Foobonia and Points West.

As we know, as I type this, John and Elly are currently living in what we call the Tiny Train House. As we also know, John pitched a fit because there were certain problems with the place despite being reassured that Stibbs had taken adequate care of it. What seems to have happened is that he didn't understand what the real estate listing meant by 'meticulously cared for'. He took it at face value when, if he knew anything at all, he would have realized that it meant that while the old man kept the floors swept and the counters cleaned, he couldn't afford to fix or replace out of date appliances, furnaces or bathroom fixtures.

The reason that I mention this is that the Pattermanse of 1987 could also be described as meticulously cared for owing to the fact that the range and oven are out of date and only someone used to cooking on a wood stove could produce edible meals. John's reluctance to spend money on that sort of thing because he buys into the media image of the impractical wife trying to spend her husband into the poorhouse is really against his best interests but he can't not get reluctant because he shares the same mental infirmity with the rest of the family: a belief that the government would not let the media lie to him.

As we're about to see, the townspeople assume that Phil's empty canoe means that its occupants are quite probably at the bottom of the lake being eaten by the pickerel they were trying to catch because they assume that the only reason anyone of average intelligence would not be found with his craft is that he's a posthumous part of the scene. As we're also about to see, the island they wound up on is thought of as, if not a popular destination for campers owing to its remoteness, at the very least one in which people do use as a fishing spot. This means that when they do find John and Phil, the SARtechs seem to be genuinely surprised that the two of them are alive, well and able to almost joke about their situation. While they're allowed to have their happy reunion with Elly and Georgia, what probably does happen when the ladies are sitting in the waiting room while the boys get checked out is that the head of the air search-and-rescue team probably has some pointed questions for John and Phil.

The most obvious question would have to be the one relating to Phil's competence as a canoeist. As we know, he swamped the canoe by steering it into the wind like an idiot and he and John abandoned it to swim for shore like the panicky imbeciles they are. Did they not realize at all what the implications of an abandoned canoe were? Did it not occur to either of them that the general consensus was that the woman who actually knew where they intended to go and her friend might end up having to identify their remains?

Of course, that was not the most devastating little question that they'd be asked. What interests me is where they landed. As we saw, there was part of an old shack on that island that they'd made into a lean-to. A normal person of average intelligence and possessing something I like to call a survival instinct would come to the conclusion that this place is a campground of some sort. It hasn't seen active use in a while but, as I mentioned earlier, the men flying the rescue plane thought it quite likely that John and Phil were camping there. What this means is that there's an easy way to get to the mainland. There might even be signs of civilization like a marina on the shore that they might have seen had they had the rather obvious idea of walking around the island to see if there was a way of getting to dry land. John and Phil did no such thing. This means that the head of the rescue team would end up asking the two clods if they wanted to die of exposure fifty feet away from rescue.

This, I should think, is why it is that John spends most of this August hiding from the world because of some sort of vaguely defined humiliation. Simply put, someone made him admit that he doesn't belong in the wilds because he's too soft and stupid to endure anything more traumatic than light drizzle and having to admit being in the wrong is, as always, something too horrible to bear.

As you might have figured out from my annoying comments about how Mike interprets everything Elly does as a means of punishing him for being alive, it's pretty clear to me that behind his angry comments about how she's supposed to lead her life without going anywhere because it's rotten of her to embarrass him in front of his friends is the short-sighted and stupid belief that she's only doing so because she's decided that his wanting to go through the day without being picked on is a bad thing that he must be punished for. This stupid belief is why he thinks that Elly decided to sing in public with the sole intent of making life worse for some child to be named later and why he thinks that April fooled all of them so that Elly could punish him for wanting the street cred he's bad for wanting to have.

What we tend to lose sight of when we focus on Mike being a vain half-wit who makes everything into a referendum about his public image is that John was not at all interested in Elly's crusade to save the town hall. This seems to be part of a wider pattern in which he makes a point of being totally disinterested in anything that makes her feel like more than a nobody doomed to go down in history as nothing more than that useless figure who might as well not have lived at all: someone's wife or someone's mother. When you listen to his whining about how her having a career destroys his home and how remodeling the kitchen just because she wanted a change is a needless expense because his mother never complained about clapped-out appliances, you end up realizing that his idea of give and take is that he takes without giving and she gives without taking.

This belief is reinforced by the fact he regards her as a poor sport for not caring about HIS stupid interests. She doesn't like model trains because she doesn't know how to have fun. She doesn't like sports cars because she wants to make him into an old fogey. She doesn't like this, that or the other thing because she doesn't seem to want to agree with something everyone knows: men get to do interesting stuff while women are fated to tend house and shut up about it. This not-needing-to-be-spoken belief of his means that the the television adaptation in which he makes an oafish comment about Elly getting back to her real job of being a housewife means that his response would be a variation on the phrase but that's different should the dichotomy be pointed out to him.

The reason for his smug belief that he's not supposed to care about outside interests that should probably be discouraged so as to preserve his home is that John has privilege blindness. Since John clearly believes that Elly's complaints about how the system is rigged against her are so much rubbish because the system works in his favor, it would take a Herculean mental effort on his behalf to see that maybe it isn't crazy woman hormones that make her want something she "shouldn't" want because she "doesn't" need it; since he's a very lazy man who doesn't like to upset apple carts any more than he likes the idea of being the bad guy, we're going to have to wait until they slam the crematorium door on him for her to be rid of his stupidity and short-sightedness.

I think it's pretty safe to say that John doesn't relate well to kids because he's pretty much still a kid himself. As I've said before, he seems to be primarily motivated by the very real need to not really grow up and accept any sort of scary change that would make him the loser in life's race. We also have to deal with the sort of black-and-white insanity that's pretty much the price people have to pay for accepting unearned privilege into their lives.

This means that any person reading the strip for the first time would be able to predict that he and Michael would continue to be somewhat incompatible during most of the middle years. After all, we're dealing with a sort of vain idiot who assumes sight unseen that Michael should be so grateful to have Daddy provide him with the things he needs that he wouldn't constantly challenge him at every turning. Since John is rather simple and there aren't hidden undercurrents in his mind, the fear that Michael represents a future in which what John wants to see happen is set at naught just because he happens to die is not something he feels. He simply wants the obeisance he feels is due to him owing to his being someone who'd fit in better as a cast member of The Venture Bros.

What Mike sees when he sees John tends to fuel Dad's rage because of the fact that John doesn't see an uncool, obsolete old fossil who won't listen to people because he spends his complaining about nothing and besides, he's forgotten what it's like to be young anyway. This is not quite the case because John clearly seems to remember himself as being a better kid than he was and as getting along better with his dad than he actually did; this means that he remembers the past through the distorting lens of a nostalgia that makes his life better than it was. This world in which childhood is a carefree romp not only gets in the way of his ability to relate to the anxious, resentful screw-up son he actually used to be, it makes him useless as a father to Lizzie.

Of course, Ted isn't the only person John misreads catastrophically. As I've said before, he can't seem to ever realize that no, it isn't crazy woman hormones that make Elly want things media imagery and cultural shibboleths that aren't nearly as timeless as he thinks they are tell him she should want. This need to assume that there's a no-way, fake, impossible maternal instinct that magically makes women into nurturers not only made him an ugly fool as a husband, it helped him randomly damn a woman he's never gonna meet.

The reason that I mention this is that his monthly letters remind me of a depressingly common problem that most people have to endure at one point in their lives: the clueless jackass who doesn't know sweet Richard all about anything who can't stop ranting about what a keen-eyed observer of the human condition he is. The problem with him is that nothing he sees seems to ever disprove his theories about the people around him. He can hear Ted hint broadly that none of the women he dates ever meet with his mother's approval and not realize that the reason his marriage fell all to shit is because Mommy helped kick it to bits because he's also the same person who can make hateful noises about how Lizzie isn't supposed to feel sad and empty and wonder why she doesn't feel as if she fits in.

While I have mentioned that his reason for not admitting error is a fear of being proven wrong, there's something else that hampers his ability to see the world properly: his need to not engage with the world. John's idea of heaven is a fortress where he doesn't have to deal with contrary (and therefore wrong) opinions and influences so he can lose himself in his hobbies and never have to think about anything much. Eventually, he'll end up like John Galt would in the real world and die alone and forgotten.

As I pointed out yesterday, John tends towards dispensing terrible advice that those around him know to be terrible. In the example I linked to, Mike is trying to explain that his prospects look sort of poor only to endure a chunk of gibberish about working to win from a man who never really had to work for what he got in life. Given that we know that most of the things in life he thinks are the result of plugging away are actually the results of just showing up and maintaining a pulse, it's sort of annoying having to listen to someone who benefited from the hard work of others (his parents, Elly and the dentist who hired him in the first place) without really paying them back as such pontificate about self-reliance and what other people owe him for doing basically nothing.

Were this not bad enough, we're stuck with the fact that he doesn't like being reminded that his head is wedged up his ass and that he doesn't actually know what he's talking about. From the very early post-Halloween strip where he wallowed in self-pity because Mike criminally decided to act as if he had no God-damned idea what he was running his mouth about to his ugly yapping about April being a princess, we're dealing with a mush-headed jerk who can call people on their nonsense but can't endure the least hint that his knowledge of a situation is incomplete or that his point of view is incorrect. This is because he's the element of Lynn's personality who believes that no matter how off-base her opinion is and how laughably incorrect she might be about an issue, she's owed complete and unquestioned obedience because she's better than we are.