Foobonia and Points West.

To continue on with why Elly wasted most of her children's childhoods racing around in a state of moral panic, let's remind us of why she's at odds with her mother Marian. As I've said too damned many times in the past, the part of Elly's brain that has to focus on imperfections and won't be reassured makes it next to impossible for her to even consider that her mother is in her own dim way trying to help her be a happier person when she nags her. This leads us to what we can call Foob Fact Twenty-One:

Fact: Since her brain is hard-wired to never see what's good in her life, Elly seems to not have outgrown the belief that when people criticize her, it means that they hate her and want to see her suffer; this means that she doesn't get better and things and never develops anything like a sense of responsibilty.

This leads us to what sets her at odds with Mike, Lizzie and April: the fact that she envies them because at least they don't have a heartless monster like her own mother who can only find fault. Despite the fact that early on, she had occasional glimmers of awareness that she was the same sort of mother inflicting the same sort of damage out of the same vanity, the Elly of the Middle Years onwards seems to have come to believe that love was everything she did. Every tirade, every demeaning lecture that made her children feel like crap, it came from love so it confused her that her children didn't seem happy. They must have been faking feeling terrible to make her feeling bad about loving them because children aren't smart enough to know what's good for them. This is best capsulized as Foob Facts Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three:

Fact: Elly firmly believes that her job is to teach her children to reject all the things they like because they by definition cannot know what's good for them.

and

Fact: Despite constantly bemoaning the fact that a childhood that she perceived as a bleak Hell-world where she was abused and trivialized because she didn't get her own way all the time has blighted her life, Elly seems to believe that nothing that happens to her children can possibly matter because of a self-serving belief in their resilience.

Since children can't know what's best for them and since children can just walk off being made to feel unloved and unappreciated because it makes life easier and since Elly thinks that having to consider how her actions might affect her kids as their being made the boss of her, it stands to reason that the reason she protests arenas and makes pious noise about how the crowd should be ashamed of itself for expecting Lizzie to fit in is the result of Foob Fact Twenty-Four:

Fact: Elly can only care about how her actions affect her personally because of that fear of being run over by her children that I mentioned.

After all, the in crowd at the junior high isn't going to say anything nasty to her if Liz doesn't wear Boston Original so Lizzie shouldn't feel like garbage. And, hey, if the kids don't like it, she can just sic John on them and get them to like it.

Of course, Elly's need to let her fears, envies and hatreds run riot in the form of one sort of doomed crusade or another is not the only reason she indulges in great public displays of moralism. There is a very deep psychological need that must be fulfilled by her making an insufferable nuisance to those around her that isn't just her need to be horrible to people and her lust for power. The yearning seems to me to be best described as a yearning for comfort.

For years, I've been wanting to share my idea that the whole bloody Patterson saga was all about her seeking out a world in which she could finally feel comfortable living in. Given that we seem to have in her a Good Socialist who wants praise to be divorced from effort or merit, her idea of 'comfort' is best expressed by formulating what I call Foob Fact Number Eighteen:

Fact: Elly judges a person, event or cultural trend to be moral or a situation or mechanical contrivance to be fair in inverse proportion to the effort said person, device, trend, event or situation requires of her.

This is why she's always angry with her family and always screaming about injustice. She wants to drift through life getting her own way all the time and she doesn't want to be bothered with situations that require her to do things that are boring, messy, difficult or prove her to be in the wrong. This also means that if something or someone disrupts her mellow, she's going to want to crush it to death no matter what the cost because of another stupid belief that I'll get to tomorrow.