Foobonia and Points West.

As we pretty much all know, a kindergarten class isn't going to be supervised by just the teacher because the kids cannot be left unsupervised. In most jurisdictions, a real-life Miss Lyon is going to have back-up in the form of a teacher's aide and a volunteering parent or two. Given that when the strip began, Lynn lived in a very small town and thus didn't have access to that sort of thing, her lack of curiosity and imagination made her believe that since she didn't see this sort of thing, it didn't exist no matter what people might try to tell her. That being said, she eventually became aware of the phenomenon when April came into the picture. The problem is that the woman seems to be depicted not as a necessary part of the process but as a sort of apathetic interloper shanghaied into being somewhere she has no place being. This, I should think, is owing to her being the creation of an unreflective dough-head who simpers that since they didn't have people like that when she was a child, they're not needed in the here and now. Besides, what could happen to a bunch of tinies if they were left to their own devices?

The very odd thing about the whole stupid mess with Phil, Georgia and Connie is that for some reason, it's assumed that Phil is obliged to spend time talking to Connie even though no such obligation actually exists. Phil isn't supposed to be allowed to stand around like a galoot making Georgia feel awkward and stupid merely because he had a tepid non-relationship that died of natural causes and Georgia isn't a jealous freak for not wanting to have to put up with that sort of tasteless behaviour. If this sounds at all familiar, let's remind ourselves that Evil Career Woman Thérèse is depicted as being a jealous and irrational monster who hated Liz for no reason because she questioned the necessity of Anothony and Liz talking about old times as if her feelings didn't and weren't supposed to matter. This, as has been said, is an attempt by the author to tell herself that she was one hundred percent blameless in the collapse of her first marriage. It wasn't that she was cheating on Doug with Rod, it was him and his big-chested women laughing at her for wanting to be happy. Since we're dealing with a woman who never can see what she does as being wrong, a grotesque and inconsiderate faux pas became a sacrament.

A few weeks ago, we were treated to a strip in which Elly stood there being defeated by her evil, chaos-worshipping, mother-hating daughter who declared that she needed to deny Elly the happiness of putting her hair up in a ponytail. It might look like a strip in which a goofy boomer lost sight of the fact that her child is a person in her own right with her own tastes but since we're dealing with a vengeful clod of an artist, the accompanying Lynnsight that had our hero whine piteously about how Katie learned to put her hair up in a style Lynn likes without having her loving mother help her kind of spells it out. We're dealing with a person who sees a child learning to do something on her own in order to somehow please the crazy woman who she calls a mother and comes to the stupid conclusion that she's doing it to be a jerk to her poooooooooooor, long-suffering mother who only asks the Earth and everything in it. Never does Lynn have the least inclination to see that people aren't trying to crush her because she assumes that they all have her overweening need to pulverize people for daring to tell the EVIL LIE!!!!!!!!!!! that people are individuals and all see the world in a different way than she does when it's clear to her that all understand as she does.

As we've come to know, Lynn can get awfully defensive when she's called on something by people, unlike her, know what they're talking about on a given issue. The most recent example of this is her whining about the mean old picky-face librarians have no sense of human and belong in cages because they object to having someone who's pretty much the tin freaking dog being sent to the librarian's workshop when an actual librarian was there to get to go to Winnipeg. As I've said on the matter, what matters to her is that she needs some reason to get Elly to take her free trip to Away From Her Children and her sinecure non-job at the library is pretty much the only game in town. The problem that I have is that it looks to me as if we're getting our first glimpse at a trend that was a hallmark of what I call the Declining Years: the annoying habit that people had of just handing Pattersons thigns that they didn't earn because the Pattersaints are awesome and deserve a break. Too bad that it wasn't the first example of Lynn not realizing that she had to put things in her strip that explained things in a more fortunate matter. It would have taken no time to have Susan say that neither she nor Monique could go but Lynn was too pressed for time to not make Elly look lucky.

Of course, Lynn herself has a fact or two about herself that she doesn't want to admit to. One of these facts is that she really doesn't have a handle on how children see the world around them. We're going to be reminded of that in a year's time when we have to contend this particular strip. As you can see, the premise behind it is "Lizzie knows that since she's three feet tall, her perspective is abnormal and distorted. Were she the same size as Elly, she would see the world the way she is supposed to and clearly wants to but since she's small, everytthing looks wrong."

I think that it's safe to say that no child thinks that way at all. A real Lizzie would see herself as being normal and seeing the world the way she's supposed to and the only reason that she would be said to think otherwise is if her actions were being interpreted by someone who thinks "If I were that size, I'd think that the world would look all wrong so she clearly must also think that the world looks distorted and weird." This sort of thing is why she occasionally has to deal with baffling comments from picky-faces about how off-putting and wrong the way the characters behave can be.

For all of my talking about how stupid John and Elly are for not exploring the option of sending Mike down to the Boys' and Girls' Club for the summer and saving themselves a crap-load of money, it seems to me that it might be a good thing that they did no such thing. That's because I lost sight of two very important things. The first is that Lynn never did this and since she can't write about anything she never experienced, suggesting that she do so would lead to a baffling mess that demonstrates how little she knows of the world and how much she relies on television to teach her. As by way of example, we have to contend with the fact that the summer camp arc seems to have been ripped directly from old sitcoms and bad TV movies so it's very likely that sending Mike down to one of these would be a kiddy-grade version of the Elly-does-macramé arc in which he "accidentally" creates things designed specifically to outrage and horrify Elly because CHAOS!!!!

The second fact I should have kept in mind is that even when Lynn has experienced something, she draws all the wrong conclusions. The same person who thinks that people who claim to get ahead because they're willing to buckle down and do things that they hate must be cheating and must envy her for her doing a lot of crappy work she's too lazy to review would probably have invited us to take part in another war on straw. This means that not only would nine year old Michael deliberately outrage Elly because he hates her and wants her to be chained to the stove and whatever the Hell lies she tells herself to protect herself from seeing that he has to live in Milborough too, we'd also see a poorly-researched ad hominem attack on modern thinking about children and the arts. Perhaps the horrible woman who didn't realize that the point of totally-not-forcing a only-reluctant-because-she-wanted-to-ruin-Elly's-image Lizzie to participate in an Easter parade she would have gladly took part in if she didn't live to make Elly look bad is to make Elly look competent would be the go-to person encouraging Mike to think of new ways to ruin Elly's reputation.

Having reviewed the sequence again, it seems to me that I've been a bit unfair to Marian in calling her stupid. After all, she's as baffled by Elly as she is by Mike or Lizzie and what baffles her is wondering if her daughter french-fried her brain huffing solvents or taking hits of the brown acid. Toddler Elly was easy to understand because she thought that the Sun shone out of her butt. Middle School Elly was easy to understand because, having learned that the Sun didn't shine out of her butt, she thought that the Sun was in the process of guttering out and dying and leaving poor Elly lost, alone, ugly, unloved and unlovable. High School Elly was easy to understand because it suddenly because Marian's fault that the Sun was dying and Elly would end up an old maid.

Sadly, nothing Elly has done since she left home seems to have ever made sense to Marian. Oh, she understands that Elly got her MRS because the crazy idiot thinks that when Mother said that a BA degree would come in handy if Mr Right didn't come along right away, she actually meant that Mister Right would never come. What she can't wrap her head around is why Elly mutated from a mildly bossy kid who needed a few years of real life to teach her what her limits were to a horror freak who acts as if she's the star of a really crappy dom-com. What this tells me is that when Mike, Lizzie and April do things that confuse Granny, Marian is wondering if their off-putting behaviour is the result of better foobage through chemistry. In her experience, people don't act as if there's some sort of sinister virus that makes them into sitcom-dialog spouting pod people unless there's some sort of brain-melting controlled substance involved.

Of course, we don't need the fact that Lynn had no real idea what to do with April after she stopped being able to write cute kid strips as a reminder that she really doesn't have any idea of what she's doing. The current arc serves that purpose just as well. If you'll allow me, I'd like to list the features common to both Lizzie's Mystery Fever Of Melodrama™ and the shabby way that the Pattersons treated the unfavorite third child.

The first common feature comes to us from the notes; that's because Lynn said that she had never actually had to send a child to hospital with an illness. Since she isn't really all that good at imagining what people do when she never did it, we end up with parents who sit home like uncaring idiots while their sick, frightened child wonders why she's been abandoned. This is like how April thought she was going to end up locked in a dungeon because Lynn couldn't imagine John and Elly actually talking to her. In both cases, Lynn never actually bothered sitting down and wondering what people would do and decided to have them do what she would. Since she doesn't seem to understand the social norms that apply, the result is rather off-putting.

The second commonality proceeds logically from the first; this is because we have Lynn not really understanding what it looks like when Elly acts as if doing the bare minimum to qualify as a decent human being is some sort of heroic sacrifice. It's as annoying to think that Lynn wants us to praise Elly for being a hero for sitting in the waiting room while Lizzie still cries for Mommy as it will be when she declares that Elly "understands' April when she tells her that she's not upset about what she's upset about.

Finally, we have to contend with the fact that Lynn has a strong aversion to having to care about people in genuine need. Whenever the conversation veers towards the subject of sick relatives, Lynn tends to lavish praise on people who don't ask her to feel bad for them. There are two reasons for this appalling tendency of hers. The first is that her own fear or being weak and dependent tends to make her think that people who are weak have somehow committed a crime and thus aren't worthy of her attention. The second is that said awful people are trying to impose on her and make her weaker than they are when they have no right to do so. This means that Lynn has criminalized compassion and empathy because she wants all the sympathy for herself.

The end result of all of this is that she never reused this sort of storyline because she did not get the results she both expected and wanted. Instead of getting letters lavishing sympathy on John and Elly for having to take care of some stupid kid who went and got herself sick, she ended up with a lot of letters that angered and confused her about how sad they were for Lizzie and how angry they were that John and Elly weren't doing enough.

It seems to me that given that we're dealing with a strip of, by and for small-minded, small town housewives who fear and hate the world outside their cage, the elimination of April from the strip would leave a gaping chasm that needs to be filled with things to be afraid of. I'll cover how to fill Elly with fear of the devil computers that require her to learn things in my next entry. What I'm going to cover today is what Lynn would have to do in order to fill up all the time not spent on Elly chasing after a small child and whining about how tied down she is. It seems to me that yesterday's look at how most of why Elly sent her children to Exile Farm was to step on relationships that frightened her makes me think that instead of kid strips, we would have gotten more ranting from Elly about how her children were too close to love interests they barely saw.

This need of Elly's to fret about the terrible possibility of the children not keeping themselves pure would, of course, have nothing to do with their well-being. As this strip clearly indicates, we're meant to think that it's right and proper that a dowdy wallflower who scowled her way through high-school because no one wanted to date a shrill, ignorant twinkie who lived to take everything the wrong way wants to punish the happy people for making her miserable. This need to avenge herself on people she's convinced herself want to destroy her trumps any minor consideration like the well-being of her irrelevant offspring or anything like a fact. The fact of the matter is that despite what she might think, her children would probably have been all right if left alone. A sane person would see that Martha and Rhetta would be two somebodies Mike used to know and not future Mrs Delicate Geniuses.

Lynn is not a sane person. Lynn is a defiant, angry child who never grew up and uses her strip as a club with which to bludgeon people she feels have wronged her. This means that instead of annoying cute kid strips, we'd have ended up watching more of Elly whimpering about the dangers of friendly, polite little girls and clumsy, ham-fisted attempts to imply that someone policed far more strictly than any Patterson ever was is a tramp. Also, we'd have to endure actually having to watch Martha be a fat, desperately lonely divorced mother of two with no immediate prospects so as to punish her for not realizing that Mike was her brain.

This sort of brings me to the real problem with Elly's need to step on relationships. The first part of the problem is that despite there being plenty of good reasons to keep children from rushing head-long into physical love before they're emotionally ready for the consequences, Lynn and her co-cannibals ignore the Hell out of them because they don't care if Tyler is too damned young to be a dad because they're too damned young to be grannies and would lose too much status in the process. The self-serving need to maintain their standing thus marches hand-in-hand with slut-shaming to make it clear that Lynn could have fulfilled her need to slam teenagers without having them people her strip. After all, a lot of teenagers these days say something dangerous when they make horrifying noise about how their mommy parts aren't the exclusive property of whatever man they happen to land.