly seems to think that whenever he and his children have the least sort of difference of opinion, they're clearly trying to revolt against his legitimate authority and usher in an era of chaos where his opinion is never to be expressed, it's easy to see that dealing with a teenager is going to make his being a gutless, vindictive and self-absorbed tin-pot dictator even worse than it already is.

That being said, it seems to me that this strip in particular explains what most frightens them about their children maturing: their fear that somehow or other, their children will be just more people whom they cannot control. We are, after all, dealing with two people who base their belief that they are the greatest victims in the history of the universe on the fact that people don't do what they want them to do when they want it done. Since they cannot have the god-like absolute control over everyone ever that their pathetic vanity and hateful megalomania make them want, they MUST own horses so as to be compensated for being defeated by everyone ever.

What this all means is that the general public is expected to part with money better spent on food and shelter so that they can be reminded that the people who will end up picking Elly's retirement home for her are terrible because they didn't agree that Mommy and Daddy cannot be questioned ever.

Of course, the real problem I have with this whole stupid thing of stupidly shipping Mike off to Vancouver for a couple of weeks is that it's just another in a long list of needlessly stupid solutions to problems that aren't as dire as John and Elly think they are and that could have been handled in a less complicated fashion than the ones we saw. To start with, was there no other option than to pack Mike off to Annie's so he can be tormented by demon children and patronized by a lard-arsed moron when Elly had to run late? Why was this angle not explored? Would it have killed Elly to find someone else to take him in?

Hmmm. Given that he isn't what you'd call welcome when he does go to the library, my guess is that it just might have done pea-brained Elly in to have to figure out what to do with him. Since she doesn't want to KNOW that he's wandering the streets (while otherwise being fine with that when she doesn't have to think about what he's doing) and since she doesn't want to be downgraded to mere worthless housewife by having him show up at her big important non-job and take her adulthood away from her, it's either have him suffer there or have him suffer by being lectured about being a selfish monster who hates her.

What Elly doesn't seem to want to realize is that by incessantly lecturing her children about how being nothing more than their mother is a fate worse than death, she's setting up a scenario in which they don't actually care much when she does lose her job. While not averse to the idea of Elly working per se, what they do resent is being told that they're evil parasites for wanting attention and hateful invaders for wanting to go where Mommy works. More on that moronic idea tomorrow.

Before I get to the point I want to make, I'd like to remind you of why I really, REALLY hate Eva Warzone. The reason I hate her stupid, self-serving and ignorant nonsense about war zones and expiration dates is that when April tries telling her something, the jerk's reaction can be best stated as "Her concerns do not affect me in the least so therefore naturally cannot be said to matter to anyone anywhere, least of all her! How do I make her realize that she should not be worried about these meaningless things either?" The method chosen is to play a filthy trick on her by trying to force her to say that if she only cares about her own immediate concerns, she's too selfish to worry about something else.

The reason that I mentioned her is that Elly is a lot like her. This is because every last one of her stupid lectures is based on the insane assumption that she is the only one allowed to care about anything and the only thing that people are allowed to care about is her witless, self-serving and ridiculously negative misrepresentation of events. If Mike wants not to come home to an empty house, it's not because being along scares him but because he doesn't care about her needs. If Mike doesn't act as if making trumpet practice enjoyable means that he'll die in a gutter, it's not because her endless beefing and refusal to offer the least encouragement has made it no longer fun but because he doesn't care about what it'll do to her. If Lizzie loses her glasses, it's not because she made a mistake but because she doesn't care about how much trouble her poor mother has to go through to replace them. If April behaves as if she doesn't know that everyone can only mean "Mommy", it's not because she's three and that's the deal with three year olds no matter how sincere Flapandhonk is but because she doesn't care about Mommy enough.

The added benefit of all of this is that the kids try to defend themselves based on what's actually going on. When they do, Elly gets to stand around wailing that her children think that she's an ignorant idiot because she's an ignorant idiot. Given her bulldog-like tenacity when defending a ludicrous misapprehension, she not only gets to shout her way into making people agree that one and one make five, she can whine her way into making her lie the truth. Yay.