Foobonia and Points West.

We're in for a bit of revisionist history to take us into June. We know from the book "Lives Behind the Lines" that Elly was John's assistant when he started out and she resumed that role when Jean Baker was absent for a while. It would appear, however, that Lynn is in the process of rewriting history so that Jean wasn't even there to be absent. However Lynn wants to retcon things, one thing is certain: Elly wasn't very good at it. The strips I remember show her making a complete mess of things. She could never remember a technical term for more than five seconds and was always handing John the wrong tool. She also didn't handle his angered reaction too well. Here he was, trying to stay afloat and there she was screwing things up for them and their family. I should also think her ineptitude helped sour him on the idea of her working outside the home by confirming the stereotypes he grew up with. His hiring more attractive assistants later on was an act of nastiness calculated to mess with her head as badly as he felt she messed up as an assistant. He had no intention of stepping out on her, he just wanted to see her squirm.

As we all know, the first three years of the strip were a huge downer. We had a few good moments here and there but most of the time, people stood around being pointlessly upset about things and acting needlessly jerkish to one another. It took to 1982 for the artwork to improve, the people to treat each other like people and, well, the continuity we're familiar with to get established. That being said, we still have to explain why Elly has so many negative memories of that period. The non-stop nastiness we saw in the first few years of the strip strains credibility. My guess is that Elly didn't want to remember the good times, that she wanted, for her own reasons, to focus on the things that upset her to feel big and important. You see, she doesn't feel that she's contributing to society at large so she needs to feel like her life was worthwhile. If she can make a beige suburban existence with a cloddish husband and loutish children sound like some horrid catastrophe, she's rescued herself from being irrelevant.

We know for a fact that Elly cannot sit still, that her love of activity for its own sweet sake made her fill every single minute of her free time with chores. We also know that John, for all his insensitive jackassery, is being straightforward when he expresses confusion about her complaints about that fact. This tells me that even though he initially expected Elly to be a housewife in the mold of his mother, Carrie Patterson was not in love with work for its own sake. She managed to keep her house spotless enough to satisfy the requirements of the Gods of Hygeine and have time to pursue her own interests. What's more, she didn't spend her time moaning about having to do it because she actually liked the way her life turned out. John probably assumed for the longest time that Elly was the same way, that she was able to clean house and have time to herself. Now that he's underfoot more often and realizes that his wife is not like his mother and cannot ever rest or be happy with what she has, he's probably started to rethink some of the things she used to say. Too bad that he probably thinks that her joyless workaholism is a good thing.

It seems obvious that, while Connie is complaining about the people around her who did not help at all with the housework, Elly, as I've said before, has a different axe to grind. Her main concern, as we've seen so far this week, is with help that does not help her much at all. We've seen too many strips where she came into the kitchen after John did some domestic stuff and re-do them her way, to many strips wher his ofer to help was violently rebuffed, too many strips where Mike was discouraged from housework because his ideas of what needed to be done conflicted with her own not to realize that she doesn't want them butting in and doing a sub-standard job. In her mind, not doing things her way is as bad as not doing anything.

I know I've said this before but it's too good a point to not repeat. For the last twenty-eight and a half years, we have been subjected to an extended plea for sympathy from most of the female characters in the strip. Everything they say or do can be boiled down to the phrase "Behold me, the wronged, and pity me." You cannot spend too much time before you encounter some idiot who whines about how hard her lot is, how helpless she is to change it and how nobody understands or offers her sympathy or help. Let's exmaine how stupid that is. First off, they got themselves into the bad situation of their own free stupid will. Nobody forced Elly to marry John. Second, it's not a matter of the Ignoble Sufferer being trapped in a bad situation. If they wanted to, they could leave in a minute. They do not want to, though. The will to self-aggrandizement by showing how much crap they can endure keeps them fixed in place. Second, they actively refuse to be helped because they'd rather be pitied. What compounds the awfulness is that if they do not have misfortune in their lives, they'll inflate something trivial into a crisis. This trafficking in mostly undeserved sympathy has a nasty side effect; it blinds them to concerns of those in genuine need. There are people with real problems like Therese and April who get shoved aside because Liz and Elly want to be patted on the head for nothing.

When Michael told us that Liz deserved to be teased because she was cuter than he was, it led me to expect that we'd have a whole bunch of strips wherein she supposedly got him into trouble 'on purpose'. That would lead to the alarming prospect of a thirty-one year old man who hadn't changed his thinking in twenty-six years. A grown man who'd think that a toddler was deliberately tormenting him is someone to avoid. However, we find something different. We find him shifting from that to the times Elly swooped down on him and started yelling. Here he was, just trying to be a kid only to have every single thing he did make her holler and scream with her arms failing and her face a mask of rage. He can't fight that enemy and win so he has to find other ways to rebel. That means that he tagets things that she likes to get back at her. Messing up tax forms and walloping people on the head with his bear only go so far, though. To really punish her for yelling at him for no reason, he strikes at the child they only had because they were mad at him: Lizzie. This leads me to believe that after talking out why he picked on Liz, he'd realize a new 'fact': she was just a stand-in for Elly. He might even make a stumbling attempt at an apology based on that 'wisdom'.

Now that we must face a week of Mike whining about how Liz always got him into trouble, let's examine how it was that he was allowed to think that he was the victim of a feminine plot. I've alreadt examined his internalizing of John's fear of the changing world so that chauvinism was second nature, how he allowed himself the luxury of thinking that Elly's hormones inpsired all the screaming and threats of punishment. What we do not see and will not see this week is her tendency to squeamishness. Just like John was allowed to be a macho bonehead for years because she caved in owing to her lack of courage, she always held back on her threats, never quite went through with things. She, by not doing exactly what she threatened, failed to gain her son's respect. Elly also tried to keep John from making his punishments stick. The conclusion that the little creep's muddled brain formed was that tormenting Liz was only wrong because she made noise. Since he never really got shown how bad he was, never had to deal with real blow-back from someone angry enough at him to force him to admit error, he still thinks that she's fair game for insults. As big a jerk as he is, he wasn't born that way: a mother with some firmness in her would have made sure to see that he grew a conscience.

I find it hard to empathize with the struggles of the Patterson family because they have an annoying habit that I keep talking about because they do it so often: they refuse to own up to doing something wrong. You'd think at first blush that they simply can't see themselves as ever having made a mistake, that they're all blind to the consequences of their actions. That would make them all like John. It takes a while for the old boy to realize that he's done something unpleasant but when he does he tries to make up for it in his own ham-fisted manner. The rest of the family, instead, seem to take after Elly. Elly seems unable to admit to herself that she is to any degree repsonsible for the messes she gets in. The finger that points out the guilty can never point to her. Children learn to see the world from those around them so, I repeat, it should be obvious that the main reason Mike says that Liz deserved to be teased because she was cuter than he was is that he was brought up to blame his troubles on a fall-guy. Since he's convinced himself that nothing is ever his fault, he is never going to apologize because he feels no guilt or remorse. It's Lizardbreath's fault for tattling and his parent's fault for taking her side. To see an adult who retains the morals of a five-year-old is sort of disgusting in a horrfying way.

THe porblem with John, as I see it, is that he is very slow on the uptake. It takes time for him to assimilate new ideas because he's a born conservative. It's only with the greatest reluctance that he alters his thinking because he can rarely muster the effort to see that he might be the cause of a problem. As the most pressing example, he spent the first few years of the strip making an ugly fool of himself because of his studied refusal to see that Elly was overworked and felt underappreciated. To him, the tidy home, good food, well-behaved kids and balanced finances seemed to occur by magic. He wouldn't allow himself to see that doing so swallowed most of his wife's time because he had a comfy image in his head of her sitting on her rump eating bon-bons that he didn't want to admit was wrong. He has changed, though. That's because he started to notice that the little woman had a point. First off, he slowly but surely figured out how much of a trial the children were. By the time that happened, he was contemplating shipping the kids off to his sister's farm to set them straight. It may not seem that taking twelve years to admit to himself that he was off base is something to be proud of but he might never have learned. Too bad it took another decade or so to get it through his skull how much work Elly put into getting the house in an order their mothers would approve of as well as putting the greaseburgers on the table. Vacuum cleaners, mops and spray cans don't clean houses, you see. People clean houses. Also, she never liked portion control in the food department. About the only thing he refuses to ackowledge now is that his spending habits are open to debate. Given his slowness on the pick up, I'd say by their thirty-fifth annversary, he'd start to publicly admit that he was wrong about the stereo incident.

As we all know, Mira's always thought that any problems in her daughter's life can be traced to the same source: the worthless twit she married. Over the years, we've seen strong hints that Mira lies awake at night asking herself the following questions:

- Why does a daugher she raised to seek out the best in everything buy second hand goods for her children?

- Why did she live in a series of rathole apartments?

- Why is she treading water financially when she was brought up to be careful with her money?

- Why does the bright, cheerful young woman who went to Honduras look like a carbon copy of the shouting idiot she calls a mother-in-law?

All these horrible questions have a horrible answer: the selfish creep she'd married is draining the life out of her. As far as Mira can see, the daydreaming slacker sits on his fat ass pretending that he's a big time author thereby forcing Deanna to wear herself out to support him. This, to her, is a terrible thing because she could have married a better man and had a better life. The only real problem with that line of reasoning is that Deanna wants to do this. She, for reasons that make sense to her, refuses the life her mother had planned for her. Not for her the understanding that Mom thinks that she has to be twice as good as everyone else just to be accepted. Everything we know about Deanna tells us that she wants nothing to do with the overly-structured life her mother values. She's willing to endure a few minor inconveniences in the name of a slower life. She clearly thinks that once things settle down, she'll have the quiet, tidy life she thinks that the Pattersons have. To sum up, she knows she can do the things her Mom wants her to, she just doesn't want to.

This sort of contrasts her with her role model, Elly. As we've seen over the years, our hero complains non-stop about the potential she's wasting raising children and cleaning house. What's more, Jim was always right in there mourning the loss of the great contribution she made to society, always seemingly ready to blame John and his selfish habit of keeping his child from excelling for her constant unhappiness. He, too, would do so in vain because Elly was not really serious about wanting her degree. She wanted a husband, kids and a home to care for and she wanted to complain about having them because she's only happy when she's upset and getting everyone else wound up. I remember most of the strips from the early years and she wasn't talking about her great work never being accomplished. She wanted to hear adult voices that talked about things she might care about and that was that.