The awareness axiom of Lizardbreath

As we all know, the Pattersons’ opinion of their own moral excellence has little bearing on reality. We have Elly and April loving saving face too damned much to admit to the anger and jealousy that consume them, we have John thinking that he’s a good guy that fallen moderns don’t understand and we have Mike grousing that he would be the good kid people like if it weren’t for the fact that everyone’s trying to crush him so they can laugh at him for wanting to be happy too. What these four sad losers have in common is that they’re aware that people don’t like what they do and it bothers them. Liz is different, though.

How Liz is different is simple: she isn’t really aware that people don’t like what she does and she isn’t aware of what she’s doing to begin with. The strip that best defines Liz has her stand around watching John and his model railroading buddies do their thing. We know that she’s too chicken and also kind of too dim to ask if she can participate but she doesn’t. When John says that if she’s just standing there like a mook, she can at least try to be useful, she’s enraged. She’s not some dimwit just standing around like a wooden Jesus in a country graveyard. She’ll prove that she’s not….and then, she’ll go back to hovering around in the background with that baffled, dead-eyed frown on her face because she doesn’t know what’s going on and she doesn’t like it anyway. This leaves us with:

Axiom 5b:

Elizabeth is pretty much devoid of anything like self-awareness and tends to ascribe herself positive traits she doesn’t have.

The sibling revilery axioms

Of course, it’s not just Mike’s belief that television is ‘real’ that makes him an insufferable jerk. We also have to deal with the fact that his stupid need for the worthless approval of his idiot parents and default negativity caused him to be a willing participant in his parents’ campaign to drive a wedge between him and Lizzie. Neither of them can see it but
Axiom 3e:
John and Elly don’t actually want their kids to get along for fear that they’ll gang up and destroy their parents.
holds true and always will. The Olds may say that they want peace but they don’t mean it because they have the stupid fear that peace between the kids means ganging up and overthrowing their parents….by which they mean “forcing two idiot yuppies to face the reality that they’re not nice people and they’re not victims and making amends for that.”
The reason Mike is at pains to obey Mom and Dad and hate his sister is that he’s not very good at understanding why people do what they do. It leaves me shaking my head in bemusement that someone that poor at answering the question “What does this person want” is pretending he’s an authory but there he is, thinking his horrible kid sister is trying to be unfair to him and cheating to get the attention she’s supposed to concede all to him because he is older and he can do things and she’s weak and stupid and has the wrong parts and, no, people are all wrong when they say he’d hate a kid brother just as much because that means that he’s not a victim either but instead a selfish little creep who needs his fucking teeth punched in. This is owing to
Axiom 4g:
Mike doesn’t like the idea of being to blame for things because that’s a humiliation.
being the case.
What makes Lizzie act the way she does is somewhat different. Unlike Elly who envies or John who’s sick with pride or Mike and his slothful ways, Lizardbreath shirks from responsibility for her own reason: she lacks anything like a sense of morals. To her, what makes her feel happy is good and what doesn’t is bad. We can codify it thusly:
Axiom 5a:
Elizabeth loves unearned attention and hates to have to do things for it because she actually did like being a parasite who gets love for nothing.

Instead of a generation gap, a cathode ray chasm

Of course, to really understand who Michael is and why he does all of the stupid things he does, we have to focus on a Very Special Story that’s going to appear in the next five years: the Very Special Story in which it’s revealed that Gordon’s father gets drunk and hits him because working class people are deplorable vermin who can’t help themselves, they’re just drunk, mean and racist. While Brian told Mike to tread carefully and to not pry into something he couldn’t fix because life isn’t a very special episode of everything, Mike was confused, angered and disappointed because Gord kept his mouth shut about something painful and humiliating like a real person instead of blubbering for the camera like Mike expected him to because, as he said, on television, Gord would’ve talked.
When he pushed that absurd and ignorant comment past his lips, I finally knew who Michael was and why he behaves the way he does. I knew this:
Axiom 4f:
Through a process of default, Elly and John delegated to network television their responsibility of teaching moral lessons to their son Michael; the end result is that he shares his father’s delusion that people are the part they play on TV instead of who they really are.
This is why he thinks that Lizzie is plotting against him….he thinks that instead of the dim, timid child she is, she’s a sitcom baby. It’s why he hates the idea of Elly having interests that aren’t him….sitcom mothers love their children uncritcally. It’s why he doesn’t understand girls: men who write for television don’t either. It’s why he hates his mother-in-law: television tells him to. It’s why he fails at everything….television isn’t real.

On being cuter than Michael

As you’ve no doubt noticed, Pattersons tend to be terrible at interpreting the motives of other people when what they do inconveniences them. While John sees people as the stereotype that makes the most sense to him and while Elly frets about the big conspiracy to hold her down, Mike is a different animal entirely in that he has no idea whatsoever motivates people to do what they do. We see this coming into play when, after having our noses rubbed in the fact that his landlady Mrs Dingle had a miserable, windblown past in which happy experiences were conspicuous by their absence, an unhappy present of collecting rent from kids who were going to have a better life than she did and a horrible future of anonymous and unmourned death, Mike had no clue whatsoever as to why she was so short-tempered and unyielding. Clearly, he thought, she was just being mean for no other reason than to be mean.

This blankness of mind would be irritating enough in itself if it didn’t begin and end with making him a lousy brother who assumed Lizzie deliberately plotted to ruin his life because of his nitwitted inability to understand cause and effect. Sadly, being a moron who thinks along those lines owing to

Axiom 4e:

1) Michael is incapable of understanding what cause and effect are.

2) This results in his being haunted by the delusion that if a phony cause to his problems could be made to vanish somehow, something that would happen anyway would not happen.

is only the beginning of why he’s a really irritating person. This is because a man who simply cannot understand why people do what they do has decided to inflict his insight-free version of reality on the world as a pretentious incompetent of an author. He really thinks that it’s his idea to blight the world with crap like ‘and the living buried the dead’ because he doesn’t understand that  he’s been steered to a career that he’s not suited for by a mother who needs to live through him. Since people are a black box to him, he can’t understand

Axiom 1x:

Elly can only picture her children following careers she doesn’t have the courage, stamina or brains to follow. Following a different path leaves her cold.

Double-dolt daring Michael

Of course, Michael doesn’t spend most of his time at home being told what a horrible child he is for expecting his parents to do more for him than they feel he deserves. The problem is that he’s still the product of their inept parenting and his own innate stupidity. This results in suffering because he gets to be a terrible judge of character for a different reason than his parents. John is a lousy judge of character because he cannot be asked to get to know anyone; his insistence on assigning them character traits based on media imagery means that he’s always blindsided by the blazingly obvious. Elly’s a shitty judge of character because she thinks that to be a good person, said person must never challenge her blinkered vision of reality and also give her the endless undeserved praise she craves more than life itself.

Michael is a terrible judge of character because of two very stupid reasons. The first very stupid reason has a lot to do with his paranoid dread that his parents expect him to just sit in a corner somewhere and apologize forever and ever for wanting recognition and love and happiness because Lizzie is here and he’s disposable really. This is where John’s pea-brained belief that Mike is a terrible child who needs to have his defiant attitude erased and Elly’s dread that he’s trying to siphon away her substance because he wants more attention that she can ever give make his and everyone else’s life worse. By endlessly harping on how he’s supposed to cooperate and share (by which they mean ‘do what they tell him without question’ and ‘never win because it’ll hurt Lizzie’), they not only make him hate his kid sister, their negativity meshes with his innate fear that no one loves him to make him an endless accepter of dares.

The reason, of course, is that since he can never get the attention he wants at home for being a good kid, he’s of course going to seek out attention of any kind because he thinks that if he follows along with whatever the guys are planning, this time, he’ll fit in and be liked and people will be glad such a great kid as himself is part of their lives instead of being like his awful parents who tell him to shut up and watch the cooing lump of a kid sister do nothing and still be praised to the skies. This can be best summarized as

Foob Axiom 4d:

Since his parents have better things to do than to praise Michael for any sort of positive accomplishment he’s made, he’s settled for being an annoying clown who does stupid things just so people will actually notice him.

The worst of both worlds

Of course, it's not just Mike's refusal to actually earn the praise he craves that makes him a pain in the neck to be around. We also have to remember that he's a combo platter of the worst traits of his parents. In his case, we combine John's stubborn pride (which explains Mike's refusal to admit when he's in the wrong) with Elly's belief that envious people want to ruin her because they can't withstand her awesomeness (which explains his inability to do things he doesn't feel like doing because following someone else's suggestions is a defeat) to yield a dull-witted person who wishes that there were a pill he could take to be instantly good at things so he didn't have to hear nagging about how he has to put in the work like a boring person.


What differentiates him from his parents is that unlike, say, Elly, who doesn't want to learn that things she thinks are difficult and scary are neither because admitting that would mean that she's a crazy person wasting time feeling sorry for herself or John who doesn't like to think about why he thinks things lest he be a mean person believing bad things, there seems to be something organically wrong with Michael that makes it impossible for him to understand things. We're dealing with a child who doesn't want 50 percent of everything ever to be half of everything ever because he believes that maybe fifty percent of something wants to be something different and we're being mean to it and forcing it to do something it doesn't want to do. We're thus stuck with


Axiom 4c:


Michael sees the world not as a series of facts that cannot be altered but as a narrative that can be changed in the interests of a sort of idiotic and lunatic fairness that can't possibly apply.

Mike’s deadly sin.

Of course, Michael can be damned hard to love. While it’s easy to see why he acts up when faced with a mother who insists that he’s trying to drain her substance and trying to argue her to death and so on and so forth and with a peevish imbecile father who won’t ever let himself be pleased, Mike would be a trial for competent, caring and intelligent parents as well. The hint as to why this is showed up really early in the proceedings when we saw his reaction to his actually having to maintain his living space like a functioning human being is supposed to. Said reaction was to wail that no one loved him in the most tediously melodramatic fashion possible because if they did, they wouldn’t expect more of him than he felt like delivering. It’s as if he’s one of the people Wilson “The Kingpin” Fisk of the Marvel Universe is talking about when he says that most people don’t want to be heroes. Most people, he says, want a big cookie at the end of the day for doing as little as possible and they want a strongman like him to give it to them. Having to earn his big cookie instead of getting it as a matter of course bums Mike the Hell out.

So does sharing his stuff or anything else he thinks he’s entitled to. He isn’t wired to think in terms of sharing because he sees life as a zero-sum game in which he’s being ordered to lose and just lay down and DIE. He can’t accept having to share with Lizzie because to him, that means that he just has to give everything away and never be loved and just sit in a corner and be told that he’s bad to want to be happy too. What this all means, of course, is that he’s motivated by his own deadly sin. While Elly is consumed by envy of anyone she thinks is having a better time than she is and John is a prideful piece of human garbage, Mike’s fatal flaw is sloth because he pretty much wants to spend his life being rewarded for maintaining a pulse. This is expressed best as

Axiom 4b:

1) Michael doesn’t actually want to do anything to earn the praise he craves more than life itself.

2) When challenged on this, he blames everyone but himself for this.

We don’t like Mike

While to the outsider, the Pattersons look like an average family, it’s obvious to someone who’s been stuck observing them that the question of which of the children is loved best is pretty much the driving force behind the story. While it might look as if Michael’s having the ability to inherit the name and manufacture more Pattersons might make him the Son around which things rotate, it’s Elizabeth’s ability to confirm that Elly lived her life right after all by also marrying an oafish clod who doesn’t actually respect her that makes her the favourite after all.

The reason for this is rather sadly obvious. It’s quite clear that despite John’s belief in the so-called maternal instinct, Elly has never actually known what she was doing as a mother. Her later panicky bleating about how her beloved Lizzie had gone away and been replaced by a hostile stranger bent on her mother’s destruction and her passive-aggressive poem that has as its premise that a six-month old child deliberately developed colic to rob her of sleep indicate that we’re dealing with a simpleton who believed that an infant was a superior sort of play-toy that she could put away if she got bored or tired or frustrated.

When one considers that the merest development of free will on Lizzie’s part led to horrified shrieking on Elly’s part about her baby vanishing and being replaced by a cruel monster child and that Lizzie risks being mistaken for a potted begonia owing to her excesses of passivity, it should come as no surprise that an active, healthy, curious and dead-on average little boy like Michael would drive the hysteric he called a mother clean round the bend. His need for attention sickened, confused and above all terrified a mother who never liked people being too close to her in the first place. Many is the time that we saw her grimly huddled over a job done ineptly and in a slip-shod fashion only to be enraged by this monster boy who wants her to drop everything she loves and never have time to herself and never be allowed to be a person because of his lying demands on her attention. Add in the fact that his ass of a father hates him because he can’t ever obey quickly enough or sincerely enough to placate him and we’re stuck with:

Axiom 4a:

1) Mike is convinced that deep down, his mother and father don’t actually like him or want him around.

2) He’s fucking right to believe that.

John and Elly: neither stone nor gelatine.

There’s another irritating reason as to why John and Elly are very terrible parents: John gets a lot of help from Elly on not knowing what the Hell is going on around him. The most irritating example is that months after the fire and downsizing, Elly finally sat him down and explained to him that the youngest child he’d written off as a spoiled little princess who didn’t understand the needs of others was actually feeling (rather correctly) as if her family took tongue in teeth and ran away in horrified disgust when her emotional needs and feelings as if she didn’t matter worth shit needed addressing. This was an unfortunate misunderstanding but, hey, kids are resilient and also, he didn’t actually have to get involved with his family because he’s the man and it’s the woman’s job to do all the heavy lifting because he’s a big bag of shit with a train fetish and Elly likes using him as a bludgeon when the kids don’t knuckle under to her insane demands. The less John knows, the less his desire to meddle in her life and make her out to be a screaming wacko who can’t tolerate kids any more than she can do housework comes into play. This leads to

Axiom 3c:

1) Elly prefers it that John doesn’t really intrude on her life because of the dreadful possibility that he might realize that their children aren’t monsters trying to destroy them.

2) John doesn’t like to be part of any discussion because of the dreadful possibility that he might have to admit that most of what he knows about his family is bullshit.

I mean, if he has to start doing that, he’s going to run into something neither of them wanna face. You see, at the same time he was being an unreasonable dick about that stupid car, Elly was acting like an ingrown hair because April was starting to develop a personality like a bad child instead of being good and remembering that she’s an automaton who can only move and think and act and speak when Elly wills it. John didn’t see the point of this because she was a cute kid any more than Elly saw the point of jumping up and down on Mike because his rat bastard idiot father simply never bothered learning to like his son much. Elly was starting to see a fellow artiste, you see and so he was suddenly great. The problem is that we’re dealing with

Axiom 3d:

1) John and Elly each have children they clearly favour and clearly dislike.

2) They ain’t going to admit that no how.

You see, if they own up to that, they gotta admit that Mike is right about something they don’t want him to be right about. They gotta admit that for the longest time, both of them fucking hated him and wished he’d go away.

The amazing binary failure: John and Elly united.

While self-aggrandizing idiot martyr Elly and wooden-headed and prideful man-child John are woefully inept in the face of life’s challenges as individuals, it’s quite clear that together, they are far more inept than they would be as two separate imbeciles. This is because they share a mental quirk that allows them to plumb new depths in antisocial stupidity:

Axiom 3a:

1) Any event that might subject John and Elly to public censure cannot, despite clear evidence otherwise, be said to be their fault.

2) Any event that might reflect well on them is, despite clear evidence otherwise, always the result of their own actions.

This is why they look for any excuse possible to pass the buck when they do something stupid like break into houses to get potties or leave gates unlatched while they’re the first to award themselves credit for academic success that occurs despite them. This need to make the who farted face when it’s pointed out that a parent is directly answerable should a child do something antisocial leads us to another irritating habit of mind that the Pattersons have that makes them horrible people.

The best example of this irritating tendency occurred in 1979 when John hauled off and spanked Mike’s ass raw in order to teach him not to use violence. If he had not, John assumed that Mike would be a brute who didn’t respect people. The problem is that all John did is teach Mike that strength is the only virtue there is. This means that we’re dealing with:

Axiom 3b:

1) John and Elly seem to believe that they’re engaged in a battle of death with their passive, tractable children who, for reasons that are horrible, are seen as having an almost superhuman power of naughtiness and rebelliion that will undo their parents’ attempt to impose order.

2) John and Elly falsely believe themselves to be teaching their children right from wrong when all they’re actually doing is teaching them that power and status are the only things that matter in life.

John’s morality axioms

As one might expect with someone with John’s narrow mind and impoverished imagination, we’re clearly dealing with a man who isn’t especially fond of brooding over a stupid decision. While Elly and Mike agonize over the dumb choices they don’t want to admit they don’t have to make, John clearly loves laying down the law and not worrying about pointless concerns like ‘context’, ‘nuance’ and ‘knowing what the fuck is actually happening’ when imposing his stupid decrees. The best example of this idiotic tendency towards rushed, arbitrary judgments is when Mike missed an exit like a normal human being and the stupid dodo John started braying about how Mike HAD to be punished for risking a God-damned material object that wasn’t even damaged at all. We saw a pathetic dildo imposing a ludicrous punishment on a child because said beefwit was scared and didn’t like it. John sees himself as being a firm and clear-headed authority figure. This leads us to have to remember

Axiom 2g:
John hates spending a lot of time when making decisions because he confuses blindly rushing to judgment based on imperfect information with having firm moral character.

What he also hates when laying down the law is actually listening to the self-serving gibberish he pushes past his lips. Not for nothing does he hang out with that Ted “King of Bedside Manor” McCaulay of the wandering eye and need to objectfy women. Ted’s the only person on Earth who’ll agree that Elly doesn’t need to be taken seriously and if anything, he’s rather too lenient with his kids. After all, he does them the favour of feeding them, clothing them and putting a roof over their heads so he should get stuff in return. Other people who want him to lose so much, he gets tired of losing make hateful noise about his owing society a solid citizen but they don’t get that

Axiom 2h:
John believes in and has imposed on the family a favor bank system of morality wherein generosity takes second place to his insatiable self-interest.

We also have to contend with the fact that he convinces himself that his children are clearly malingering when they prove incompetent at the insane tasks he likes to set them. This leaves us with the spectacle of a man who, having convinced himself that he did far more around the house than he actually did or was actually possible, stands around like a big fucking idiot bellowing about Michael having a poor work ethic and bad attitude because the boy cannot after all do the work of a grown man without, say, DYING OF EXHAUSTION. This leads us to the final axiom that describes John as a person:

Axiom 2i:
1) John believes himself to be a far better person than he actually was.
2) This leads him to upbraid his children for not following his insane and fictitious example.

John’s self-image axioms.

As the incident with the turkey and the potty tell us, John is an arrogant clod who stands there moaning about the indignity of being laughed at and being seen as something less than the commanding, unquestioned figure he’d love to be seen as. The reason that I mention this that egomania and pride in full bloom need to be accompanied by a leafy green background of utter indifference to the rights and feelings of the people in his vicinity. After all, he is the husband and father so he gets to say what goes and no one is supposed to hold him down and make him less than a man by invoking something pointless like how Elly feels fat and ugly and foolish all the time already so it’s a real dick move to remind her of that fact. Since he’s supposed to win all the time and they’re just supposed to take it, we have to deal with:

Axiom 2e:

John firmly believes that there’s one set of rules for him and one set for everyone else.

That being said, his need to preserve what he sees as his rightful place as King Of Big Fucking Deal Mountain isn’t the only reason he mopes when his ego-gratifying toys are used as poking holes in his argument that his wife doesn’t really deserve kitchen equipment that actually works. We also have to realize that while his decisions are arbitrary and self-serving, his sensitivity to the needs of his family can only be measured with an electron microscope and his moral courage is conspicuous by its non-existence, he needs to see himself as a great guy everyone should listen to. He doesn’t see the whining, boorish ogre Elly sees or the pompous and always angry dicktard his kids do because he’s waged a war against self-awareness all his life. This leaves us dealing with

Axiom 2f:

John is almost tragically unaware that his family sort of fears him instead of loving and respecting him.

The sin axiom of John Patterson

As I said earlier, Elly’s go-to sin is quite obviously envy. We see this when we look at the long, sad and pathetic joke Connie Poirier’s life is only to turn around and watch Elly’s eyes light up when imagining Connie as having a life of freedom and excitement she does not get to enjoy. We see it when she looks at her husband and children and envies their being to come and go as they please while she sees herself as being the anonymous organic adjunct of the family home. We see this when she bitterly complains about how Mira is a pain because her son’s mother in law is better at throwing her weight around than she is. What we don’t see is her quite understanding what it is that makes John act in a manner that inconveniences and confounds her.
While John has a fair amount of envy in his own heart (as is evidenced by his being upset that Santa is more generous to his children and grandchildren than he was to him), it’s fairly clear that a different sin drives him forward. Choosing a random example of his being an active hindrance to a harmless suggestion that affects him not at all, let’s look at why he became a panicky wet blanket when Elly talked about the possibility of having their third child at home. He wanted her to be sensible and not think about things because he’s worried less about her feelings, hopes and dreams and a damned sight more about what random strangers who don’t actually have a vote might say about this. Were Elly to have her child at home like some kind of primitive, his reputation would be damaged and that would be the worst thing ever. What this tells us is that John is driven mostly by the need to maintain face. While the need to preserve credibility exists in Elly’s heart as well, it doesn’t dominate to the extent it does her husband so we find ourselves contending with
Axiom 2d:
John Patterson is mostly concerned with trying to prevent damage to his public image owing to his being a very proud man without not a Hell of a lot to actually be proud of.

The way of the Train Man.

Of course, Elly cannot, despite her clear wish otherwise, exist in isolation in a happy void in which she doesn't have people make cruel, insane and hateful demands on her time (and, no, her mother isn't right about how she'd go stir-crazy in a minute if she actually WERE on her own.) She, like all of us, exists as part of a family. The interesting thing is that in a very real sense, her lack of interest in the question "Why is this person doing this?" leads us to a rather unsettling destination:

Axiom 2a:

1) In every way that matters, Elly doesn't know much more about what makes John tick than she did when she found a nerdy dental student asleep in HER chair forty-seven years ago.
2) The same applies to John himself.

Since the strip is mostly about how it took until the Settlepocalypse for Elly to realize that her life has always been pretty good, we don't get a lot of back story on John. We usually experience him as Elly does: a baffling, huffy ogre who insults her, demeans her, makes light of her dreams and insists on his right to do so lest society collapse and his children be deprived of happiness and order. Certain facts, however, can't help but emerge. We have to deal with his constant nursing of his oh-so-easily wounded pride, his insistence that everyone else lighten up when he behaves like a jerk, his lack of friends and his need for ego-gratifying toys to make up for what he insists was a childhood of constant toil. We also have to deal with his being a dumb son-of-a-bitch when he's not in his surgery. This tells us two facts that Elly has yet to learn.

Axiom 2b:

Given his strident need to make everyone in sight live his idea of what a happy childhood should be, John seems to be driven by a feeling that his own past somehow failed to meet an artificial standard and he needs to have that fake injustice redressed.

and

Axiom 2c:

1) Outside a very narrow range of competence, John is a dullard who lacks common sense, awareness, wisdom and curiosity about the world. 
2) He uses the dangerous substitute called "folk wisdom" to compensate for lack of real knowledge.

The communication axioms

One of the more annoying things we have to bear witness to is that Elly doesn't actually like telling people with the power to shout her down what she actually thinks. Just as in real life, the people around Lynn have to piece together what she means because she appears to have been raised in an environment that feared a bullshit apocalypse of being blubbering Continentals who didn't know what shame was and thus actually talked about their problems instead of bottling them up for fear of what the neighbours might think because sense, common decency and sanity is NOT FOR ENGLISHMEN, Elly seems to have come up with an exaggerated dread of what someone might do to punish her for oppressing him with her hurt feelings. This is a woman who wanted to be beaten up for a bent fender because it would make her feel better and restore the balance so it's obvious that the reason that John has to play guessing games is due to

Axiom 1w:

Elly cannot and will not express her honest assessment of what's bothering her with someone with sufficient status to shout her down.

This need of hers to walk around looking wounded and angry all the time is made all the worse by the survival of her inability to quite realize that people either don't actually know what they did to upset her and the fact that she might not actually have anything to be upset about. This means that the family lives in fear not only of the volcanic temper she doesn't admit exists but also of her being in a tearing rage over less than nothing again. Since she'd sooner admit that her mother was right about her imaginary pot belly vanishing if she didn't slouch around like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders than confess that she has a hair-trigger temper and a lack of interest in figuring out what's actually happened, the characters have to contend with

Axiom 1x:

1) Elly makes her life worse by not actually talking about what's bothering her because she wastes her life being pointlessly upset when a simple yes-or-no question would save her time, worry and effort.

2) Because Marian never shuts up about the mistakes Elly's made, Elly has no interest in doing this because she believes that admitting she's wrong is a humiliation from which she'll never be allowed to recover.

The public image axiom

The interesting thing about Elly is that there's an image that leads her like a pillar of fire by night and a a pillar of smoke by day. It's the image of everyone in the world celebrating the fact that she's a part of it and deferring to her without the messy conflict that she probably wouldn't be able to handle even if Marian had seen fit to actually let her win an argument for once. What she does now is bitterly complain to everyone in earshot that it will only ever occur to them to be sincerely grateful for what she does for them and what she had to give up twenty or thirty years after she dies. What she does not do is consider that despite her imaginings to the contrary, she isn't exactly what you'd call anonymous.

First off, she's known for locking her kids out of their house for hours on end because she's too damned fragile to deal with them. She's known for letting a large, shaggy dog roam around at large because she's too stupid to keep track of him. She's known for complaining about a fictitious ten pounds that's an artifact of the terrible posture she won't admit to. She's known for being too stupid to understand when a woman is trying to tell her that she can't afford to pay her. She's known for being a deluded nitwit screaming about an unpopular cause. She's known for being a dunderhead who seems intent on murdering her youngest child out of sheer shit-for-brains negligence. She's known for being the mental absentee owner of a bookstore. She's known for sitting on her ass letting her daughter plan a tasteless wedding. Most of all, though, she's got a public identity that can be summed up rather simply:

Axiom 1v:

Elly will be known at "that train-obsessed dentist's screaming lunatic of a wife" for years to come and people will be telling horror stories about having to deal with her and her infantile rages long after she dies. 

The relationship axioms.

As one could expect, Elly's inept attempt to live up to her mother's example as a homemaker and parent is part of a wider problem that makes her life worse. One of the most egregious examples of this tendency took place when Liz was trying to get her to work through a word problem; instead of doing the mental arithmetic, Elly focused on what the person was supposedly doing and condemned him for doing it. When we factor in how her love of gossiping collides with her trouble with getting facts straight and watching Jeremy's insane motive for trying to dismantle April wash over her, we're stuck dealing with the following limiting factor:

Axiom 1r:

1) Owing to a fixation on non-issues and poor listening and comprehension skills, Elly almost never actually seems to know what's really going on around her.

2) Elly does not realize this.

The reason that this makes relationships harder than they need to be has a great deal to do with her conviction that she's the only person around her who cares to stave off the chaos and ruin she fears. She can't allow people to help on their own terms because she can only admit to one way of doing things and she can't bring herself to trust people when she can't see them because she has trust issues. This leads us to:

Axiom 1s:

1) When forced to imagine what people are doing when she isn't present to stave off chaos and ruin, Elly's self-pity and megalomania lead her to assume the very worst.

2) When confronted, Elly says that she trusts people but not situations.

Since she doesn't trust people not to make her life worse and since she's not very observant or smart, she tends to assume that she has to be watching her family non-stop to keep them from ruining her life and laughing at her misery. Mike can treat her like she's his servant, John can be a pompous oaf teaching Mike to do that, Lizzie can be clinging to her like a barnacle and April can drive her batty just by breathing but as long as their bad treatment of her is simply emotional and not physical, they're great people. If someone were to love someone other better, they would be dead to her. This is owing to two more traits that make her life stupid.

Axiom 1t:

Elly is obsessed with being loved most of all because she assumes she's loved not at all.

and

Axiom 1u:

1) Elly firmly believes that one MUST be in an exclusive physical relationship to be taken seriously as a member of society; those who are not are clearly a threat to established relationships as that's what romance comics told her.

2) Physical disloyalty is the worst thing a person can do to a partner and the cheater and those who do not call for his or her destruction are vermin who seek to destroy the world.

This is why Anthony gets a free pass while Therese is filth. While he decided that his marriage was over, the closest he came to doing what literal-minded dimwit Elly thinks of as cheating is asking Liz to wait for his marriage to implode.

The housework and computer axioms.

Of course, one of the things that Elly has always thought was too hard aside from chasing after children or keeping her girlish figure is doing housework. It always seems to amaze her that her mother can tidy the house in almost nothing flat while she spends a wearing, despairing day of unspeakable toil. What she doesn't seem to have pieced together is that the reason uncharitable types like us make comments about how she just moves the dirt around is that it doesn't look as if she outgrew thinking that she hadn't made a jumble out of what she saw her mother doing. The reason she only thinks that she's doing what her mother did when she's just a dim-witted child's idea of Marian is what can be called:

Axiom 1p:

Elly believes herself to be far smarter and more observant than she actually is.

Of course, being an over-grown child who doesn't realize that she's not as smart as her mother is cannot be said to be the only manner in which not actually maturing overly much messes her up. While she'll deny it to her dying day, Elly is still the angry child who hated doing stuff that she didn't immediately take to. A normal person would feel a sense of accomplishment after having mastered a difficult task; Elly clearly seems to have felt as if she had been tortured for no reason by cruel people who inflicted useless knowledge on someone who's clearly the smartest person ever. This is why she stares goggle-eyed at ironing that would go away on its own if she hadn't made it out to be this horrible torment and it's why she screams blue murder at the Scary Difficult Machine. It can be called:

Axiom 1q:

1) Elly likes easy tasks that don't take a lot of time to master; when faced with something that can't be explained in more than fifteen seconds, she either loses patience and becomes a bellowing lunatic or stands there moaning about a non-event she's made into torture.

2) Elly doesn't like admitting that the tasks that bedevil her could possibly be as easy as other people make out because she needs to be the best at everything just to feel as if she should be kept alive and not summarily put to death for being useless and obsolete by an uncaring society that won't mourn her loss.

When she explodes: the rest of the parenting axioms

As I said yesterday, Elly finds it nearly impossible to think when someone is in her presence because of an exaggerated flight or fight response. Where you and I would see a small child simply sitting around doing nothing of note, Elly's disproportionate fear of chaos and violence makes her see someone who wants to drain her substance and chain her to the stove and keep her from expressing herself and so on and so forth. What makes all of this so much the worse is that her default refusal to allow herself to own up to the complex of negative tendencies and emotions that dominate her personality lead us to a horrible limiting factor. The best example of this is when she cried her eyes  out when Lizzie made a casual observation about a mean old witch who didn't let her children do nothing. A normal, healthy person is going to feel bad that her kids see her as an ogre but she isn't going to let it crush her like Elly does because being loved all the time by everyone isn't a realistic proposition. Sadly, we have to contend with the following problem when dealing with our hero:


Axiom 1m:


Elly's yearning for her mother's uncritical devotion is merely part of a greater desire to be thought well of by everyone without reservation.


Her pathetic yowling to Connie about how she hated been seen as cruel and unfair when all she wants is the uncritical devotion she isn't designed to accept is, of course, only part of the problem. Her inability to admit to herself that she has hostile emotions because of a black and white viewpoint that would make her a depraved, heartless monster if she didn't like her kids sometimes leads her to be living in a state of denial as to how she's perceived. It doesn't matter if she cries her heart out, makes passive-aggressive noise about strangers in her house that makes a little boy who yearns for her love feel like crap or blowing up in his face when he gives her the right name of lecturing irritating, we have to contend with another two limiting factors. The first is:


Axiom 1n:


Elly makes her clear hatred for everything her kids say, do, think, like, wear, listen to or want for themselves a secret only to herself.


while the second is best explained by her wailing piteously about Lizzie going away and being replaced by a hostile stranger the second she becomes more difficult to control. As it is when thirty-five year old Elly forgets that the thirty year old Elly who stood at a mirror freaking out because suddenly, she was old and fat and ugly had no problem with her appearance, Elly assumes that she was a calmer mother to better behaved children.


This leads us to a transitional axiom that leads us to why she screams and moans about that fictitious ten pounds that messes up her mind:


Axiom 1o:


Elly seems to be transfixed by the notion that the fictitious crisis that she's screaming about is a sudden fall from a much better past when the facts are that she was never happy with anything.

How to light a garbage fire: the first of the parenting axioms

As we know, the Elly we're looking at right now has a sort of non-job as a glorified gofer for the public library that she's invested most of her identity in. Rather than be content with what she had before, the poor deluded sap thinks that her paid internship is this big career that she has to defend from all comers. The problem is that due to budget cuts, they're forced to do something they hate and wish they didn't have to do by depriving a pathetic charity case with an oaf husband and spoiled brats of the one ray of life in her bleak existence. Elly insists on not seeing this. The Elly who screamed about quitting motherhood still thinks that she lost her job because they didn't really like her or else they'd have found a way to let her keep her job. This points us to one of the quirks she has that makes raising children a traumatizing mess for all concerned:

Axiom 1i:

Elly never actually bothers asking why people do or say anything because she assumes sight unseen that the only answer is "Because they hate her and want to make her life worse."

It should be noted that this also covers why she thinks people who actually put in the work get ahead: she thinks that they're all cheating because she can't be asked to do things that bore her and doesn't want to admit that people might know things she doesn't. This leads us to another problem that makes her a less effective parent than she might otherwise be:

Axiom 1j:

Elly seems to be organically incapable of understanding any viewpoint not her own. When asked to see that people might know or have experienced something she has not, she comes to the conclusion that the other party is trying to deceive, confuse and humiliate her because that person is part of the conspiracy to ruin her she invented to keep from accepting the eternal humiliation of accepting personal responsibility for her actions.

Of course, it's not just Elly's irritating paranoia that makes her a terrible parent. We also have to deal with the reason why she's at pains to throw her kids out of the house because she finds their presence oppressive and terrible. As bad as Elly's work ethic is when she's unsupervised, having to look at a face not her own drives her batty because of

Axiom 1k:

Elly finds it even more difficult to concentrate than she usually does when someone's in the room.

The problem is that Axiom 1j tends to make her life worse because it leads to another problem:

Axiom 1l:

Elly seems to be burdened with the irritating notion that when she isn't looking at someone, that person simply freezes in place. When reality insists on falsifying that notion, we generally get angry screeching and blind panic. 

What we don't get is anything like publicly expressed self-awareness; we'll get to why that is next.

On envy and initiative.

It stands to reason that a gloomy egomaniac who sees the world as being this great big stupid conspiracy to keep her from being loved and respected and wanted because jealous people are afraid of her innate superiority is going to be one of the most envious people who has ever lived. Such is the case with Elly. We see it when she envied her pathetic loser friend Connie an imaginary lifestyle of fun and excitement. We see it when she and John moan about how Santa is more generous these days than when they were young. We see it every time she wants to get her thumbs jammed in the eyes of anyone she sees as having a better time than she is. The problem is that her refusal to admit to having any sort of negative traits owing to a sort of binary insanity that allows for either stainless virtue or irredeemable evil combines with her refusal to see that her life isn't a bleak hell to make her look even crazier. This either-orism and need to see herself as the victim of all victims surpassing all others forces us to deal with:

Axiom 1g:

While she denies it angrily, Elly is consumed by envy of those around her while at the same time unable to understand why people out there clearly envy her. 

Of course, it's not just that she hates people for getting ahead. She also seems to actively people who earn their praise when she seems to be made to want it for breathing. What Marian seems to have not noticed is that it wasn't her incessant nagging about all the things that Elly did wrong that built a person who lets something she doesn't like to do pile up and become too much to bear. Elly seems to have been born assuming that it was unfair to expect it of her in the first place. This, I should think, is why someone who was really smart in high school failed to thrive in the real world. With no one to impress, Elly simply lost interest in getting her degree owing to this rule of thumb:

Axiom 1h:

Elly seems to be programmed to think that it's not fair to expect her to do anything she finds difficult, messy or boring no matter how much praise she'd earn by doing so because she's also an insane monster of entitlement on top of being a gloomy wacko who thinks everyone is trying to destroy her.

Of similarity and siblings.

Of course, the real reason that Elly and her mother couldn't help but clash is that for all intents and purposes, Elly is sort of an inferior copy of Marian. She has her mother's awkwardness, her need to prove herself to indifferent authority figures, her exaggerated dread of what they both call 'chaos' and what less depressive personalities call 'regular life' and the same stubborn pride. Elly simply lacks her mother's keen intellect and firmness of character. The reason both women spent too much time arguing over not all that much has a lot to do with why Marian never allowed a dog in her house. We know that it's because she hated all dogs because her evil father loved his dog more than he loved her and she was bound and determined to keep that from happening in her own home. She was also bound and determined not to look like the vindictive idiot she was because of a fear of being seen to have a negative character trait. This black-and-white insanity of hers and Elly's is best expressed as follows:

Axiom 1e:

Neither Marian or Elly will admit to doing things for a selfish reason or wish to see a glaring flaw in a plan to 'help' those around them.

This need Marian had to deny wanting to force Elly to lose arguments because she needed to win to make up for her childhood because that made her look crazy would have been bad enough if Elly were an only child. Sadly, Phil's advent only made Elly's feeling that she was unwelcome in this or any other world worse owing to Marian rigidly applying a double standard to keep the neighbours from talking and also because that's just how things were. By hiding behind a boys will be boys ethos because Phil appealed to her for the same reason Jim did, and by deliberately making things unfair because girls had to be kept repressed, Marian helped usher in a world wherein the following problem obtained:

Axiom 1f:

Owing to a childhood where she was always made to be wrong while an interloper she couldn't touch was always right, Elly's default suspicion that she was expected to suffer and be laughed at for wanting to be happy too mutated into a martyrdom complex her idiot mother could never understand.

On chaos, conflict and why they matter.

It should be noted that Marian Richards was the same sort of flawed, imperfect human being we all are. As her on-site biography attests, she appears to have grown up in a stifling, friendless environment dominated by the sort of brutish, obscuratist patriarch that seem to populate the Pattersons' world. Old Man Barclay and his Tory swinishness and default misogyny and foul temper ended up producing a woman who was awkward in social settings, had a difficult time both understanding and dealing with people and who (despite thinking him too naive to live in this world) envied her husband his easy-going ways and ability to handle himself in a public settting. While the first years of their marriage seemed to go by in a rush of happy accomplishment, things took a turn for the worse when Elly started displaying signs of a personality.


While Jim and most of the human race saw the inquistive, strong-willed little girl Elly was starting to become as a neutral phenomenon who only needed the mildest correction to keep her steadied, the Marian who got held down all her life saw her child as a petty tyrant in the making who HAD to be subjected to iron discipline to keep her from becoming an angry monster who shoved and bullied her way through life and made life a chaos in which Marian would spend the rest of her life never winning arguments. The solution to the non-problem Elly was is best expressed as follows:

Axiom 1c:
 Marian made a point of never letting Elly win any sort of argument as a child owing to the mistaken belief that by doing so, she was saving her from becoming a belligerent monster who stormed through life running people over.
  

Of course, the problem with this policy is that this sort of thing doesn't work especially well in real life. If you make a point of making sure that your kid is forced to lose all the time for her "own good" like Marian did, you're going to create the sort of monster you fear..especially when you spend most of your time wailing about chaos and anarchy and also play clear favourites. The end result of this sort of thing is, of course:

Axiom 1d:

Not being allowed to win arguments combined with Elly's innate negativity to make her see the world as a chaotic, horrible place in which she had to defend herself against an endless array of opponents who wanted to destroy her and laugh at her suffering as they did so. 

Elly's Prime Directive and its discontents.

The interesting thing about having burned through almost a decade talking about the comic strip "For Better Or For Worse" is that you notice certain trends that drive the characters. While I started to list these on my LiveJournal account recently, it occurs to me that I made a mess of things because I didn't start from the right vantage-point and ask what it is that main character Elly most wants out of life. While we don't get to see what drives her in the later years, the need Elly has to make sure her children live lives of stultifying blandness in order to obey a rather rigid ideal of 'correct' behaviour suggest that the Elly of 2008 is as hampered by the same obsession as the Elly of 1979 was. This means that the primary motivation Elly Patterson has is expressed as follows:

Axiom 1a:

Elly Patterson's every action is designed with the goal of gaining her mother's approval and thus proving that her mother is wrong to treat her like a despised disappointment all the time.

The problem with that is that Elly's mother Marian didn't actually see Elly as a despised and detested disappointment she regrets having. Marian actually seemed to be quite fond of her daughter and only pointed out problem areas because she wanted Elly to excel and be even happier. The tragedy is that is not her need to keep Elly 'humble' is that not only did she not anticipate how that would make life worse is that Marian seemed to be incapable of really understanding how Elly felt about herself because it never occurred to her that people like Elly's level of self-loathing exist in this world. This means that she died 'knowing' that her daughter 'knew' she was loved because she was unaware of a distressing limitation that hampered her daughter and blighted her chances of happiness:

Axiom 1b:

Elly seems to be incapable of actually seeing what's right with her life; not only does she see the glass as being almost empty, she's certain that people who hate her drank it to make her life worse.