![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Yesterday's post contained within it the real source of the Patterson's woes: their consistent failure to come up with a realistic answer to one of the only questions that matter: "What's the worst thing that could happen?" When I started this, I saw yellowjkt's article about the "Bad Idea Foobs" who told the Pattersons to always take the worst possible course of action in a given situation. Whether they exist or not, the Patterclan act as if they do. Take, for instance, the mess Liz made of her relationship with Paul. She asked herself "Hmmm. I told him to transfer to be with me in Mtigwaki but I decided to move back home. I'll just ask him to transfer again. What's the worst thing that could happen?" She failed to give the right answer to that question. Instead of coming up with the (W)right answer, namely "He might think I'm just jerking him around and seek out a girlfriend who doesn't", she came up with "If he loves me, he won't mind." It also explains why Mike quit Portrait in the gutless way he did. He thought the worst thing in the world was clearing out all the dead wood so he stupidly fell on his sword. In his shoes, I'd run the place like a scab foreman. John's insane-seeming need to buy the TTH now instead of waiting for April to go to college? His idea of the worst thing in the world is not having somewhere to put his damned trains. Why doesn't Iris ask for help? She doesn't want Elly to have a meltdown. I would've stood by and let Elly make an ugly, ungrateful looking fool of herself in Iris's place 'cause that'd've meant Potatonose would've been shamed into doing what she's supposed to be doing. Elly's failure to come up with the correct answer to that bit April on the ass twice. First, she thought that making a deal with a toddler would work out better than fumbling for keys to the back gate. Second, she'd've rather let Kortney steal from her and threaten her child than possibly look like the heavy and fire La Krelbutz's ass. Anthony would've rather let Therese suffer in silence than get her psychiatric help she needed because he thought it would make him look like he wasn't on the ball so that makes him a Patterson by association.
Everybody's talking at me.
Jun. 22nd, 2007 07:57 amPanel Three of today's strip explains a lot more than April's ignorance of the Telethontelethontelethon, doesn't it? She states that John told her about the thing but she just sorta tuned him out. IF she hadn't said so specifically, I'd have been able to make a real good guess that it did. Like the rest of her family, April makes a horrible, horrible mistake; she assumes that, since John isn't a teenaged girl and doesn't generally talk about the stuff she finds important, he has nothing worth saying so she doesn't really have to listen. Her idea of holding up her end of the conversation is making a non-commital noise that simulates agreement so the other person will go away and she can go back to whining about how nobody ever tells her anything. This is why the Pattersons don't really communicate, isn't it? Each and every Foob drifts off to Cloudcuckooland because the other person is not as he or she is so cannot have an opinion that REALLY matters. This is why April feels left out of the Housening; she won't make herself a part of it. For all we know NOW, John and Elly may have made an effort to involve her in the discussion and she may have been PHYSICALLY present but her mind was elsewhere. Possibly on the planet Self-pity.
As princessgos pointed out, the Pattersons take a lot of pretty-much undeserved credit for Gordon Mayes's happiness. Sure, John handed him the seed money to get the ball rolling but most, if not all, of the subsequent improvements were all Gordo. All the Pattersons really did is sit back and collect their slice of the Mayes money cake. They still think, though, that he's somehow beholden to them, don't they? They could not be more wrong. The exact second Gordon payed off his loan, he was his own man and, what's more, knew it. His tuft-hunting is just for show as he flatters the people riding his coattails. He knows these people have an inflated notion of their position in the community and how to deal with them. As a matter of fact, I'll bet the real reason for the big turnout at Mike's book launch is that Gordo's loser buddy finally had a turn of good luck and they wanted to congratulate him.
Humor is nothing to laugh about.
Jun. 13th, 2007 07:50 amLike I've said before, the Pattersons take everything in their lives way too seriously. Not only is because it's a way for dim people like them to sound important, they don't have anything like a sense of humor. Every fucking thing they do, no matter how trivial, is mentally magnified to the point where they think if they don't brush their teeth exactly right, the Sun will die and the World come to an end. Their monstrous vanity and lack any real sense of proportion or their place in the world preclude them from stepping back and laughing at the follies that swallow their time and steal their happiness. They cannot laugh at themselves because, like children, they believe if people laugh at them, they don't respect them. They'll just be pathetic zeroes that their 'betters' haul out to guffaw at forever and ever. That doesn't, however, stop them from making wisecracks at other peoples' expense. We remember the gales of laughter Elly stifled down at the whimsical prospect of cigarette smokers burning themselves half to death. That's because when a Patterson makes a joke, he/she isn't really happy as much as making a display of veiled aggression.
The Pattersons : Clients of the able.
Jun. 12th, 2007 07:09 amAs howtheduck pointed out in response to my post yesterday, the Pattersons respond to major problems by not responding in the hopes that someone else will take care of things. For some strange reason, they fear, not so much confrontation, but looking like the bad guy. Let's take the first example he mentioned; Mike's troubles with the downstairs neighbors. Instead of having a sit-down with the Kelpfroths and actually getting to know them so he could figure out what they wanted, Mike wrote that slanderous article, after which he cowered behind Lovey Saltzmann. If he did have the sit-down I mentioned, he might had to admit he was partly in the wrong and that would never do. Each example follows the same pattern: a Patterson would directly hurt an outsider's feelings. Their inflated sense of self-importance makes them uncomfortable with anything that would suggest people might not like everything they do so to forestall that, they do nothing. It always seems to work out from their perspective because it gets done anyway. Their insularity, sadly, blinds them to the fact that the people who clean up their messes tell other people to avoid dealing with them lest they too be forced to put out Pattersonian fires all their lives.
The Uncle Baldwin Effect...
May. 27th, 2007 09:19 amI'm taking the title from today's post from the character of the same name from the late Walt Kelly's comic strip, Pogo. Every so often, Porky Pine's uncle would show up in the swamp, make an infernal nuisance of himself and generally make a dog's breakfast of his nephew's life by exploiting their uncanny similarity. You could generally tell when the creep popped up when one of the dumber denizens of the strip complained to ol'Porky anout 'his' antics. They were distinguished by the fact Uncle Baldwin wore a greatcoat to cover a telltale bald spot on his rump. (His name was a pun, meaning 'bald one'.) Kelly's stated motivation in introducing the guy was that he wanted to have two people who looked exactly alike in order to avoid having to learn to draw a new character. Lynn seems over the last few years to have picked up the same habit. We all remember a time when John and Elly didn't look alike but nowadays the only way we have of telling the two apart is their hairstyles. Mike and Deanna are also starting to blend together, with only the hair color separating them. As other, wiser minds have pointed out, if this trend continued we'd only be able to tell Liz and Anthony apart based on the absence or presence of facial hair.
Jumping to conclusions and other hazards.
May. 25th, 2007 12:48 pmLike I've said before, here and on the Foobiverse Journal, the most annoying part of the Housening is not just the lousy timing; after all, John freely admits that they'd hoped April was at University beforehand. It's also not just that John's main concern is the big lot for his Train Layout of Delight and his need to get the land NOW before Stibbs does something wacky like 'sever' the other two lots from the property, thereby leaving him nowhere to put it. It's that none of these boneheads have taken the time to address April's real concerns. I'm not saying she has veto power over the move because it IS John and Elly's decision, after all. The problem is that they don't know WHY she's in a bad mood, not that it would occur to them to ask. They breezily assume she's being difficult BECAUSE she's a teenager and 'that's what they do'. Plus also, they haven't bothered taking her down to the Pattermanse 2.0 to allay her concerns about the move. The lack of any real communication from her dolt parents has naturally led her to assume the worst because she no real idea what the basement is like. It could well be a cozy little apartment that needs an hour's worth of tidying up instead of the dungeon her sister's horror stories have led her to believe but no one involved seems to realize that's what's bothering her. If she were given the chance to compare it with the second bedroom she seems to want, she might come around to her parent's way of thinking on her own. Having it happen because of a stress-induced delusion that her Big, Scary Wish borught a rotten old tree crashing down is a lousy solution with its unacceptabilty amplified by their belief that she's finally started to see sense.
Going Broke Saving Money.
May. 24th, 2007 08:44 amI readily admit to posting something similar to what I'm about to say after the Sheet-shaving incident but this week's story line makes it far more central to what ails the Pattersons. Like everyone around them, Milborough's WorstFirst Family don't want to spend too much money doing the things they want to do. The problem is that, since they don't have two clues to rub together, they take shortcuts that guarantee they'll burn through their savings accounts. Case in point: John buys the TTH sight unseen without wasting money on anything like an inspector. It's not just because he trusts George; he doesn't see the need to check up on his purchase to see if there might be problems, like any rotten trees on the property that could fall on the place, that need to be addressed. If he'd had the foresight to crack open his wallet BEFORE something bad happened, he could have had the tree cut down and saved himself the expense of fixing the roof. Now he proposes to remove the tree himself. Given the fact he's not using the proper equipment, he'll most likely cause more damage than the tree did thereby making the renovation even more expensive. Knowing him, he'd try to save a few bucks by doing that himself too, most likely by raiding the funds earmarked for fixing up the basement for April. This is really gonna cost him because the province isn't gonna let him exile the Martian to a basement that isn't up to legal code. The fine he'd end up paying there might well derail his plans to build the Vandal Magnet of Ultimate Doom because he WOULD have to 'sever' the other two lots and sell them to cover his expenses. All this chaos because the smug bastard is too fucking cheap to do things right. No wonder April's losing her mind!!
Women in Basements: A warped idee-fixe...
May. 21st, 2007 10:54 amOne of the weirder trends in the latter years of this mess is Lynn's obvious fixation on having young women live in basement apartments. Sort of a "Laverne and Shirley" complex, if you will. The first occasion this came up was when Blandthony showed Elizabeth around the pee-wee gated community he'd built for his daughter Francoise. Instead of questioning his sanity or contacting children's welfare, Elizabeth praised the morose freak for her 'caring' and 'foresight'. The next occasion is Liz's own bizarre love affair with DIY disaster areas in duplexes. Sure, she complains about the noise and expense but that's pretty much a protesting lady deal. Now, we have April being shuttled from one basement to another. I wonder what it says about Lynn that she digs the idea of girls in bunkers? They (whoever THEY are) can't get you if they can't see you? Why this paranoia?
