Foobonia and Points West.

The interesting thing about Jan Eliot's Stone Soup is that while Val looks like a latter-day Elly in that she's kind of a frustrated mess who can't get along with her oldest daughter too well, what animates Val's need to 'rescue' Holly from being a child makes her a damned sight more like John. Every so often, we see broad hints that Valerie thinks that she is helping Holly by trying to force her to see that caring about cute clothes, cute boys, peer pressure, mean girls and other such things is a pointless hindrance to the good life "because I fell into that trap and look what it did to ME!!!!"

This will not work. It will work as well as her taking them to abandoned mining camps for summer vacation so as to make them see how great the simple life is will in that it is well-meaning but impractical, destructive and useless. By telling her that she's crazy and stupid to care about things she can do about, all Val is doing is poisoning her relationship with Holly. It might take years for her to see that this was a costly folly and only come about when she finally realizes why an adult Holly is pulling insane crap like that on her own child if it does.

The very odd thing about how Elly's 'triumph' (which is to say "having a traffic ticket vanish because an accident couldn't be prevented") turned out to be short-lived because she'd double-parked is that we got no follow-up about the injustice or irony of it all. Elly had tried to show the world that she couldn't be messed with and the world messed with her anyway because it wants to make her miserable.

The reason that I mention this is that Elly tends to lack the same measure of self-awareness Val Stone does because neither person wants to admit that she thinks that she's being a dutiful daughter by making herself miserable over nothing. We know that Elly lived and died by what her stand-offish, praise-withholding mother Marian thought and we know that Val grew up believing that happiness was a bad thing to be avoided because of her own puritan idiot mother. This resulted it two women who made themselves unhappy on purpose in order to prove to an indifferent parent how mature they are. Both of them are worse for it.

Of course, it's not just that Val doesn't like outsiders coming along and telling Holly that she deserves to have a summer vacation that isn't spent in an abandoned mining camp where she can be saved from horrible distractions like functioning plumbing, central heating, mattresses that cannot be confused with matzohs and male contemporaries or being told that all she's doing by blathering about how spoiled Holly is because she can't do much about world evil. What really makes Val wonderful company is her dread of implausible catastrophes because much like how the cowbirds from Pogo were happiest when they were miserable, Val Stone seems to be content to live her life in a state of needless panic so that she doesn't really have to do things about things she can do things about.

I should think that the need to congratulate herself for turning humanitarian causes into a sort of punishment for Holly's wanting things not to her own goody-too-shoes, please-give-me-a-pat-on-the-head-for-caring-enough-to-be-pointlessy-punitive tastes stems from the need to believe that she is, in fact, a poor, misunderstood figure who only wants to help her child live a happy life by depriving her of the only childhood she'll ever have. Caring about cute tops, cute boys and makeup is not just typical behaviour to be tolerated but instead a horrible threat to be fought at every turning. It might look as if Valerie is a crazy idiot worrying about nothing to her detriment but that's not what she sees. What she wants to see is Holly not corrupting Alix by telling her to grow up and acting like a child because the alternative is admitting that it's okay that she do what they did and move on with her life. Valerie might have remarried but it's kind of obvious that she's never really going to get over the death of her first husband because that would make her a bad person.

As we know, Val Stone has picked up the baton of failure, selfishness and stupidity that is the logical fallacy called "the appeal to worse problems" argument. Since she's a self-absorbed whack-job with the same martyrdom complex Elly Patterson has and the same lack of give her idol does, her favourite means of silencing children who try to get her to worry about things she'd rather not because of a genetic proclivity to tune out the unimportant buzzing noises children make so she can focus on her own self-pity and inability to admit that the reason people at her job dump stuff on her desk is because she fucking lets them is to berate them for being terrible people because they worry about things that they can do things about instead of things that they cannot. I distinctly remember Holly flat out telling Val that yes, she knows that these problems exist but there's not much that a small child in a suburb can actually do to make things better so could she please perhaps help her to figure out how to deal with the anorectic bloviating that her mommy doesn't love her because she's not her birth weight only to be stared at in blank-eyed and sorrowing incomprehension.

This is because the sort of person who loves to lecture about how their are children starving in Africa so I can't care about your problems holds the following untenable assumptions to be self-evident.

1. "It is not possible to care about big and small problems simultaneously." This is horseshit because a Holly can be aware that there's a Great Big Problem she can't do much about no matter how much she might actually want to and a Tiny Little Problem that would go away on its own if Mom would get off her high horse and help her with it.
2. "Venting a minor complaint is sufficient proof that the major problem is considered unimportant." This is a load of crap because of the reason I mentioned above.
3. "If the person irritated over the minor problem did help solve or even cared about the big problems, s/he would then not mind at all that his/her car broke down or whatever the frustration was...or because there are people with worse problems, that person shouldn't complain about a frustration" This is simply an excuse people who are too lazy and selfish to care about the people in their immediate vicinity use to keep from having to do so.

The reason that I mention this is that there's a hidden postulate that is so obvious, people don't mention it. Science fiction author Isaac Asimov once referred to something like that as a sort of zeroth law because of its unspoken nature. What seems to underpin the need to bellow about starving orphan refugees in war zones dying of world diseases is something along the lines of

"0: "By invoking insoluble problems, the unsympathetic drone trying her damnedest to avoid caring about her child can hoodwink herself into thinking of herself as a paragon of virtue instead of as what she is: a cold-hearted solipsist sick with the mortal sin of Sloth."

If things go on like they've been going, we're going to see a pitched battle in the world of Stone Soup again when summer vacation rolls around. This is because Val combines Andy Fox's need to 'better' her children by force (and thus be praised by her mother for her diligence) with Elly Patterson's need to isolate children from dreadful outside influences that tell children the evil lie that their feelings are real and matter by taking them to Camp Middleofnowhere so that they can be cut off from plumbing and the internet and all other things that are good for her 'spoiled' children and will make them 'wonderful.'

This is because of her recent marriage to Phil the motorcycle cop. He doesn't see the point of driving hundreds of miles to be uncomfortable on purpose because he has yet to be bludgeoned into compliance with Valerie's wonderful philosophy of aggression and self-righteousness. What escapes the daffy moron thinking that it is good and wonderful and loving of her to steamroll over her daughters in the name of saving them from having childhoods is that if her first husband hadn't died when Alix was three or so, he'd also object vociferously to "Let's trick the kids into being great" because he probably wasn't a crazy imbecile boomer thinking that the worst thing in the world is a child with a mind of her own.

As you will recall, I've made a LOT of noise about how I think that Lynn is a pretty god-awful influence on Jan Eliot....and I ain't talking about how she imitates that stupid, STUPID palms-out pleading gesture or how it's held as axiomatic that Holly can't be listened to because doing so would posit a cruel, terrible world in which Val is a short-sighted, panicky failure who takes things too damned seriously.

What I'm talking about today is how she faithfully imitated her hero's need to conveniently hear brand names in such a fashion as to take any sort of thing that isn't to her taste and make it into a plot to make the lives of We MOMS!!!!! worse. Just as Lynn turns "Quarter pounder" or "pizza" into junk food and the brand name of everything produced by General Mills and his infantry into "sugar cereal," Eliot translated things in such a way as to make a toy into something that oppressed her and cute shoes into a sign that Holly was and is a willing slave of men who make of her a commodity. The interesting thing is that Val's ultra-reasonable response was to simply drive off to the middle of nowhere so as to bring the real Christmas to her unwilling twelve-year old because she has life too easy what with being lectured 24/7/365 by a blousy and unsympathetic loud-mouth mother what an ungrateful little bitch she is because she isn't a mindless loudspeaker for progressive thinking.

This sort of thing almost makes Val's being frogmarched down the aisle because the other busybodies who need to learn to step the Hell off and not take life so damned personally insist on saving her from comfort and ease appropriate. The way I see it, live by foobery, DIE by foobery.