Foobonia and Points West.

Having reviewed the facts, it seems to me that the turgid torrent of rancid oatmeal called Stone Season is not just a Saturday-morning cartoon adaptation of Mrs Dingle's life story or just a horribly retrograde novel that manages to damn both genders equally. It is quite clear that Mike is completely unaware that in Harvey, he's created something like the ideal male character in the strip. As I'm about to prove, he covers all the bases.

Let's lead off by pointing out that he entered the life of a woman who seemed to be going places in this world under by posing as something he wasn't. As Mike describes it, once he took his uniform off, the dashing, laughing love interest revealed his true self: a morose, miserly, distant clodhopper who regards women as pretty much put on this earth to do chores for idiots like him and who thinks that cooperation is synonymous with castration.

The second interesting fact is that his great big plan for the future can be charitably summarized as the fever dream of a mentally deficient opium fiend. He had no idea how to run his farm, no business ruining the lives of his family doing so and no intention of manning up and calling it quits despite stupidly managing to bury two children because he didn't want to take charity. As Mike said in his letters, his need to have an identity loomed larger than sense, decency or the needs of others.

This leads to his callous disregard for the needs of the unfortunates stuck having to deal with him. Mike might think that having to live Sheilagh's needlessly miserable existence made her a strong woman but all it served to prove is that she found it difficult to rid herself of a very horrible and worthless man who resented the wife who wanted love he couldn't give and the horrible, ungrateful children who made his life a misery by being born weak and dependent.

The odd thing is that Mike has no real idea that when he said that he WAS Harvey Rood, he was one hundred percent right. He, John, Phil and Anthony think that they're something they're not, they hate sharing, they have a self-serving I-it view of women, they don't have the least idea how to live their lives and they resent their children for making them incompetent.

The reason that he fails to see this is that he's so used to the idea of that horribly brutal gender war I talk about to see how like Harv he himself is.

I think that it's pretty safe to say that Michael's opinion of women was set in stone pretty much when John informed him that despite what it looked like, the reason Elly was so upset all the time was not that the two of them were selfish douchecanoes who treated her like their servant and thought of her hopes as a hindrance to their being swinish Neanderthals. Nope. It was crazy, scary woman hormones making her not like things she's supposed to love to do. If she didn't have them, she'd admit that she was designed for the sole purpose of racing around after entitled sacks of sewage like them.

What sold me on the fact that Michael was never seriously going to question his cretin father's default assumption that women are silly, hormonal children who need male guidance is strip number 5577. As we see, part of Mike's plans to win Rhetta over included his letting her ASSERT her indepence; what this clearly seems to translate to is "Indulge the crazy fantasy girls have that they can make decisions without male input." This, combined with his being the same sort of whiny bitch his pinhead uncle Phil was when HIS dumb ass got dumped and making idiotic yowling noises about letting a dame mess up his alleged brain tells me we're dealing with yet another human being who should, by rights, be the same sort of pathetic social isolate as that dimwit hayseed who hangs out with Hippy Dippy Uncle Danny on Exile Farm.

Instead, we see him playing the same infernal head games Phil did when he was getting ready to ruin Georgia's life by shackling her in baffled monogamous misery to an entitled imbecile and getting the same results: a wife who's become a joke supporting a failure with a bad idea about how things work. The strange thing is that she helps screw over someone else who's also kept off-balance in order to keep her from making headway: April.

Of course, the idea of Georgia pining away and dying of grief because her one-and-only true love died on her isn't the only profoundly sexist idea to inform the strip. As history teaches us, no matter how repellent a man is, a woman is supposed to automatically jump into his arms if he mentions or hints at marriage. It doesn't matter how ugly and self-indulgent a fool the man makes of himself because if he declares his intent, the girl is simply powerless to resist.

The example that comes readiest to mind is the man whose death requires Georgia to commit despairing suicide: Phil. Let's examine his attributes so as to force us to ask the question "What on God's EARTH does she see in the bonehead with the idiotic mustache?!"

I mean, it's not as if we didn't have any number of warning signs that the man was bad meat in a can. After all, Phil outed himself when he made a whiny little shit of himself when Connie Poirier decided to give another self-absorbed momma's boy another chance. When he wasn't sobbing about how he'd let a dame mess him up, he was foaming at the mouth about her being so crazy as to reject him.

The second broad hint as to what makes Phil tick is that nothing on this Earth can seem to make him take Elly's concerns seriously. The very really feeling that she's had all her life that she's been shortchanged just because she's a woman seems to mean very little to the wilted flower child who regards the sixties not as an era of societal change but as an era in which societal rules that kept him from being the spoiled little kid he wants to be were set aside.

Finally, we have the recent exercise in which he, as John would put it, kept Georgia on her toes. The way he saw it, he had to and has to keep the women in his life off balance or else they might start thinking something crazy about how they're supposed to make headway in the brutal war between the sexes that seems to be going on in Soviet Foobistan. As we all know, the idea that underlies the strip is that the women in the strip are all supposed to wail feebly about how they can never come close to any sort of victory over the men in the world. Always and ever, Elly and the others are frustrated by men who in the real world could be taken down by a hamster.

The end result of all of this is that Georgia was kept off balance so long and made unsure of things to such a great extent that she started to think that two and two did after all make twenty-two. This means that the strip seems to preach the moral "Don't worry about him being a vain, immature emotional abuser who thinks that you're less than human, ladies. Just make sure he's a great provider."