Foobonia and Points West.

Of course, the real reason that Molly and Gayle disappeared is that Lynn had no real-world versions to observe. Just as Annie's children disappeared because she lost touch with Corbeil Anne and her family, the children who were supposed to feed her ideas failed to do so because they were brought up to respect a person's privacy. If Aaron and Katie's mom didn't want to be disturbed, they weren't going to do so because that's bad form.

The problem with this is what I mentioned yesterday in that it looked as if there were something terrible about Milborough that made them want to flee back to Thunder Bay as soon as their mother resurfaced and never look back. Whatever the horrible, bad, no-good thing that made Milborough unbearable was, it inspired Molly to take up American citizenship and Gayle to flee to the terrible frozen city of Thunder Bay to ward off the baleful threat. Since it couldn't be Connie's fault because she's just some poor benighted idiot who still doesn't realize her Twoo Wuv was using her as a human shield and since they know that Greg is a pathetic slob eager to please Step-Mom, the horrible monster they ended up having to flee probably doesn't realize how off-putting sweeping that damned porch is.

Before I continue on with my honest bios for this battle of the bands thing Lynn was floating, it's my distinct displeasure to remind you of one of Lynn's more annoying peculiarities: the odd belief that for some reason, men of colour needs must stay where they 'belong' because participating in the 'majority' white culture will somehow magically kill them. The first such person is, as I've said, Pablo Da Silva. While in the book "The Lives Behind The Lines", he was merely stringing Connie along about his wanting to move to Canada, her on-site Liography has it that for some reason that is probably Lynn having grown up stupid under the Red Ensign, Pablo is some sort of hothouse flower who'd die of exposure if exposed to daytime highs of minus ten Celsius. This is sort of a foreshadowing of how Paul would melt because he's made of snow and can't be part of the Pattersons' world either. Those of you who've been paying attention realize that it's also highly likely that both men made an insane demand that needn't be taken seriously: expecting Connie and Liz to give up their lives back in Ofayland and living amongst the swarthy.

This by-product of being an unreflective, paternalistic dunce growing up arrogant and short-sighted in a white settler dominion is also why she's made of Brian a Westerner who, for some reason she never goes in to, decides to marry into a foreign culture because she believes him to be embracing his heritage when he's just embracing someone who can put up with his weak bullshit. The reason that I mention this is that she's got the same thing in mind for Duncan Anderson when he meekly follows Granny back to freaking Jamaica to be with his kind, embrace his heritage and get away from stupid Caucasians like the Pattersons who say shit like that. Also, everyone knows that Hispanics are in the country illegally so that's it for Luis Refugee and maybe Cantu and Castellanos should do something about the idiot Anglo-Canadian talking like a Trumpista.

As I implied yesterday, April isn't actually missing too much by not having to endure hand-wringing, pants-wetting simpering from Elly about the direction her life is taking, Elizabeth running her stupid mouth about how horrible it is that actions have consequences, Mike being a patronizing dickchoad, John harrumphing about her attitude or Deanna making a jackass of herself by not seeing that our hero was not put on this Earth to live her life for her. That being said, there's something else that she's better off not having to bear witness to: her idiot parents, moron siblings and unspeakable clodhopper in-laws planning Meredith's wedding. After all, since she's eleven, she's practically an adult and has to be married off before she's too ooooold.

The reason that I make what I wish to Hell was a joke is that for some ungodly reason that probably has to do with a delusional old fool simpering about how when she was eleven years old, she KNEW what love was and who she was in love with, Lynn is obsessed with the idea of pairing the children off at the age of eleven. As howtheduck tells us, this has a lot to do with why Deanna and Janice had to take a powder after next year's Halloween party of her getting a bug up her ass because Mike did something stupid. As he saw it, the idiotic plot would have had ten year old Mike torn between two extremes. On the one hand, we'd have Deanna as a stand-in for the sort of girl Lynn thinks twelve-year old Aaron should have gravitated towards and Janice as a living warning not to associate with the wrong sort. It's like how she'd later revive Deanna as a means to the end of telling him "I told you so" about the end of his marriage.

That being said, it's probably for the best that Ruth Johnston managed to convince Lynn that she should hold off on that until Mike was in high school so that she didn't get angry letters about kids growing up too fast. The letters didn't make sense to Lynn because of that whole "I KNEW I was in love, real love" at eleven thing she has.

This tendency of Lynn to recycle rejected plotlines isn't the only instance in which the Lost Strips can be seen to predict the future. While it's true that the sequences that I'm about to discuss were reasonably harmless back in the late Seventies and early Eighties, they tend to be off-putting in the hear and now because of all that's happened afterward. The first such lost sequence concerns first grader Michael's big, sloppy embarrassing crush on Deanna. Back in 1979, what we saw is a small, scruffy boy developing a crush on a classmate who saw him as something of an irritant. While it's true that most parents would look at his flat-footed attempts to impress the girl and make a cute little aside about how funny it would be if they were to eventually marry, most sane people would think that that was at best, a very long shot. If they found out that the two of them actually did get married, said average, normal healthy person would describe that is a very odd little coincidence. The problem is that Lynn ain't most people. If questioned, she'd probably chuckle that they were indeed destined to be married all along. What's more, most of her fans would join in being impressed at how romantic this all is.

The second set of rejected strips that predicted the Pattersons' present day started off when Elly got a letter from Marian telling her that her grandfather had passed on. The first rough-draft goes as follows:

Panel 1: Elly holds a letter in her hands and says "Oh, dear, John! My grandfather has just passed away! What an awful shock for my mother!"
Panel 2: John 'comforts' Elly by reminding her that the man was ninety-three, that they've been expecting this and that her mother will by okay.
Panel 3: He then says that the man wanted to go before saying that her mother will be relieved now that her life has been made so much easier.
Panel 4: She agrees with this but then says that Marian now feels as if she a fifty-five year old orphan.

While the second goes like this:

Panel 1: Elly tells John that it's easy not to talk about it but wonders what will happen when their parents are elderly and need care.
Panel 2: John mutters something about they owe them so much and need to repay all they were given but can't see living with the parents.
Panel 3: Elly tells him that Jim and Marian will never move in with them but she herself can't bring herself to park them in an old age home.
Panel 4: John ends the discussion by agreeing that it's an awful decision that they don't have to think of yet so should stop talking about it.

The interesting thing about all of this is that John's jerkish remark about how happy Marian will be now that she's no longer looking after a very old man not only demonstrates that he's a heartless dick who can only think of things in terms of what's convenient, it seems to me to foreshadow the way Eva Warzone, the Continental and Luis Refugee deal with April's grief over what happened to Jim. The underlying idea that since Jim and Elly's grandfather were very old, the best thing to do is be grateful that their suffering is at an end so that one can move on to things that actually matter. In John's case, it's not having to worry about the future; in the case of Eva Warzone, it's crushing Becky before she can crush them.

This leads me to another thing wherein making John and Elly's life easier comes into play: his comment about how he and Elly are somehow beholden to their parents for something that they don't actually seem to want to be rewarded for doing. I do not know where these two came up with the idea that parents should somehow or other present their children with an itemized bill for services rendered when they leave home because their folks sure don't believe that they're owed anything more than happy children. What I do know is that for some reason, the two of them think that they have to own horses because of that favor bank system of morality they believe in.

This, I think, is why Jim was very reluctant to move to the Pattermanse. He didn't want to impose because his children had their own lives. He stayed a couple of years so as to make Elly happy and to get his bearings after Marian passed but soon found himself wanting a private life again with Iris. The problem is that by the time that Elly's horrible cooking gave him a minor stroke, their refusal to plan for that sort of thing left them scrambling around like lunatics and treating April like someone who has mittens pinned to her jacket sleeves in July. What it also tells us is that when he actually did pass on, April will have been  accused of wanting to make his death about her and her drama by inquiring as to why the assembled hypocritical vermin come to whine about how much they'll miss a man they shunned like a leper because they feared his aphasia was contagious didn't do more for him when he was still alive.

Now, to get back to the whole 'John sets Mike up to fail so he can have an excuse to be angry' thing, it's fairly obvious that John and Elly's belief that their children are freeloaders who owe their parents for the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the roof over their heads and the air they breathe is not the only self-serving and destructive value that marks them as slithering filth and revolting white trash. The other false value is that children have no right to expect punishment or reward to be related to what they themselves do.

Well, I should not use the word "reward", should I? The Pattersons don't believe in rewarding their children when they do something good because nothing the children do can be allowed to please them. What I should say is that the level of punishment is directly pegged to how pissed off John and Elly happen to be at any given moment. What really seems to infuriate John and Elly is any sign that the children are showing 'ingratitude'. Given that the two of them are incredibly selfish people who want a medal and a parade for the performance of a moral obligation, 'ingratitude' is best defined as any behavior that might imply that John and Elly's whims are not the only thing on Earth that have any value.

This sort of hatred of 'ingratitude' helps explain why John and Elly are always angry. Simply put, they think that their children are trying to mess with them because they hate them and want to destroy them. This, in their mind, justifies their making children live in a constant state of apprehension so that they don't get any funny ideas about how Mommy and Daddy are what Chris Rock calls "low-expectation-having motherfuckers."

The end result of this horrible emotional abuse is to produce children who lie as a matter of course. They really can't help it and aren't doing it to be evil. They need to lie to protect themselves from insane, hateful parents who blow up over trivialities and try to elicit the praise said vermin selfishly withhold so as to conserve gratitude. Also, they become hyper-vigilant to the idea of being attacked. My guess is that if Mike weren't habituated to the idea that John would just saunter on over and start yelling at him because he had a hard day being reminded that he's not a big deal, he wouldn't have squealed about how Rhetta and Martha betrayed him.

Fortunately for him, though, he has a penis and thus gets fawned over because he can perpetuate the family name. Liz and April have to choose the safe option.

Of course, what really bothered me about the whole "Let's treat Mike like a damned war criminal because John loves his car more than he can ever love a human being" deal is not that it was followed by Elly being a punitive jerk to a two year old child. What bothers me is that John might think very highly of things that belong to him while not seeing that other people have as much right to their own property as he does. The idea seems to be "What's mine is mine and what's yours is junk."

I realize that I do tend to rattle on about this tendency that the Pattersons have of not seeing that other people have as much right to their little treasures as they themselves do but I think that it's fairly important to understand why. The first hint to as to why Elly felt the need to swoop down every so often and clean out Mike's room doesn't have a thing to do with helping Michael develop a sense of pride in his surroundings. As this strip indicates, most of why she feels the need to decide who owns what is that she fears censure from other people more than she values the opinion of people who get in the way of trying to impress people who don't actually count. Simply put, Michael cannot have an identity separate from hers because it gets in the way of reassuring the disinterested that she can be relied on. The idea that no one anywhere has ever been worried about her reliability is not one a silly, attention-seeking dimwit like her has ever contemplated. Always and ever, the need to be seen as being someone who can do things for people gets in the way of respecting people who actually need her.

We must also remember that she simply isn't capable of caring about the rights of those around her to do what they want with their belongings any more than she can understand who owns what. In both of the strips I linked to, April's life is made the worse because her idiot mother and father simply can't be asked to understand that if something belongs to someone else, it's not junk that THEY can dispose of how they see fit. Sadly, this need to think of having to respect the rights of other people as some sort of horrible imposition is a collective failure of the imagination.

My guess is that it comes from Lynn herself. As we're about to see in the notes, she quickly grew tired of her mother-in-law's need to simply toss things that meant something to her in the trash because since they meant nothing to Lynn, they couldn't be said to have any value at all.

I've already written about the fact that Elly's stooped posture sends people that she's a submissive type coping with exhaustion and an unrealistic fear of being the victim of aggression and how her over-the-top reaction to non-events makes her look like a too-easily baffled nitwit with a poor grasp on this whole 'cause and effect' thing her dad tried telling her about once and a tendency to mindlessly overestimate the consequences of the trivial. Today, I'd like to talk about another common reaction and what it says about her: her tendency to rage brainlessly away at imagined slights.

The two examples that can be used to demonstrate my point are a decade or so apart. The first one has a bored Michael wonder exactly how long Elly's latest self-serving tirade about how put-upon she is and how terrible a child he is will last this time. Rather than recognize that she's perceived as a dreary old nag who can't stand the people around her and who will not shut up about how they disappoint her because they hate her, Elly erupts like a volcano.

The second telling example almost doesn't need a detailed summary: the phone book strip. Why it is that Elly thinks the customer has been rude to her is a baffling little mystery but her reaction of biting through a four-inch thick telephone book out of frustrated rage is not mysterious at all. For some reason, the imagined slight has provoked a witlessly inappropriate respone.

What Lynn loses sight of when she has Elly simply flip out and throw a tantrum like an angry child when she perceives herself as having been slighted is that instead of having made her into a sympathetic everywoman, she's made her into a short-tempered, unlikeable lunatic spoiling for a chance to scream about how awful everyone else but her is.

Like pretty much everyone who reads the strip, certain things about the lives of the Pattersons appear so often, I have to make something of an effort to actually notice them. As an example, let's talk about the fact that most of the them, Elly's head is thrust forward as if she's staggering under some sort of heavy weight. While the premise of the strip is that Elly is a busy mother with no help and no time to herself who never gets thanks for anything ever and thus staggers under a burden people are too selfish and thoughtless to help her carry, what Lynn tends to forget is that permanent stooping doesn't only mean "Poor Elly. She does sooooo much and gets sooooo little in return."

After all, someone who seems to be trying to make herself look shorter than she really is all the time like Elly is doesn't seem to realize that she's clearly sending the subconscious message "I am not worthy to look in your eyes, Big Strong Alpha Male." Elly might talk about how the revolution is sputtering but she's not helping her cause by constantly trying to prove that she isn't trying to upstage John.

That being said, this need to not 'embarrass' the man by being almost as tall as he is might explain Lynn's love for depicting the male characters as being twice their wives' size, it and exhaustion don't tell the whole story. This is because a person who is ducking all the time is also subconsciously trying to protect herself from an imagined attack. Remember how she thought John was going to beat her up because she dinged his sports car? It seems to me that for some unknown reason, Elly has an exaggerated and unrealistic fear of getting her ass kicked for not much of a reason; thus, she's trying to protect her vital parts from phantoms and delusions.