dreadedcandiru2 | Entries tagged with exile farm

As we know, this year's Valentine Dance arc is mostly about how Aaron needed to smarten up and stop strutting around like he owned the place. We get that hammered home when John gets all morose about how it's hard to keep up with a boy that can run faster than he can. This leads us to John's reason for agreeing with Elly's plan to drive a wedge between Mike and Name Escapes Me: his need to compensate for anaemic and inconsistent underparenting by going to a somewhat overweening extreme: packing the boy off to a far-away place to establish dominance.

This is because of a defect in John's character that he sees as a strength: his refusal to actually learn who the people around him are and what they want out of life. He's already decided who they are and why they behave the way they do so their being different people is clearly a slam against him. Learning that Mike sees him as a dour and unsympathetic presence who lives a life of pointless boredom and also as Elly's enforcer would lead to something perilous: his realizing that his own self-assessment is as off-base as his opinion of everyone else. Better to fulminate about attitudes and give the boy the vacation he'd like for himself.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1090149.html

Since we're about to be reminded why Lawrence is radioactive soon enough, I'd like to clarify my position on the stupid reasons Martha gave for not writing Michael. The first stupid reason is, of course, Lynn using Martha as a means of settling scores with classmates who she felt had deliberately slighted her because they hate her. When she's not standing around squealing that of course the popular girls want to steal all the boys because they want to laugh at her when her urn is planted in a maiden's forgotten grave because they all decided that Lindy Ridgway didn't deserve to be happy because popular girls are mean, she's pissed off at some boy she scared off acting the way she does. In this instance, Martha is being used to castigate some poor slob who wasn't that into the crazy girl who spent her youth flinging herself at anything remotely male that didn't move too quick for not keeping a promise to write that he'd never intended to keep in the first place.

The second stupid reason is that Martha claimed to be so intimidated by Mike's unreasonable facsimile of a writing style that she felt that he'd think she was an imbecile if she wrote to him in clear English that people could actually understand. This is nuts because it ignores their shared history of his making a paranoid and vindictive jackass of himself every time he handed her a note. Since he can't admit that he put too much stock in the opinion of a bunch of scruffy idiots who still hold him in contempt, it's easy for him to want to confuse her sharing a touching comment with her girlfriends with her sharing a good laugh at the monkey she's stringing along because he's not smart enough or self-aware enough to realize that his anger and fear of humiliation had the wrong focus.

What this means is that it made no sense for her to not write because his not being able to see what she was really doing is all the paranoia fuel a gloomy dope with a nightmare fantasy of endless humiliation based on a well-deserved self-hatred he can't admit to needed. We could see her being so clean, we could eat off of her and him going nuts making up incriminating bullshit. The problem is that we'd be asked to sympathize with the nutcase pulling the case against her out of his fat Tom Of Finland ass instead of the sitting duck antagonist because she'd be convicted by horrid wordplay about what absence really makes the heart do.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1053486.html

I think that this summer should stand out for one very bizarre and troubling reason: it's the only one in the strip's history that doesn't have Elly and John howl about the need to pack their kids off some place for weeks on end or arrange a really neat job John would really like that turns out to be a degrading slog no sane person should like to make'em suddenly wonderful by reminding them what hard work is. Granted, we get Elly delivering a mind-blowing speech about how Mike supposedly owes her and John for the air he breathes but that's about it.

The reason that this sticks out in my mind is because it's a reminder that for some reason, John and Elly are convinced that the kids are having a better time than they are and for sure, a far better time than they did and so does Lynn, it would seem. Since she's sort of weird and sort of thinks that her opinion is everyone's opinion, her attempt to depict the kids as being spoiled falls far short of the mark and makes John and Elly look like jerk parents screaming about nothing much at all.

This would be a minor irritation save for one factor: Lynn's strip seems to have become a sort of flypaper for freaks and monsters who smile and nod and tell themselves they're great people for insisting that John and Elly should occasionally fire off and wale the snot outta their kids for no reason at all just to show'em who's in charge. Since the lovers of appalling and irrational cruelty for its own sake will always be with us, Lynn will always have fans and admirers.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1045691.html

The irritating thing about Danny is that he assumes that people can't simply come to visit when they show up. This manifests itself as John complaining about having to thaw and replace plumbing and repair farm equipment when he wanted to take things easy. This tendency of his to impose back-breaking labour on people because his farm ain't no hippie commune is that his "you wanna eat, you gotta work" outlook on life extends to his kid. The end result of his being the jackass who makes his kid work at the family business to keep her out of mischief is that being made to feel guilty about not wanting to be a farmhand fills her with envy of those who don't have to live her life.

Said envy tends to explain her defensiveness when it's pointed out that her life looks rather bleak and boring as well as her shrewish ad hominem attacks on the cousins who play tourist on the farm of a Summer while she has to be there year round. Given Danny's being a bit of a dope and a lot of a throwback is that now that he's probably retired, he probably sold it out from under her without even considering if she'd like to own the place because of that Heir Club For Men thing he and John are rocking.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1016910.html

One of the things one must remember about Elly is her tendency to make a pleasant myth of painful experiences in order to avoid learning from the past. While it might look as if Michael is the only Patterson who was about to transmute the ridiculous and needless clusterfuck that was spending Christmas at a failing family farm in the coldest spot on the continent into a Hallmark Movie Of The Week, we have proof that somewhere in the next two and a half years from now, they'll come to the conclusion that what Mike needs to cure him of "defiance" (by which John means not agreeing with every stupid thing that comes out of his ignorant fucking yap quickly or cravenly enough) and "dangerous attachments" (by which Elly means associating with a girl she doesn't know) is to send him to the Magic Land of Wonder and Enrichment that is a dirt farm because absence has made the depressing stain on the map more delightful the longer they're away from it.

The reason that I mention this is that by the year 2007, it is quite likely that all of the Pattersons who bore witness to the horrid and preventable mess that blighted the Christmas of 1988 have let a fine haze of pea-brained nostalgia blur the past to a more pleasing and less teeth-grindingly stupid shape. Instead of remembering being cheek by jowl with dumbass hicks, they choose to remember the place as a sort of Xanadu filled with love and companionship. This is why, I should think, it made sense to everyone who wasn't April to just crowd into the Pattermanse like idiots and stay until Mike forced Elly to flee her home by waving his brats under her nose. This means that like a lot of stupid things, the Housening is really Danny's fault. If he were a better host, the Pattersons would remember a boring but pleasant time and be less inclined to recreate it.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1016736.html

As we know, Elly tends to hate it when either her mother or John's mother shows up when she's around. She doesn't mind telling the kids to mind their elders when she's not around but there's something about being no longer the eldest that just gets on her nerves. Said something is, of course, her having to take a back seat to Granny and being overruled at every turn. When she issues forth an ill-considered, inflexible and stupid decree because she thinks that the point of being a wife and mother is to say no to everything, she doesn't like having an older person coming along and setting aside her brutal commands.

The reason this is important over the next two or three weeks is that Elly happens to be a guest in someone else's house. This means that she cannot actually boss Laura around the same way she can tyrannize her own children because Laura isn't her kid and she's not actually in charge of anything other than telling people what other parents have decided. If someone else says something she disapproves of is okay, Elly has no choice but to lump it because what Someone Else says goes and that's wrong. What's also wrong is that she can't commandeer her niece's room and manage to bar her from it. Why, she even has to accept other people's judgment as to whether her children are happy and that's terrible too. This is why Exile Farm is some place other people get sent to: Elly can't cooperate unless she's in charge.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1016223.html

As we all know, all of the Pattersons have a terrible time when they go to Exile Farm. The kids have to endure Cousin Laura and her wall-to-wall bitchy moral superiority, Elly has to deal with the fact that despite what the media tells her, exposure to grain silos and barn yard animals doesn't ennoble people and John winds up becoming the farm hand he feared becoming. The reason that I mention this is that despite the fact that he really hates farm life when he's actually living it, John tells himself that people who live on the land are really lucky.

This is important for two reasons. Not only did he marry a city girl who also blanks out on how miserable she is on the farm, he has at least two children out there who look back on their purgatorial period of dealing with recalcitrant future meal options and the boorish yokels Elly and John think are better than civilized men and women with the same idiot gloss of sentimentality. Oddly enough, the only person sane enough to remember what a craphole the farm is went nuts in a different way and thinks Blandthony is Galahad.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1016063.html

As you know, we're about two months away from what appears to me to be Elly channeling Clark Griswold by launching in to a big, stupid and ill-considered attempt at bonding with her husband's extended family and enriching her children's lives by, you guessed it, visiting Exile Farm in the middle of December like a big, deluded idiot from the city who doesn't get what that might entail.

I'd originally thought that she was doing so to cool down a relationship that Mike is quite frankly too young for but we all know that it takes a year and a half from now for Elly to learn that Martha exists and that Mike's been in an on-and-off thing with her all that time. What's happening is pretty much her trying to make things better by being with family and maybe showing Mike and Lizzie the real meaning of Christmas: being harangued about being spoiled and lazy by arrogant and clannish hayseeds.

We start things off with this being discussed behind Michael's back because he might object to any plan to make him Suddenly Wonderful by exposing him to the beauty of an ice-cold winter in beautiful Middle Of God-Damned Nowhere, Manitoba because central heating and pipes that aren't frozen solid are a luxury that's making him bad and cruel and mother-hating. So, it would seem, is not especially liking old people who want to doze away the day so KEEP IT QUIET, being reminded that a Grunt-Burg used to be a cow, being packed in like sardines and, yes, being lectured to be smug fist-magnet farm-folk about how foolish he is for being materialistic and rebellious and the like.

What caps things off is that when someone points out the defects in Elly's logic and how the results are that Mike feels miserable (and was forced to stand out in the cold to Think About Being A Bad Guest by his graceless, thin-skinned moron hosts because he finally told that snippy, yapping annoyance Laura where she can shove the attitude she needs to lose yesterday), she gets all angry about how wonderful her ill-thought out plan is. The only thing that would have saved this is if Lynn had followed through on her plan to pack Danny and the gang down to Milboring so that nitwit Laura can get cut down to size.

Crossposts: https://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/1010989.html

Now, to get back to the fact that Lynn seems to have just plain forgot to give Liz a sleepover of her own despite giving Mike and April one, it seems to me that said affaair would be used for the same purpose the ones Lynn bothered to write: to reinforce a character trait of the birthday girl. In Mike and April’s case, we were reminded that both children have the unhappy tendency to want to test the very narrow limits of the very drab and anticsocial idiots they call parents. (What this means is that having John glower at April and her friends while congratulating himself on being able to do is an amplified version of Elly glowering at the ‘peep’ strip.)

The reason that I mention this is that were twelve-year old Lizardbreath try to twist things around so that her aloof, standoffish nature, blank-eyed inability to pick up on or recognize social norms and sullen resentment of people who clearlt want to “steal” the friends she has are why Elly would have the devil’s own time coming up with a guest list for a slumber party, we’d probably end with the whole thing getting scrubbed because Elly had the same problem for the same reason. This means that the closest the Breath is ever going to have to one of those things is her bridal shower.

This is akin to how the closest thing to the threatened visit by the Cruikshanks in which Saint Laura would spew treacle from her mouth about how lazy, soft, entitled and ungrateful Mike and Lizzie are for not wanting to be lectured all the damned time about how they’re moral monsters for not getting all giddy about the prospect of being at the southbound end of a northbound horse in the comfort of their own home is, of course, the Settlepocalypse…..not, of course, that we got to see that either. Lynn had priorities like having Elly talk about how great it was that Liz took over the wedding like what should happen.

Crossposts: http://dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com/985444.html

The interesting thing about the real Cruikshank family is that they have three daughters. The other interesting fact is that they're much the same age as Kate and Aaron are. This is why whenever Cousin Laura appeared, she seemed to be just a little older than the Patterson child she was calling a clodhopper. What this tells us is that something entertaining is happening that the Patterson family are too dim to realize: Bev and Danny also have three daughters. For the sake of convenience, let's call them Karen, Laura and Melanie. They look similar enough that someone not especially familiar with their family would confuse them with one another and none of the three of them especially loved playing baby-sitter because their idiot uncle from the big city was too big of a girl's blouse to deal with the alleged out-of-control behaviour of his slug-like imbecile offspring.

This led the three of them to formulate a plan to prank the moron city folk; said plan involves their conceit that whatever 'Laura' stuck Foob-sitting is an only child. Since idiot Mike and clueless Liz are almost attentive as their moron parents, the gag is a viable one and since by the time the Martian showed up, Karen and the real Laura had moved elsewhere, it seemed appropriate to just let the idiots from the city go right on being ignorant. It should be noted that John was probably as big an asshole as an older brother as he is a father and husband so it's easy to see why Bev and Danny would get in on the fun. After all, there's nothing farm people love better than putting one over on city folk. The success of the Letters From Wingfield Farms series of plays is testament to that.

Of course, the real problem with the Peeping Mike arc is that it highlights a dilemma John and Elly brought on themselves by being stupid parents. This eternal battle against having the kids stay home during the Summer seems, as all things, to be a multi-stage omnishambles that has distinct subcomponents of stupidity:

Since Michael is stupid, lazy, anger-prone and misogynistic, he doesn't ever spend his summers doing anything constructive. Sooner or later, he finds a way to spend his time that outrages and inconveniences his family.
John and Elly have no interest in policing Mike's behaviour because they have lives.
John and Elly are inept fools who believe that exposure to magic will make him wonderful.
This means that they end up making Mike's idiocy someone else's problem.
Since he cannot be with his friends and he's also exposed to the change he hates more than anything else, this convinces Mike that his parents hate the idea of his being happy because they're too old to enjoy life any longer.
Go back to Step One.

This is why next year, Mike ends up getting packed off to summer camp in order to instill in him a love of nature that will somehow make him the grinning gumdrop they want instead of the sullen goof their ineptitude would have to create. This is why doing chores that he hates all the next summer further convinces him that they're Nazis who hate happiness. This is why they get him a job in order to keep out of trouble and why he ends up thinking even more that his parents are too old to laugh and enjoy life and want to punish him for still being able to do so. This, finally, is why they hit on the idea of sending him and his siblings off to that damned farm. The idea seems to be to cut him off from the familiar surroundings and familiar friends and anything that would allow him to feel as if his opinion matters. Exposing him to horned cattle, grain and old people who look down on him and lecture him will somehow make of him the pliable drone that they think they want. Ah, well. Evil people pay for their sins sooner or later and since they got what they wanted, they're finding out that they were fools to want it.

The odd thing about all of this talk about the band and stuff is having to remember John's useless advice about how Becky had traded FRIENDS!!! and FUN!!! for a silly day-dream that kept her from the good things in life like serving the interests of ~~grasping yuppie vermin who think that having to wait more than five seconds to get what they want makes them the victims of all victims surpassing all others~~him and Elly. The reason that I mention this is that his sovereign cure for what he sees is his children's ingratitude and defiance is being exiled to a failing dirt farm and being lorded over by an obnoxious hippie and his smug idiot daughter.

The reason for this is not, of course, just that he and his imbecile wife have a sort of stupid fetish about farm life. If it were just that his belief that exposure to horned cattle, horses, chickens and ass-scratching hicks magically make children wonderful, it would be one thing. The problem is that we have to read his retcons and endure his getting all sentimental about the long, hard days being at the south end of a north-bound horse. Simply put, when he proposed sending the kids to Danny and Bev's farm, John was basically being a typical man and giving unwilling people a present he'd like for himself. Ah, well. At least his being the same sort of goof who'd have bought Elly a socket set if he thought he could get away with it makes him better about it than a wife who won't admit to why she's doing something.

The interesting thing about the Pattersons' experience at summer camp is that it has a commonality with sending the kids off to Exile Farm and when John got Mike a summer job selling hot dogs from a cart. Said common factor is that they're immediately proceeded either by Elly having to mediate a row between Mike and Lizzie or by Mike proposing to do something that would heap shame on the family name.

As I've said before, the children have to go away because they were never taught how to spend their time productively and that conflicts not only with Elly's somewhat unreasonable expectation that her own children should somehow behave better than she did when she was their age but with John's amnesia as regards what a pain in the neck he was when he was a child. This has the result of taking what could otherwise be a rather positive and normal experience and making it into something of a punishment owing to the refusal people have to explain themselves.

Of course, the saddest part of all of this "Let's pack Mike off somewhere because Elly is too self-absorbed and immature to deal with him as if he's a person too" business is that Mike grew up to be an incredibly self-absorbed and damaged human being in his own right. Given that he has been systematically denied any freedom of expression and sympathy for his own viewpoints, he quickly turned into another self-pitying, self-contained idiot who cannot empathize with others or identify with their point of view.

This is why whenever his children want reassurance that Daddy actually cares about them and likes knowing that they exist and want to be with him, he screams for Deanna to keep the scary, scary little children he can't identify with away from him. Since he is unable to understand why people do what they do, he can only think that people are doing what he thinks they're doing. This leaves him with a very low tolerance for children actually being children.

When we combine this with his need to position himself as being the victim above all others, it doesn't take a genius to realize that at some point in the last five years since the Settlepocalypse, the Delicate Genius must have come to the stupid conclusion that his children need to be exposed to farm life to control their baffling need to impinge on his awareness and their disappointing lack of gratitude that he actually takes care of them. This means that obnoxious hayseed idiot Laura's obnoxious hayseed idiot daughter is currently mocking Meredith because she doesn't know a tractor from a turnip. This also means that a man named Paul Jones from Saint John, New Brunswick wants to gut-punch the Delicate Genius for having a skull filled with horseshit.

Remember a few months ago when I talked about how pissed off Liz was that Dawn took up with Shawna Marie during her stay at Exile Farm? The idea seems to have been that Dawn should have done absolutely nothing with her life while Lizzie was away so that she would find things to be exactly the same as they were when Elly and John lost their shit and packed her off to Bev and Danny's place. It's like how Mike turned into a whiny little bitch because Jason Finkbeiner was THERE for Martha; in both cases, people are simply expected to sit on their hands and do nothing because the Patterson children expect to be sent away and not have to cope with people living their lives without them in it.

I think that that is a very stupid and self-centered thing to expect. Not only does it assume that Mike and Liz are the axis around which the world rotates, the other idiotic underlying assumption is that the people in the Pattersons' neighborhood aren't used to the idea that Mike and Liz will not be allowed to have a summer at home just hanging out like other children. Either they go on a family trip to hang out with old people who lecture them or John and Elly send them away because they're too fragile to deal with the idea of children being underfoot all summer long. If you were to ask Dawn or Gordon or Lawrence about this, he or she would shrug and say "Well, that's what happens. Mike and Liz and their sister, they just go away for the summer and that's that." If you were to ask a stupid person like Connie, you'd get a huffy comment about Elly being tormented. If you were to ask someone who doesn't think much of Elly's parenting skills like Annie, you'd be told Elly doesn't like being a mother so tends to send them away. This makes Annie better than the other people I'd mentioned.

Now that I've talked as much as I care to about the Enjo family, I'd like to discuss Liz's other token Magic Minority Friendoid, Shawna Marie Verano. Much like Lawrence Poirier, she's pretty much a product of Lynn's lack of any real knowledge of Latin America; much as Sarah Palin thinks that Africa is a country, Lynn seems to think that the world South of the Rio Grande is a homogenous mass of swarthy people who speak Spanish. Trying to explain that Brazil is the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world or that the Argentina where the Veranos are supposedly from is a majority-white country (Buenos Aires, in fact, being indistinguishable from Toronto save for the language, the fact that the people dress better and who they think that certain sheep-ridden islands in the South Atlantic belong to) is the same exercise in futility that explaining to her that the Authentic Thailand never really existed save in the minds of a Hollywood script writer.

Not, of course, that it doesn't somehow fit that she's the product of Lynn's ignorance. After all, she came into Liz's life as the end result of her parents' panicky stupidity. You see, one summer, she had Dawn all to herself and one trip to Exile Farm later, Lizardbreath felt as if she was on the outside looking because "Dawn likes Shawna Marie best now." What really, really hurts about that is that John and Elly hadn't the courage or decency to do anything other than moan about how baffling it was that Liz never felt as if she belonged anywhere when it was their God-damned fault that she felt that way. It's like watching the potato-nosed harridan whine about how Liz never came to her with her problems when she and her non-stop moaning about how ungrateful she and Michael were WAS Problem Number God-Damned One.

Anyways, after their issues got resolved, Shawna Marie turned into a logic defying amalgam of Candace's being closer to the Earth and Eva Warzone's need to lecture Liz about how awful some woman she only knew by reputation was. I have no idea what possessed her and Dawn to talk smack about Thérèse or why she thinks that it's a great thing that she stuck up for that toxic little dink Anthony because she knew him; all I know is that I don't like it. I also don't like how her wedding from Hell to Brian Squiggly Line (seriously, Lynn couldn't even give the man a name) is where Liz FINALLY committed to Anthony after about ten or twelve years of false starts and missed opportunities. She might think that she witnessed magic; sane people will realize that a relationship that should have petered out and died ages ago was being kept alive by artificial means so that two selfish old people who think that their children owe them for the air they breathe can get money that they do NOT and never did have coming.

As I recently reminded you, most of this summer will be spent watching Jim and Marian babysit Michael because Elly thinks that his attitude needs adjusting. This, as we all know is because rather than actually risk talking to their children and thus losing any hope of being 'authority' figures, the Pattersons ship the 'problem' elsewhere in the hopes that it will be cure the child of 'unreasonable' defiance. The form it takes this time around is that Michael is angry because his opinion about Elly's job has been declared to be selfish and a risk to his mother's freedom and happiness; this, as we've seen, is as accurate, generous and respectful of his feelings as the presumption that April wanted Mike and his family to freeze and die so she could be selfish and have a room to herself.

As I stated earlier, Elly decided sight unseen to pack Mike off to Vancouver in the hopes that they would subject him to the same parenting she both hated and wishes to emulate. The idea seems to have been that two months of what she perceived as being arbitrary brutality because she has never wanted to admit that she behaved far worse than Mike ever did growing up would make him soooooo grateful to be home where he is safe that he'd roll over and do whatever she told him.

Sadly for her, her clever plan collided with the disappointing reality of Jim and Marian treating Mike like a human being instead of a chaos-loving monster who wanted to eat Elly's happiness. Since this meant that Mom and Dad failed Elly, she and John had to find a better set of people so that their children would finally admit that they're selfish monsters who had no legitimate right to expect to be clothed, fed and housed no matter how many indulgent and silly people told Daddy "Look here, you stupid four-eyed (expletive deleted)!! Those children are helpless so you gotta take care of them no matter how much it cramps your style." Thus, they hit on sending them to a man who made all the right noises: Danny Cruikshank, bearded road-apple, professional hayseed and all-around condescending shitbag.

As you know, we're going to spend the summer watching Michael getting sent to Vancouver. The reason is that he objects to Elly not trusting him with a key to the house and being forced into hanging around stoooopid babies. We also know that Elly interprets this as his wanting her to not have a life of her own. As she sees it, he's a selfish little monster who wants her to stay home and watch the world go on without her while everyone else gets to go out in public and do things that matter. What Michael sees is something else, of course. What Michael sees is a mother who finds excuse after excuse to not be there for him when he needs a mother. Were this a normal sitcom instead of a warped retelling of Lynn's own life, what would happen is that we'd get the same sort of non-apology that April got during the Housening that allowed her to feel as if someone cared while allowing the parents to go on their merry way waiting until she's moved out to finish the sweet suite and rent it to a pallid nitwit like Lizardbreath. Since this is the Patterverse, expecting that to happen is like expecting Elly to join the Kiss Army or John to admit that he doesn't have the blindest idea what he's talking about. What generally happens tends to happen in the following distinct stages:

Parental obliviousness: John and Elly do something that reminds us that not only do they not understand children, they don't especially want to as doing so would mean that they're arrogant, selfish people who deliberately make a chaos of their lives out of malice and folly. In the current instance, it's Elly's refusal to admit that she's broadcasting the message that Mike doesn't matter.
Confrontation with the obvious: Sadly for the children, not even John and Elly can keep their heads buried in the sand forever. Sooner or later, Mom and Dad will end up realizing that yet again, their awful children don't know that they're merely extensions of their parents. The form this takes this time is Elly being horrified because Mike isn't as gung-ho about her job as she is.
Misapprehension as to motive: John and Elly have always attributed the worst possible motive to any sign that the children's opinion differs from their own. In this instance, we have Mike being cast as a selfish monster who wants Elly to be a slave and NEVER EVER have time to herself or fulfillment or blah-blah-blah.
Communications Failure: John and Elly have a firm rule about not talking to their children as if they're human beings with comprehensible motives. This time around, it takes the form of Mike having to overhear arguments about how he's a selfish little jerk because he wants the reassuring presence of Elly in his life.
Panic: What seems to take place time and again is that John and Elly are terrified that if things go on as they are, an adult might have to do something a child wants and thus lose any authority forever.
Show of Force: Since they have to remind the children that they have no power, they hit on the solution of shipping the problem elsewhere just to crow about being the boss of them.
Alienation of relatives: Their hapless idiot relatives end up getting stuck babysitting because John and Elly are gutless simpletons who are too fragile to deal with their tractable children. This time around, we have Mike being treated like a normal kid instead of a radioactive leper with Tourette's.
Failure of Concept: Aside from Laura's comments about how freaking dumb her city cousins are, the children don't have the horrible time that their idiot parents think they'll have. This year, it's Mike having a pleasant summer with caring people instead of what John and Elly want: the same treatment she got for being a much worse child despite Jim and Marian having a firm policy of not wanting to do her parenting for her.

The last stage is a reminder that no matter how many times they pack the children off elsewhere because they don't want to actually be parents, the same terrifying need to be people in their own right keeps coming back to haunt them because the children are not terrified into complying with Mom and Dad's insane demands. This means that they keep on having to dump their self-created crises on other people. Eventually, they get the grateful children they want because their failure to teach them to function in adult society on any meaningful level has created a pair of adult children who need a spotter to remind them to breathe.

As we know, there was a big, long arc back in, oh, nineteen eighty-eight that had Elly and the family pack up and spend Christmas at Exile Farm. As I’d mentioned in my last essay about said story line, there were three purposes that Lynn and Elly had in mind. The stated purpose for that little excursion into appealing to worse problems was that they all decided to have Christmas at The Farm with The Family just like on TV. The second purpose was, of course, to adjust Michael and Lizzie’s awful attitudes and teach them to be grateful to their wonderful parents and not take things for granted and, well, you get the point. The third purpose, of course, was to isolate Michael from that scary young girl and her scary body language and the scary fact that her scary existence meant that Elly might have to face the scary fact that her dance card was empty because she was a scowling, short-tempered idiot who pissed away her chances taking herself too damned seriously. Since Lynn approves of silencing complaints that mean that she might have to adapt to other people by ranting about refugees in war zones, the Pattersons were depicted as good-hearted people whose good intentions got wrecked by an ungrateful brat kid who doesn’t know what life is all about.

Contrast this with the upcoming Christmas on Long Island arc in Sally Forth. What is happening here is that Ces clearly indicates that Sally is embarking on a ruinous folly because she’s transfixed by a crippling delusion that makes her life and the lives of everyone in her family worse. While we see that were she and Ted to simply cut their horrible relatives out of their lives and focus their remaining years on being happy with themselves and making their daughter’s life better, they would finally get the peace of mind that they deserve, Sally simply cannot see it that way. She won’t admit that she should simply give up on her selfish mother and lazy sister any more than she and Ted can admit that he should stop beating himself up about not being a traditionally ‘manly’ man. Thus, they intend to not only waste a Thanksgiving being made to feel bad about themselves by a drunk and a parasite, they also intend to wreck a Christmas being made to feel like crap by Ted’s jerk father, clingy mother and brutish siblings. Worse, they intend screwing up Hilary’s budding romance with Jon in order to sacrifice her happiness on the altar of futility.

We thus have two crappy Christmases that could have been salvaged had the ‘adults’ not been deluded nitwits. The difference is that Ces knows his characters to be lunatics immolating themselves on a pyre of idiocy; Lynn does not. Why, he even handles the whole "You could be a war-zone living in a refugee" bullcrap from friends better; I mean, we know that Ted doesn't really want to go to Long Island so he can feel like shit all over again and is only doing it to indulge his wife's need to hope for an impossibility but Faye does not. This is much better than Eva having all the facts at hand and still blathering about how since April isn't a starving quadruple amputee orphan who has to travel fifty miles every morning to the hatpin factory to feed her nine starving quadruple amputee siblings, she can't complain about anything. Also, instead of having a rich kid complain to a poorer kid about problems she's too exalted to have, we have a poor kid who sort of wishes that she'd know what it felt like to have Hilary's problems. Leave it to Ces to discover the best way to appeal to worse problems: by giving the person talking sense into the other person worse problems.

For all my talk of John wanting to silence opinions that don't mesh exactly with his own and Elly wanting to discourage scary relationships that would mean that neither of them would get to own their children's horses as 'fair' payment for what they call a horrible and unfair sacrifice and what decent human beings call the affirmative moral duty of raising defenseless children, I tend to forget that Lynn has it in her head that farm life is somehow better than urban life, that spending long hours doing stoop labor makes children more practical and wonderful than suburbanites. Since she's not willing to face the sad fact that farm kids are just as likely to be apathetic slackers or arrogant jerkwads as city kids, she needs to have something that isn't Unfrozen Caveman Farmhand or Lantern-Jawed Carping Bitchdroid Laura to highlight how 'impractical' and 'stupid' Mike, Liz and April are because they don't have to deal with rising before dawn, getting to bed at dusk and working very hard every freaking day.

The medium she uses to indicate how utterly useless she thinks they are because they don't live on a farm and don't have to listen to Danny and Bev rant non-stop about how farm people are the moral superiors of city folk 24/7/365 is their consistently negative interactions with horses. Each time a Patterson encounters a horse, he or she always comes up the loser. We first start with Mike, his overconfident belief that all he needed to do was jump on a horse and he'd be able to play cowboys for real. What happened is that since he didn't know how ride the damned thing because he was too big and important to learn, it came to a sudden halt in order to eat....thereby causing Mike to get a sweet one in the yams. A decade and a half later, Liz had to endure Cousin Laura's tendency to lecture her about how spoiled city folk are because they don't spend most of their time relying on a large, temperamental creature that eats hay and produces dung for transportation. A decade or so after that, Laura calls April a horse's ass because she got on the losing side of her own argument with a glue-factory reject.

You can't help but notice a commonality here. What always happens is that the city kid wants to very much maintain his or her dignity only to be humiliated and mocked by a nasty, pontificating bitch who either needs to be slapped in the mouth and told to mind her manners or be asked to tell April that she's spoiled and lazy while Daddy drinks a glass of water.

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Foobonia and Points West.

Four Panel Babylon

Entries tagged with exile farm

The vanishing father syndrome.

On the communication breakdown at Exile Farm

The anomalous summer of 1989

Laura reconsidered.

Danny: Herald Of The Housening.

Exile Farm and the Obedience Gap.

The Legend Of Exile Farm.

Irrational Buffoon: Elly's Christmas Of Total Fail.

The dropped plot threads of 1988 examined.

Triple trouble on Exile Farm.

Cherry trees and farms of exile: John and Elly are stupid and useless.

On Exile Farm and gift-giving.

On ignition points.

Exile Farm: The Next Generation.

On the exile of the Patteson children and what the neighbors REALLY think.

Shawna Marie: A proud product of Exile Farm.......

Vancouver: An Exile Too Far.....

The Exile Cycle.

Two Big Crappy Families: Sally versus Elly.

On Exile Farm, Horses Own Pattersons.....