As you know, the Pattersons eat terrible, lowest common-denominator food in a disgusting manner as night after endless night, they slop down stew that relies heavily on a canned soup base or a nasty tuna casserole that has the taste of fish hidden by the rest of the ingredients. The dreary offering is gobbled down in a noisy manner so as to avoid having to taste the awful mess. What's seemingly odd about this (but really isn't) is that Lynn seems to love the finer things in life; she knows what good food is and, based what I've seen on her appearance on cooking shows, appreciates it and eats with proper table manners. Sadly, she can't seem to cook the fancy foods she loves on a regular basis so feels ashamed when she really shouldn't; this is why she promoted loathsome offerings like Cheapie Weenie Casserole on the homepage. Since she can't cook Cordon Bleu meals on a work-a-day budget, she feels as if she's churning out swill.

I'd like to talk to you today about something that's bothered a lot of us for quite some time: Elly's odd habit of assigning Mike age-inappropriate chores. Not only does he have to be the one that walks Farley, he also seems to be Lizzie's primary caregiver. This is, of course, so she can devote her time to busywork, soaps and roaming the neighborhood gossiping about whatever of her two friends she's not with. This is, to put it mildly, sick and wrong. A child of approximately six years of age is neither mentally or physically ready for the piping-hot plate of responsibility his lazy, idiotic, insane mother dumped in his lap because she can't cope with the mundane. He's bound to let his attention wander and he doesn't have the strength to remove his charges from the fixes he can't prevent them from getting into. This also has the result of destroying his willingness to do more kid-friendly chores. Since Elly yells at him because he can't do those amazingly simple thing well, he's not going to want to pick up his toys or laundry.

As you know, one of the most unlovely habits Elly has is her tendency to explode with rage and start ranting angrily when confronted with minor setbacks. This is frightening to someone who's never experienced it before. That's because you'd be walking down the street minding your business and not looking for trouble and, having inadvertently offended some nondescript housewife with a nose starting to turn into a trunk, were the unwitting target of a screeching fit in the middle of the shopping district. As you'd wondered what you'd done to get the crazy woman in the dowdy clothes to blow up in your face, you'd probably feel sorry for the little boy she had with her. You'd be right to do so; most of Mike's more anti-social behavior is the result of the following belief: "If I'm going to get yelled at no matter what I do, I might as well deserve it." The day that he realized that Elly is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, was the best day of his young life; as long as he could avoid John, who actually backed up his threats, he could make it through the day and all he'd have to do was fake taking his mother seriously.

On 1 July 2009, forworse reminded us all of an alarming trend: the inability of anyone in the Pattersons' world to bring companion animals into their lives in a responsible fashion. So far, we've seen:

• Farley, who was adopted primarily as a means of 'teaching' Mike to 'be responsible'; he was adopted when a local breeder was farming out the runt of the litter to some sap who believed that having a dog would magically improve his family's life. How the dog would fit into his family dynamic, who would really take care of him and neutering him were never taken into consideration.


• This leads us to Edgar, the living, breathing consequence of the Pattersons' feckless refusal to do the right thing. He, as we all know, is the end result of a non-neutered male dog siring a litter off a female who was likewise left intact by her idiot owner. Although primary caregiver Elly did neuter this one, she still never bothered training him or supervising him adequately.


• Next comes Sera, the dog Farley mated with. As we all know, Connie brought her into her life on a whim because she was tired of waiting for Lawrence to stop being gay, get married and give her grandbabies to fuss over; she refused to go over the decision with her idiot husband Greg who had to agree to a fait accompli.


• Mr. B., the rabbit. Liz bought him at an auction because she didn't want to go empty handed and palmed him off on April because she was too lazy to take care of him.


• Butterscotch. the rabbit. April adopted him (without, of course consulting anyone first) after the first rabbit died. Duncan's mother was eager to clear out the menagerie her son had collected and found a sucker in overalls ready to help her.


• Jim's dog Dixie. She came into the Pattersons' lives when Jim helped out a friend; you see, the man had moved into a building with a strict no-pets policy. When he in turn moved to the same building, Dixie stayed behind with Elly.


• Shimsaa the cat. She was a stray kitten that Jesse Mukwa hectored a reluctant Liz into adpoting; how Liz would be able to cope with pet ownership or how the poor creature would live in a house with cat-fearing Elly never came up as a subject of conversation until after Elly unhinged her jaws and started screaming.


• The endless succession of goldfish that John got Mike so he could have a pet; it's sort of obvious that a five year old would end up being an unwitting executioner of small animals to anyone who isn't John Patterson.

As she pointed out in her entry, no one in the Pattersons' world took the time to see how their pets would fit into their lives. It seems that Lynn assumes that pets are simply things people have and preparing for them is a useless waste of time.

Now that Lynn has shared her impressions of the third and fourth day of her trip with the world, more annoying patterns have emerged. The first of these is that she seems to have been completely unprepared for the realities that face her. We learned this when she ignored the fact that the funny, funny man that woke her up at five was not only selling fuel, he was selling clean drinking water. She proceeded to use tap water on her vegetables and give Katie a bad case of diarrhea; diarrhea she treated with an over-the-counter medicine that was way too powerful. The next pattern is her inability to tell one Mexican from the other; in her mind, they seem to be a sea of brown faces. The idea that they have individual identities, hopes and dreams is beyond her; when this is posited, she nods and smiles as if to indulge the delusion that they are as good as we are. The worst error by far though is her willful refusal to understand local history. When she isn't blaming the downfall of a civilization on the marital habits of its leaders, she's denigrating people who know things because they dare to disabuse her of the notion that life is like Peabody's Improbable History. Unlike Jay Ward, who knew that people of the past didn't dedicate monuments to selling food and services and only said they did to mock the present day that irritated him, she would prefer to believe that the hieroglyphs the locals left behind served every-day purposes instead of informing us that on such-and-such a date, King X decreed that he was deputed by his pantheon to commit act of aggression Y against enemy nation Z on their behalf. This is, of course, because Lynn thinks that people who work towards things are suckers; it's much better to have crap handed to you on a tray like regular people.

As we know, the Pattersons have eating habits that are atrocious. Not only do they eat pile-high helpings of horrible, fatty, salty, sugary food, they assume that healthy food is bland and unenjoyable. How do they instil such a lack of respect of good food that April is aware that fresh fruit exists but doesn’t know what to call it when she sees it? Simple; they start really early. As we saw on the new-ruin that appeared on 30 June 2009, Elly didn’t want to serve Lizzie a plain, dull old banana; she ‘had’ to dress it up with pretty, tasty, shiny sprinkles to protect her daughter from something that tastes like it was an organic substance. Even then, she failed of her immediate purpose of trying to hide the fact that she’d eaten all the cookies; she did, however, succeed in convincing Lizzie that the consumption of fruit and vegetables was a bad thing and consequence of misbehavior. The only figure in popular fiction I can think of with a similar diet is Ron Stoppable; they devoted a fourth-season episode of Kim Possible to reminding us that he thought that the Food Pyramid was a conspiracy hatched by the Man to harsh his groove. Where the people at Disney and Lynn part company is that they went out of their way to prove him wrong; as I recall, even Drakken thought that the buffoon’s idea of the ideal menu was a suicide note. Lynn, on the other hand, would have probably thought that the pushy red-head was being a picky-face Martian princess.

As I've mentioned before, the Pattersons do things in an odd manner when it comes to parenting. When confronted with their children, they either ignore them completely or drop everything they're doing and give in to what their kids want. They never seem to do the right thing and pay the appropriate amount of attention to their children. This, sadly, is because they believe things that are not so. The first unbelievable belief is the importance of the job they're doing and how it cannot be interrupted. As we've seen, that's just not the case; Elly might think that she has to do load after load of laundry every day but she doesn't. She can actually take time to play with Lizzie and Mike and thus bond with them and make her life better. That is, of course, assuming she wanted to. That's because she's like the Dee, Mike and Liz of the Declining Years in that she believes that children shouldn't actually be playing. Apparently she took her nutbar of a mother at her word when she said that nice children sat quietly and stared off into space instead of yelling and disturbing someone with a hangover. Since Elly is too stupid to realize that her family wasn't normal, she makes a lot of mistakes that ruin her life.

As you will no doubt recall, I’m convinced that Lynn believes the whole issue of child safety is a moral panic. In her mind, it seems that people make an enormous deal over a total non-issue and also try to keep children from having the same fun she did as a kid. She, to drive a point into the ground, thinks that the parents of today make the same amount of noise when Little Timmy skins his knee as they would if he were to get really hurt, like if he broke his leg or something. The problem, of course, is her self-willed isolation from the world; she chooses to not be aware of the risk factors out there. One of those risks, as we all know, is inherently-unsafe children’s furniture. We know that a crib with bars that could trap a child’s skull are as bad a thing as a making a toddler sleep in the top bunk of a bunk bed. Lynn, who chooses to not know, does not. She always seems to have the Patterson children sleeping in beds designed to murder them.

As howtheduck pointed out, the Pattersons have trouble convincing their children to upgrade their sleeping arrangements. So far, we’ve seen:

• Lizzie tearfully refuse the toddler bed that Elly bought and demand to be put in her crib.
• Meredith drive Deanna into distraction by being unable to give up her beloved crib to Robin.
• Robin prefer to sleep in the bunk beds next to Meredith instead of in his own bed in his own room.

There’s a unifying theme in all three events: the child is disappointing his or her mother by preferring his or her old sleeping arrangements to the desirable new order of things. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the parent in question that the change in the surroundings terrifies and confuses the child; this can happen again and again and they still don’t admit the problem. What they should do is make the child a part of the process instead of simply trying to force the issue and cave in when things don’t go as they plan. That, sadly, would never occur to either Elly or Dee; they don’t want to surrender their authority to their children, you see.

As you know, the first story line of what was supposed to be the first year of the Hybrids (but instead turned out to be filler while we were waiting for Dee to find the Miracle Dress) was Mike telling Merrie and Robin about the time Elly took him and Lizzie out West to see Jim and Marian. Marian was supposedly some sort of super-great grandparent despite the fact that she too ignored him and he spent most of his time with Jim. As could have been predicted, Jim was a bit testy because he wanted to bond with Mike and the kid wanted no part of it. It seems to aprilp_katje that since history has been reset that we're about to see it (or its replacement) fairly soon. If that's the case, prepare to see Mike be even brattier, Lizzie clingier, Jim more of a grump, Marian be more judgmental and Elly a bigger martyr.

One of the odder things about life in the Foobiverse is how unprepared Elly is for the change of the seasons. We never see her do things like put a boot tray in the front entryway or start the car with the remote starter in the winter, have John clean out the gutters in the autumn, or prepare adequately for rainy spring days and the hot, so-muggy-you-don’t-feel-like-life-is-worth-living days of summer. Whatever the weather, she’s woefully underprepared and proud of it; that’s because she thinks that a natural, normal, predictable phenomenon is a miracle. What makes this even more idiotic is that the weather isn’t the only non-miraculous miracle: birth, death, sunrise, sunset and the passage of times are also things Elly finds miraculous. What’s more, she’s raised three children to think along the same lines.

There’s another factor that makes most people want to scream when they read Lynn’s travelogue that isn’t her insular, ignorant point of view: her horrible English. Her crimes against standard usage are:

1. Saying “You and I” when “You and me” would make more sense.
2. Gross errors in punctuation.
3. Gratuitous and incorrect Spanish.
4. Overly-long sentences that go nowhere and do nothing to tell her story.
5. Dubious spelling.

What’s more, she thinks that she writes and speaks English fairly well and gets defensive, to say the least, when it’s pointed out that she doesn’t. I’ve met a lot of people like her who don’t take kindly to reminders that they speak English improperly; their response is similar to her own: petulant yapping about my being hoity-toity. Simply put, a Lynn Johnston thinks that bad English is the language of the common man.

As you know, Lynn has decided to share her observations about her recent trip to the city of Oaxaca in Mexico. We've only read about her first day there and patterns are already starting to emerge. This is because she can't help but say stupid things and has treated us to the following examples of arrogant ignorance:

1. She whines about how unfair it is that her hosts have to lower themselves by making friends with local tradespeople as if it's some sort of hardship.


2. She simpers that it's a hardship that her host's daughter is forced to communicate with her male friend in Spanish.


3. She witnesses a particularly brutal labor dispute and willfully misinterprets headbreaking and oppression that hasn't occurred in the overstuffed North in sixty years as a beef over the freshness of donuts in the teacher's lounge.


4. She regards Mexico as nothing more than an exotic backdrop for her time in the sun; the notion that the brown people have hopes, dreams and a culture deeper and broader than her own simply never entered her mind.

This is because Lynn is a victim of something I like to call "growing up stupid under the Red Ensign". She was raised to think of people south of the Rio Grande as either stupid or sinister and has made little effort to disabuse herself of her preconceptions. We see this attitude pop up in the strip when we see that John and Elly regard Mexico as little more than a twenty-four hour buffet table where the waiters pretend to not understand English no matter how loud they have to shout.

As we all know, Mike and Liz spent (and will spend) their formative years at each other’s throats while Elly wrings her hands, wonders why they can’t get along and frets about how it makes her look as a parent that they can’t. It’s sort of too bad for the two of them that they don’t realize the frantic loudmouth telling them to go to their rooms if they can’t behave is the same idiot who, without intending to or even realizing what she was doing while she was doing it, pitted them against each other in the first place. Elly, you see, is like a lot of insecure, selfish people and thinks that everyone is trying to destroy her; a part of her that she won’t acknowledge thinks that if her kids are getting along, it must be because they’re plotting her downfall. To prevent that, she unwittingly says and does things that make it impossible for them to not fight. Every time she rubs it in Mike’s face that he’s being a monster or that she ignores Liz’s accomplishments to hover over her ugly brother, she keeps the hostility flying. The really sad thing is that they aren’t aware this is happening and that it isn’t normal; this means that they too will give hate a chance and shrud off needless disharmony as being normal.

Lynn’s belief that it’s next to impossible to train an animal out of its less desirable habits isn’t the only example of defeatism in the strip. It’s a minor manifestation of her belief that Elly is the hapless victim of a doomed struggle against impossible odds as she’s beaten down by an endless array of cruel and selfish people who hate her and want her to suffer. Other menaces to her contentment are:

1. A selfish lout of a husband who wants her to not succeed at anything other than being his housemaid; he gets to meet adults  and do exciting things while her brain rots away cooking, cleaning and dealing with the horrible, horrible burdens that eat of her substance while providing nothing in return children.
2. Two demonic children who spend their days talking back to her, making messes and not getting along.
3. Neighbors who live lives that remind her how squalid and wasted her own is.
4. Highhanded outsiders who look on in her in judgment and refuse to admit that she’s clearly the victim of laughing chance.

There’s one threat, however, that is even more evil than the ones I’ve listed: people with a sense of proportion who accuse her of being a paranoiac with a martyrdom complex. They see the world in a way that threatens to take away the only thing that keeps Elly from having to do the thing she fears most and do something about her problems. If she were to admit that John wasn’t plotting her downfall, that her children need her time and love, that what her neighbors say or do doesn’t matter and that random passers-by don’t actually care one way or another about her, she might laugh off her troubles and get down to lightening her load. Too bad she’d rather not. 

It's not hard to see that you'll never see Elly provide Farley with positive reinforcement for desirable behavior; she doesn't, as I said, believe in it. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that Elly has praised anyone for a job well done or congratulated her husband and children on their success without either being sarcastic or trying to twist things into a slam against her. She simply doesn't have it in her to be happy for their accomplishments or take pride in their deeds. It's even worse that she's not alone; she married a jerk who doles out sincere compliments with a damned eyedropper. John, as we all know, also cannot be grateful for the people in his life; he too must begrudge them their triumphs and be petty and ungracious. The worst thing of all is that Lynn doesn't see anything especially wrong with this surly, crabbed-up point of view. She seems to have a bottomless appetite for approval so can't seem to spare any for others.

I should think that the real reason that Elly doesn't much care for the idea of obedience training is that she doesn't really want it to succeed. After all, if he does learn to behave, not only would that deprive her of something to complain about, it would mean that John was right to have suggested it. Neither possibility would be something that would sit very well with Elly. We know her too well not to realize that she'd prefer a Farley she can resent and worry about to a Farley that would do her proud. Her whole raison-d'etre is based on never praising anyone for anything at any time so having a dog she'd have to say "Good Boy" to is the height of unfairness.

There's another good reason why Farley's obedience training is doomed to failure: Elly's disagreement with the instructor's philosophy. Not only does she endure the hateful-to-her process of being told what to do, she is given advice that makes no sense to her. The guiding principle of training, you see, is to provide positive reinforcement when Farley does something she wants while not, repeat "not", screaming in rage and kicking him in the rump when he does something wrong. Unhinging her jaws and yelling at a confused puppy while never showing him what she wants is the only thing she knows how to do because it was how she was raised; being told that she's wrong to do so would not only mean that her mother was being insulted, it would mean that her childhood was marred by pointless aggression and abuse. Rather than face that she was raised wrong and is raising her kids improperly, Elly will proceed to dismiss and ignore the silly, ignorant lady's stupid advice and do what's 'right'.

My post yesterday made a dangerous assumption; I assumed that Elly would be an active participant in Farley's obedience training. It's entirely possible that she will not attend any of the classes or learn any of the commands that Farley does end up getting taught. That would entail an attention to process that she lacks. The end result is that we would have a dog that is trained and a primary care-giver who doesn't know how to get him to do things. Since she doesn't know to control him (and doesn't want to find out how to), she can turn around and whine that Farley is unteachable and that the class was a waste of money. It wouldn't be the first time that Elly blamed the victim of her incompetence for the result of her failings and it won't be the last.

It seems to me that howtheduck has something when he predicts that Elly will magically become super-competent in the new-ruin version of the obedience school arc; this is not only due to the fact that Lynn has a vet who knows how thinks work as a close personal friend, she wants to remind us that she thinks Elly knows what she's doing. This, of course, will fall flat on its face because Elly, as we all know, is a peevish, stubborn, whiny incompetent. Watching her absorb the knowledge the dog trainers dish out is going to be painful because we know that as soon as she gets the nifty little certificate that tells her that she, Elly Patterson, has successfully completed the course, the knowledge will immediately leave her brain and she'll be back to standing on the porch grimacing as Farley takes his time finding the right spot in the yard to poop and bellowing because he 'pretends' he doesn't know English.