Foobonia and Points West.

To continue on from yesterday, it's fairly obvious that a jerk like John is uniquely ill-suited to deal with normal human adolescence. After all, to be a teenager is to suddenly discover that parents are flawed and to resent that as if one were the victim of a confidence trick. Most of today's comic strips are written from the viewpoint of boomer imbeciles like John and Elly who resent how they've been cast as uncool dorks who can no longer be respected automatically. Point a moody teenager at a vain, petty and self-righteous piss-ant like John who views conflict as a cruel surprise and you come away with the impression that it's lucky that he didn't beat Mike up for being 'smart'. The reason that I mention this is that just as he dropped the ball with Michael owing to his arrogant refusal to understand his son's needs, he made a dog's breakfast of raising Liz and April because of gender profiling.

To explain why this is, we have to remember something he doesn't care to about Elizabeth. What we see, what we always see, is a frightened, passive little child desperately seeking to fit in and convinced that the world is passing her by and trying to leave her by herself, alone and unloved and vulnerable. It's rather sad to have to watch the poor thing look in the mirror and wonder why trading on her looks doesn't work any more and why she never seems to have the happiness and attention and love her cruel, ugly brother takes for granted. She spent most of her teenaged years alienated and lost because she was never allowed to have real friends because she had to fight Mom every step of the way to fit in with the others and be loved.

This means nothing at all to John because he's a dolt who wants a passive doll-child who fawns over him and doesn't complain about her lot in life because that's gross. Time and again, he had to be reminded that no, family wasn't enough and she wanted real friends who weren't obliged to love her and time and again he 'forgot' because it means that he and Elly should not be the only influences in their children's lives. He also forgot that Liz saught to recapture the early, happy days when Daddy loved her and never said to go away because she was in pain. This led to her ultimate ruination as a person. We call this calamity in which she defaulted on being a person in her own right as the dreaded Settlepocalypse.

As I've said before, this whole irritating business about calling April a princess is simply another symptom of John's primary character defect. As history reminds us, he does not really want to know who the people around him are and what they want but instead sees the people in his life as stereotypes. April is a melodramatic little princess who doesn't understand the big picture because teenaged girls are melodramatic princesses who don't understand the big picture. Liz spent most of her teenaged years being moody about nothing because teenaged girls are moody over nothing. Mike had a bad attitude and needed to be set straight because teenaged boys have bad attitudes and need to be set straight. Anthony is an earnest go-getter because he looks like one. Thérèse is a crazy person who turned her back on the good life because John can't and won't question a system that gives him an edge because he's a white man. Elly spent her life wanting things that probably weren't good for her because the alternative to ascribing everything to hormones is that he's a selfish jackass who'd rather have her miserable than be inconvenienced slightly.

While it's true that John doesn't like questioning his preconceived ideas because he doesn't want to look in the mirror and see the loutish, oafish, insensitive, pig-ignorant, selfish and self-serving creep filled with contempt for the people he rides rough-shod over he actually is, the mystery is how two normal people raised him to be a petty monstrosity with a fear of being blindsided by an objective reality that makes a turd of him. What seems to make the most sense comes to us when we recall his need to make a childish fool of himself at his family's expense. If I'm right, what we're looking at is someone who was forced to take on adult responsibilities sooner than was good for him. Will and Carrie's Liography seem to point us to this conclusion by referring to it being medically necessary for Will to take up something less strenuous than working in a coal mine. It could be that while he was laid up, John had to be the man of the house and it warped the Hell out of him because while his peers were doing normal teenage stuff, he had to spend a lot of time being The Big Man while his dad's back was on the mend; this would explain his yearning to be one of the kids and his inflexibility.

The interesting thing about John's hobby is that it seems to serve as something of a form of shorthand that explains who the characters are and how they relate to him. The most telling example of this tendency is, of course, John himself. We are, after all, dealing with someone who doesn't quite see that his own interests should not be the measure of all things as well as someone who, owing to privilege blindness and a general insensitive and oblivious refusal to appreciate what Elly does, see her needs as something of a useless obstacle to getting what he wants.

The other interesting thing about this is that we start to see why John has so little in common with his children and how it's all their fault. The example that comes readiest to mind is this strip in which we're supposed to think that teenaged Liz is simply a passive observer who doesn't realize that she's just standing around doing nothing at all to help because we're supposed to forget that every time she and Mike tried to participate, the tetchy idiot with the glasses turned into a sullen, possessive jerk who groused about how children should neither be seen, heard or physically present when he was being a big-shot.

This, as you will recall, is why we used to call him "Train Man" back in the day. His model trains weren't a bit of color that added a bit of pizzazz to an otherwise dull and mildly irritating character but instead a sort of easy way to remind ourselves that he's an insensitive clod who dismisses his wife's complaints about her life as being the hormones talking and a distant and unsympathetic idiot father who blames his children for his own gutless inability to reach out to them.

One of the more irritating phenomena of the Declining Years was having to read those stupid character letters and have to endure John be a smug, indulgent rat bastard idiot who shook his head, clucked his tongue and made stupid noise about the children he never bothered getting to know when they were growing up. This, I should think, is the bitter fruit of Lynn's idea of what being a good father is. She might think that John and Mike are great fathers worthy of emulation by being emotionally distant idiots who only want to interact with their children when it amuses them but, well, let's consider the end result of all of that.

For starters, it doesn't take a genius to see that John's need to flee his children or banish them from his presence when it's not all smiles is as efficient a method of preventing bonding as his high-handed snippiness when little hands come to play with his toys. Given that Massive-Diameter Dickhole John won't make any sort of logical connection between his "Go away and think about how selfish you are for thinking that feeling lost and alone in this world is a REAL problem when refugee orphan children are starving in a war zone, Liz!!" and the fact that she doesn't feel as if she belongs anywhere, it's kind of easy to see that the same festering boil on the asscheeks of humanity isn't going to want to understand that the reason that his children don't know who he is or what he's in to is because he won't share.

It's also fairly easy to see that the same clod will be at the chiropractor's office after wrenching his shoulder out patting himself on the back for being soooo observant when he tells Mike what other people say about him. As I've said before, being stupid means never having to say "I'm sorry."

Of course, John's switching from being a dopey, happy up-beat sort of man-child when he's feeling good to an angry, whiny man-child when his privileges are called into question or when someone touches his stuff is not the only thing keeping him from being the sort of bland, dull Everyman he appears to be at first blush. He's also hindered by his need to be so neutral and impartial an observer, he doesn't know who the people who live in his house are.

The example that comes readiest to mind is NOT, as you might think, his inability to quite understand that yes, Elly actually did feel trapped and useless and lost throughout most of the Early, Middle and Later Years. The example that comes to my mind appears about five to ten years from now when he proves himself incapable of understanding why his teenaged kids are always so moody and surly. He provides them with a nice home and nice things and it seems to him that their problems are easily solved so the hostility and depression are something he never quite understands. What he tends to not quite remember is that back when he was that age, a zit or a bad hair day or Patsy O'Connor dating another person actually felt like the end of the world.

This tendency is not one Elly shares by any means. This is because when she's not trying to jam up relationships that are being taken too seriously, she's trying to gain vicarious vengeance on girls with the body and the language. John, on the other hand, simply wants an end to the huffiness and drama without really caring too much about whatever hormone causes it. Once the kids have seen the real world and talked to someone sensible like their cousin Laura, they'll realize that it's silly to mope about who's pals with whom and be the quiet, grateful kids he 'deserves.'