Foobonia and Points West.

This week's exercise in showing us that Mike is a real grown up kid who can be trusted to do chores is, of course, yet another reminder of the stupid belief Elly has that some magic force protects children so that she can be free and not have to spend her whooooole life chasing after kids and have time to herself and live her life and so on through the angry ranting that for reasons she cannot fathom leaves the offsprings with the baffling belief that she doesn't want them around. Given that we've spent a heck of a lot of time talking about the negligent stupidity on her part that damned near killed April, it behooves us to look closely at who the Pattersons trust to look after the kids.

As it stands right now, we're dealing with the fact that when John and Elly have to be away from the house for an extended period of time, the two of them exploit Annie shamelessly while offering her not much in return. This persisted up until, oh, about a year or so after April came into the picture and Annie became A Bad Person To Be Around because stupid Elly stupidly misinterpreted what was happening in the woman's life for the longest damned time. This meant that when it came time for the 1995 vacation of getting away from April, they did what they did in the eighties and parachuted in John's folks. The upshot of that is that not only was April unsubtly given the message "Your mom and dad don't want you around because you're naughty and unwelcome and they're stupid", she reacted to being lied to by having her own boat trip of slipping into a river and damned near dying because Elly is too stupid to buy a real lock for the gate. Since Will and Carrie's 'magic' wasn't strong enough to protect the offsprings, they'd hit on the idea of dropping them off at the Enjos and Maguires up until Lizzie was at an age wherein someone unwelcome might come to talk her into doing something she's not ready for. (By someone, I mean Anthony and by something, I mean going to second base.)

The problem of what to do with the kids became a real problem once Liz went off to college to be tainted by Eric and thus spend years in purgatory until she became worthy to spend a bland non-existence with a dullard. The solution hit on was to keep April out of the mischief Elly was sure she would get into by forcing her to spend her afternoons as Elly's flunky at the bookstore. Since it was Mike's stupid idea to keep her from having the same freedom he envied because girls need policing, we add being a rock-ribbed God-damned Neanderthal to the list of charges against him. 

Of course, most of Elly's need to obsess about her looks is something of a self-imposed distraction. While it is true that she loves to complain about things while preaching about the need everyone but her has to keep things close to the vest in the name of social harmony, most of those complaints would go away were it not for her having made a meal ticket out of a particularly oafish and self-absorbed clod named John Patterson.

As I've said before, the cover image to Pushing Forty tells us everything we need to know about John. This is because we have to watch the ugly fool selfishly inconvenience his family so he can do something juvenile, undignified and silly and love every minute of it. It doesn't take a genius to realize that were John to be denied, the selfish idiot child would turn into a foul-tempered old man in a nanosecond. All it takes is watching his reaction to his being inconvenienced in the least degree. Elly's fears that Mike is turning into a bloodthirsty, gun-loving, death-worshiping nihilistic ghoul are so much junk to the idiot but his getting a little bit of his dignity taken away is obviously an affirmative defense for the indictable offense of assault and battery because, as I've said, John is what hospital staff call a particularly antagonistic patient: an SHPOS (short for sub-human piece of shit.) Other people are too young or too old to be sensitive about their looks because he cannot and will not feel their pain but his own pain is something he wields like a bludgeon.

This, as I've said before, is owing to John and Eva representing that part of Lynn's psyche that resents being told to think about other people. Not only does she assume that she's being told to never think of herself, the question baffles and angers her because of the child-like inability to understand that people don't see the world the way she does. This means that not only does John think that April was a jerk to not fall in line when they let Mike actually freeload, he's completely in the dark as to why. He might say that he finally understands that April has needs that differ from his own but he can't really make himself believe it.

If it were not bad enough that we're dealing with a drama queen who labours under the laughable and discreditable misapprehension that having to endure a bit of discomfort for the kids is a hardship so bleak as to require horses to be owned, we have to rememeber that John and Elly spend most of their time screaming in rage at their children for the chaos they create owing to being the dullest, most clueless and aimless offsprings and small ones ever to make other people ask "What the Hell kind of incompetent muttonhead let this kid get this dumb?" If they aren't standing around in baffled horror at the fruits of their children's obliviousness and clumsiness, they're generally screaming in rage.

This is owing to a deliberate failure on their part to admit that Goethe was right to say that "misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence." As an upcoming strip shows us, John is especially unwilling to acknowledge that Michael's brain consists of two neurons tied in a slip-knot because admitting that while ignorance is curable, stupidity is forever means that he can't shout or bully or punch a dullard into not being a clod. Similarly, Elly seems equally reluctant to admit that her clumsy, stubborn, oblivious and slow-witted children do things that inconvenience her because admitting that her children are too stupid to know what they're doing to bug her means that she can't pose as a martyr. Worse, it means that the people who think of her as being a failure of a mother wasting her life raging away pointlessly at stupid, aimless children who don't learn things because they're too stupid to live are right.

As we all know, one of the things that always baffled Elly is that Mike lost interest in playing the trumpet despite her being what she perceived as being a loving, supportive mother. She cannot understand how her selflessly withholding the praise and encouragement that would obviously have led to his developing a swelled head, heroically killing his need to waste time enjoying playing the trumpet and thus making it worth nothing and lovingly refusing to listen to any selfish and cowardly noise about how he felt like a worthless failure who could never meet the not-at-all insane pressure she wasn't putting on him made him want to quit. If asked, she blames Mike on being weak and not her for being a rock colossus of pious bitchery.

The reason that I mention this is that we see the same problem when homework comes around. I've already talked about how she and John cannot understand that Mike needs a certain level of background noise in order to be able to keep his mind on what he's doing. This lack of awareness of who Mike is and that their advice is worthless because of said ignorance is only half of the problem. The real problem is that they insist on 'helping' him in other useless ways. John by forgetting that while he himself can easily Mike's homework, Mike doesn't have his level of education and is thus confused, angered and humiliated by the 'easy' work he should feel bad about not finding fun. He also helps by threatening him with violence when the feeling that he's been given an impossible task by a sadistic teacher becomes unbearable. This complements how Elly helps by nagging about how he can't concentrate unless he's in an unearthly silence that he's not used to. They both help by being people who barely passed high school in the first place trying to cope with homework that leaves them baffled.

The reason that having John and Elly going over his homework with him is a rotten idea is that, well, a lot of why Mike can't do math all that well is that he had in Elly the worst possible coach. Since she doesn't want to admit that she and not evil, scary media is the primary influence in his life, she can't see that her screwing her face up and muttering about how math is for saps is why he still can't do basic mental arithmetic. It's akin to how someone who should be a contestant on Canada's Worst Driver insists on lovingly giving her weary charges their first driving lessons. Just as a woman who can barely count past ten is worthless when faced with algebra, having a nitwit who makes rolling stops inflict her ineptitude on her kids makes her the real error in the educational system.

The problem with criticizing Mike for assuming sight unseen that his parents have judged him and found him guilty of being someone they cannot and should not be expected to love is that, well, he's right to do so. First off, we have to deal with the fact that from the get-go, his idiot mother went out of her way to believe that his very real need to be reassured that she actually liked him and wanted him around were attempts to make her feel bad about wanting to have an identity that isn't MAAAAAAAA!!!!!!! Also, we have to deal with the fact that she also went out of her way to mistake his having an opinion not her own with his hating her and wanting to defy her and his acting out because they completely freaking neglect him as an excuse to treat him like someone she can't like. Simply put, Elly is and has always been too fragile to deal with any sort of conflict that she can't win easily and has spent most of her life resenting the fact that it took so long to wear Mike down to compliance. Now that he's the pathetically dependent creature she always wanted, she can finally love him.

He also has to deal with the fact that his father not only becomes a raging asshole bent on his son's destruction the instant he becomes personally inconvenienced by whatever it is that Michael might do to him no matter how trivial the 'damage' might be, he can't bring himself to respect the career that he drifted into because it isn't "practical", as evidenced by this smarmy defense of being an unreflective clod afraid of asking the question "What do you believe, John Patterson and why do you believe it?":

Apparently Mike is getting close to finishing his novel. I always hated writing essays, and this project of his seems like one giant essay to me, so I can't imagine how he could either want to do it, or more importantly enjoy the writing!

As I've said before, writing essays exposes John to the terrifying question "Why?" and the terrifying answer "Because I, John Patterson, am a total f*cking greaseball: and is therefore terrible; this means that Mike's doing so is unworthy because sooner or later, John himself will be faithfully depicted in his books in all his sordid worthlessness.

The end result of the two boomer assholes subjecting Mike to an evil experiment is to create someone so downtrodden and confused that he doesn't even realize how miserable he is. The smug smile on Mike's face comes from the fact that he doesn't quite get that he's been cheated out of being loved for who he was supposed to have been by a moronic monster mom who thinks that a child is supposed to be a doll she can put away when she gets bored.

As we all know, the reason that Elly and John love Eva Warzone and believe her to be a wonderful influence on their selfish, spoiled, rotten and ungrateful picky-face Martian creature princess daughter is that she loves to play the filthy trick called "appealing to shame." Always and ever, the need to not care about the problems April has is coached in terms that make the poor thing look and feel like a total jerk because she's too busy trying to defend herself to notice the ludicrous underlying assumption. Unlike the panicky chowderhead from Stone Soup who's too dim to notice that she's relying on a repulsively idiotic assumption to silence Holly, Eva knows damned well how churlish it is to say "Since you care about immediate concerns, it follows logically you cannot care about greater ones and are thus selfish" owing to the fact that that assumption is false and stupid.

The reason that I mention this is that it's a subset of a greater problem that the children face. Time and again, John and Elly tell a child a variant of the phrase "Either you do something very inconvenient that will do nothing to benefit you and for which you will never be given any credit for or you're a bad, ungrateful child who hates us and whom we cannot love" in order to get what they want by means of emotional blackmail. Since a small child as a general rule and the Patterson children in particular live in a constant state of anxiety as to if Mom and Dad love them and want them around and also since children want to prove that they're good kids who deserve to be loved, it's kind of obvious that this nasty, selfish and brutish tactic works. The problem is not just that there is no need for the child to sacrifice to prove their moral worth or that John and Elly have no need for what the children surrender. The problem is that no matter what the children do, it's never going to be good enough because their oafish clod parents think that their children live care-free lives and never have to worry about anything. The occasional reminder that Mike, Lizzie and April groaned under the burden of the too-high expectations of tyrant parents who are incapable of love or tolerance or acceptance was blown off as drama because they don't see themselves as what they are: monsters of greed, selfishness and hate.

As we all know, we're not just going to spend January 2014 watching the Patterson family fail to learn their lesson about responsible pet ownership. If it were simply another round of the family being shocked out of their alleged minds by the inevitable only to overreact and then go back to normal because it hurts too much to be consistent, we'd just be in for a depressing four weeks of asking ourselves why the Hell Mrs Baird thought that giving the Foobs pets would teach them responsibility. What we also have to contend with is Phil not realizing why it is that Mike's ardor for the trumpet has cooled. While it's true that the vain little kid in him sees Mike's "disrespect" and "lack of drive" as being inspired by ingratitude and hatred, the adult in him is completely baffled by all of this. This is because of something I said the last time I talked about all of this: Phil has no idea that there are two extraneous factors that get in the way of Mike's enthusiasm. Said extraneous factors are a peevish, narrow-minded, disruption-hating father who is more the organic adjunct of a recliner than a supportive role model and a mother who needs to destroy enjoyment in the process of living owing to her stupid belief that only miserable people matter. This inability to consider the home environment of a child as a factor in his or her willingness to learn seems to be inherent to most teachers in the Foobiverse. One would think that when he went to Teacher's College, Phil was told point-blank that a child's surroundings have exactly no relation to anything at all.

Before I launch into the meat of my essay, I'd like to go on record as saying that there really isn't anything inherently wrong with a married couple with children deciding to take a vacation without them. What is inherently wrong with the way that the Patterswine do it is that they don't really hide certain beliefs too well. For starters, they don't really go a good job of reassuring their offsprings and small ones that no, they're not fleeing them because if they don't get away from the evil, chaos-loving semi-human monsters who are clearly trying to drain them of their substance because they hate the poor parents who have to sacrifice EVERYTHING and get NOTHING in return, they'll just DIE!!!!! Second, they don't hide the fact that they sincerely believe that if they are somehow forced to take children oversees, their evil, chaos-loving brood will destroy EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE because they're filled with malice and cruelty and NEVER want to see their poor, helpless parents HAPPY because the CHAOS in their brains hates the idea of a content mother.

The reason that I mentioned the fact that Mike, Liz and April were caught between the Scylla of John and Elly's fear of them and the Charybdis of their fear of being embarrassed is that I think that we'd be at the point where Mike and Liz would start contemplating child-fleeing vacations of their own. Well, at least Michael and Deanna would maintain the tradition. Liz, I should think, would bring CHAOS on herself by being foolish and reckless enough to take her children with her instead of leaving them at home to think about the horrors that they selfishly, cruelly and criminally inflict on the parents to whom they owe everything and still freeload off of despite being capable of supporting themselves.

From Michael and Deanna, we would get the same speech from the caregiver that broadly hints that Meredith and Robin are sooooooooooooooo naughty and selfish and cruel and so defiantly insistent on the horrible, vicious lie that they are anything but an extension of their parents' will that poor Mike and poor Deanna have to have time to recover from dealing with two monsters who are not at all placid children who simply don't know what, if anything, they did wrong. We can also expect Mike and Deanna to feel a vague sense of remorse coming from that terrible, no-good, stinky voice that suggests the terrible idea that they're being idiots when it comes to the way that they think of their kids. The best part is that when Mike gets there, he'll finally realize that his parents were right to deny him time in the sun when he was too selfish and chaos-loving to appreciate it. Why, if they'd done that, it would have been entirely possible that he and Lizzie and April would have selfishly touched off a war out of sheer naughtiness.

Contrast this to Liz who would not see that her and no-longer-wonderful Anthony's foolhardy insistence on surrendering all their authority to mere children is why their vacations all suck. This would lead, of course, to a leaden and stupid Aesop about how they should have followed Michael's lead and not tempted fate, faith and chaos and not stupidly done what the insane Martian did and kept expecting children to behave.

That would show Kate for not letting the same mother who had no time for her monopolize the time of the grandchild she graciously gave her. It would also show the kids for wanting to go South where people would expect Lynn to forego shopping, snacking, lounging at poolside and guzzling beer and be something she hates more than anything else ever: the mother of small children.

The odd thing about the Strip of Destiny is that it has at least one panel that seems to be an accurate prediction of the shape of things to come. Said panel is the part about John and Elly retiring from their horrible, horrible stress-filled jobs in order to hang around tourist deadfalls in the Tropics while congratulating themselves on fleeing their kids, to read alarmist newspaper articles about how the devil interwebs are corrupting children, to meddle witlessly in their community and to subject another generation of children to their self-serving and idiotic travesty of child-rearing.

This would, of course, be seen as something of a well-deserved reward for what two fragile idiots falsely assume to be unreasonable sacrifices made for unappreciative little freeloaders who, despite what a legion of scary, selfish outsiders who clearly don't want John and Elly to be happy might say, could easily have fed, clothed and housed themselves and who clearly only wanted to come with them on their vacations to spread chaos and humiliate the parents they hate.

Mind you, the one thing that they hate more than the horrible idea of being told that their horrible children aren't actually horrible is that they themselves are. It would seem that every so often, it comes back to them that they come across as being two shallow, callow, thin-skinned and short-tempered total incompetent idiot asshole parents who simply can't deal with the demands of three children who, were they any more passive, would have to spend their free time fending off passers-by who mistakenly put dimes on their eyes. The nerve of those people calling them weaklings who can't cope with anything! Don't they know that John and Elly are the victims of all victims surpassing all others. Other people might be gutless assholes fleeing harmless children because they don't have the moral fiber necessary to put up with a too-long line at Tim Hortons; the Pattersons aren't other people because if they were, they'd have to look in the mirror and see something they don't want to: the self-serving failures that they really are.