Foobonia and Points West.

The interesting thing about this week's arc is not that we're yet again asked to prefer a self-righteous outrage artist to a jovial adolescent in his middle thirties only to end up slightly more on Phil's side because affable goofolas who wanna have a good time are more tolerable company than strident boneheads racing around looking for monsters to destroy. The interesting thing is that Elly is probably still to this day trying to figure out if her sister in law insulted her with a big phony smile on her face when she made a comment about how long hair at her age made her look like a dowdy old lady.

Given that the woman is four years or so younger than Elly is, I'd say that, yeah, she did get in a sick burn at Elly's expense and got away with it too. It could well be that she might have made a habit of saying cutting things with a big, dopey smile on her face and having her targets wonder what she meant by that crack. Elly is never going to know because she has a distinct lack of curiosity about Georgia that extends to not having the least idea (or inclination to actually know) what her birth name is.

Of course, there IS a rather sizable problem with that delicious little scenario in which Elly's ignorance of Georgia is publicly exposed. Since the Pattersons live in something a lot like the real world, we have to contend with the fact that it's pretty much a given that it's falsely assumed by everyone involved (especially Georgia) that Elly actually does know what her sister-in-law's birth name and profession actually are. Such a scenario would occasion Elly's being baffled by Michael's off-hand comment about now, no, they aren't going to drive to Montreal to get the family discount and wondering which relation on which side is an audiologist in Montreal. This might tempt her to ask Phil about the problem but, well, she's still vaguely upset that she couldn't glom on to the damned pump organ to talk to him.

The end result of her discovery of who Georgia really is and what she does would thus not cause her to reflect on her living her life in a fog of incuriosity and willful blindness. If she should comment on the fact, it would probably be assumed that something she's known for years had slipped her mind because she doesn't usually have her hearing checked. This means that we're dealing with a relatively benign version of a phenomenon that will cause all sorts of mischief: Liz finally being told about the wedding for heart and the one for show. As I've said before, she'd be less angry at taking part in a scam and more angry about being 'deliberately' shut out by people who thought that she knew what was going on. In this instance, we'd be dealing with Elly wondering if she was losing it when she never had it to begin with.

The interesting thing about the book "The Lives Behind The Lines" is that while Lynn manages to talk about how Molly "came back to the light" and how Deanna came back into Mike's life, what she still doesn't do is say much more about Georgia than she did in Phil's Liography. We still don't know much more about her than a vague description of her family background. To someone used to this conceit Lynn has that the characters speak to her, it is almost as if Lynn doesn't especially want to hear what she has to say.

Sadly, this seems to be the case owing to the need Lynn and Elly have to see Georgia not as a person in her own right but as a plot device whose function is to drag Phil kicking and screaming to maturity. Knowing her birth name and getting too detailed about her past before Phil would tend to perhaps draw attention away from the Patterson family and that simply cannot be allowed.

As you know, it's always sort of bothered me that we never get to learn Georgia's birth name. The subject never comes up in the strip archives nor does what Lynn would refer to as a maiden name appear in Phil's Liography. It would thus appear that neither Lynn nor Elly ever seem to have realized that Geo actually needed a surname in the first place. It's very odd but very telling that the same woman who spent all twenty-nine years bristling at the notion of being thought of as an extension of a man would idly consign Georgia to the same fate but it seems to me that while Elly lived in a nightmare world where she wasn't a person in her own right but just either Jim's daughter, John's wife, Mike's mother or Robin's grandmother and not Elly the individual with an identity all her own, she had no problem with consigning Georgia to that same state of depersonalization.

It seems to me that when they were introduced, Elly might have heard a surname but her mind forgot that unimportant detail because she saw Georgia as "Georgia, girlfriend of Phil." This changed to "Georgia, that poor girl my asshole brother selfishly refuses to marry and my parents won't make him either" once they moved in together. Once Phil proposed, she became "Georgia, fiancee of Phil" only to become "Georgia, wife of Phil" after their marriage. If she lives long enough, Elly will end up thinking of her sister in law not as the former Georgia whatever-her-surname-was but as "Georgia, widow of Phil." This leaves us living in an indeterminate world wherein John is the one who actually remembers what Georgia's last name used to be.

The interesting thing about Connie's departure is that it looks to all the world as if it's meant to be a temporary obstacle to Elly's having someone with whom she can agree that children are ungrateful parasites who steal time and attention because CHAOS and that their malicious, self-absorbed neglect and solipsism is actually the best way to raise their ill-used offsprings and small ones. It might have looked as if we were dealing with a real-world situation in which life was a fluid thing in which people's lives take different trajectories but Lynn made it obvious that Connie's destiny is to be Elly's sidekick and fellow failure as a mother, wife and human being. The question that faces us is wondering why it is that she had to leave and why it was that it took her so long to return.

The answer seems to be that it was impressed upon Lynn that she couldn't have the soap operatic love triangle between Phil, Georgia and Connie that her day-time television obsessed brain makes her see as being the most desirable means in which to have people interact. Since she couldn't have the drama, it made sense to put Connie on a bus until such time as Alan stopped telling his crazy lie about how Joan was the one dragging her feet about marriage and got married already. Simply put, we have to endure cheap theatrics about how Lawrence has to adjust to living in a whirlwind so that his idiot creator can pout about people having no sense of reality.

The odd thing that Connie's sudden departure forestalled was a sort of tension between Georgia and Phil over the fact that she might present something of a threat to their relationship. The strip in which Geo thought-bubbled that she'd ignore Phil's behaviour this time was, I should think, a sort of warning that if Connie were still in town, there'd be a lot of simmering resentment. Fortunately for all concerned, Connie decided that not only did she not want to see Ted with another girl, she couldn't possibly intrude on the happiness a passing fling had found for himself. Also, by the time she'd returned, she and Phil were married to other people.

The reason that I mention this is that I was reminded of notes in which Lynn confessed to wanting to nag Alan to marry a single mother they both knew in order to 'do right' by her. What this means is that every strip in which Phil's presented as being an idiot for not 'dealing' is another example of Alan being told what to do by someone whose business it isn't. I should also think that it took quite a while for Lynn to warm up to the woman Alan did end up marrying owing to the fact that it took until the whole wedding planning thing for Georgia to become someone other that "Phil's girlfriend". The only sign that she was still a bit of a stranger is that even now, we don't know her maiden name.

Of course, Elly and the gang aren't alone in being self-absorbed jerkwads who squeal about being cruelly mistreated while they're in the process of denying someone his or her rights, freedom and/or property. Phil is also a rather horrible jerk in his own right. As the recent sequence in which he pulled a Jedi mind trick on Georgia so that she would agree that only he gets to make decisions because he has the Y chromosome that permits them to be made, he likes to play a lot of nasty head games because he's an infantile petty tyrant.

This meant that most of the lead-up to their inevitable marriage meant that she wasted the best years of her life trying to reform the whimpering sack of sewage. In the normal course of events, she might have eventually fallen into the orbit of a less depressingly stupid and entitled and wound up bitterly resenting the time lost pursuing an imbecile who lives to trivialize the hopes, fears and dreams of the women in his life. Sadly, he and John decided to get away from what they called "feminine tyranny" and what actual men call "having to admit that they're most of why their significant others are so damned moody all the time."

Since the two of them had no more idea of what they were doing in the wilderness than a member of Possum Lodge, their canoe capsized owing to being weighed down by all the junk they needed to enjoy the simple life. While Elly was wondering why John's leaving whiskers in the sink like a slob was a big deal, Georgia stated that she simply couldn't go on living if Phil were dead.

Since she didn't have to pine away and die of grief or commit suicide so she could be with her mayyyyyyuuuuunnnnnn, she was glad to take him on, bad habits, verbal abuse and everything. What Phil never seems to have quite realized is that the idea of being free of a puerile moron who spent the better part of the eighties pretending that it was still 1972 had been made so scary that he had no choice but to marry her lest she do herself an injury.

Just as she would later do with Liz and Anthony or Mike and Deanna, Lynn would declare this to be the triumph of True Love. She would be dead bang on were the words "true love" to be pronounced "stock-holm syn-drome."

As I indicated in yesterday's post, I think that Deanna and Georgia have a lot in common in that they married artistic types who clearly need a certain amount of weaning away from their mothers. Granted, Georgia had an easier time of it because while Marian doted on Phil to a rather off-putting extent, she at least made sure that he could live on his own so that she didn't have to put up with an over-grown teenager cramping her style. Not for her and Jim the dreadful prospect of her adult children camping out for extended periods because they couldn't cope with life on their own.

Deanna, on the other hand, had a much more difficult time dealing with Mike owing to the fact that he acts like a character from a sixties sitcom preaching Strict-But-Fair Parenting By Bad Example. If the Pattersons' world were a television program, Deanna herself would be the kid protagonist learning that the "free" kid whose ability to come and go as he pleases and do pretty much ever he wants craves the structure lovingly imposed on him from Sainted Mira and Wilf; instead, his father is more a growth oozing out of a chair and his mother a negligent idiot Who Should Probably Not Have Had Kids. It's quite obvious that Michael cannot cope on his own and needs to be dependent on a kindly adult to save him from himself. Deanna's job is to make sure that that adult is Elly.

Good thing for Elly that all Deanna can do is rebel against her mother; that way, she can have Mike to be her BABY forever and always while allowing Phil to be one of the kindly adults who parents her children for her.

I'd like to move away from Elly pouting about how unfair it is that her horrible children wanted to torment her by questioning the iron-clad rule that only their generous parents get to decide what they will allow the offsprings and small ones to keep to talking about how Phil took a very long time adjusting to the idea of a more settled life. Given how often Lynn liked to have him compare the steady, regular existence the Pattersons had to some sort of cruel punishment meant to trap people and keep them from being free, what we were looking at was her hectoring Alan about how worthless and stupid he was being for not settling down NOW and making of himself a disgrace to everyone everywhere.

What she doesn't realize is that when Phil talked about some fellow he knows going down in flames, he (and Alan) were more than likely trying to tell her that he had convinced himself that he was sure to make a complete blunder of the whole work-a-daddy, mind-your-mommy Patterlife held up as a model for all. While John might overshoot the mark with his rattling witlessly about evil, distracting stars that mislead people into living a miserable nomadic life of nomadic misery, Elly is genetically incapable of understanding putting a brave face on things. Since John is too blasted insensitive to understand how dull it is to drift along aimlessly and Elly too angry at him for winning their childhood, it's a good thing for him that he has a reasonably sympathetic life partner in Georgia. She might want to remodel him too but at least it's not because she hates him and wants to torment him to death for the sins of her idiot parents.

The real problem some of us have with the sudden return of the Liographies is asking why it's necessary. After all, it'll be at least ten years before we see Weed reappear so it's not like we need to wonder why the party-hearty buffoon we see in the strip has been assigned such a screwed-up back story for quite a while. The answer one of us came up with is that the market for the kids' books dried up and Beth needs to express herself somehow so she's back to ranting about anachronistic heavy parents and the children whose hopes they crush because their inhuman greed has made monsters of them.

The only upside I see in this mess comes from having read the insane biography of the sunken-chested gitface Anthony. That's because we finally learned the birth name of the woman he used and discarded like tissue paper in a repulsively effective effort to gain the sympathies of white trash. What this tells me is that sooner or later, Beth will get around to depicting the insanely warped background of Georgia Sevenyearsyounger and finally give her something Lynn never bothered to do: give her a maiden name.