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.