Good Grief!
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Good Grief! Charles M. Schulz calls it quits after fifty years of Peanuts. BY JOHN PODHORETZ "I wish I could be happy," the I boy says. "I think I could be I happy if my .A. life had more purpose...
...No strict Freudian was Lucy...
...And it's Snoopy, said to be the most popular cartoon character in the world, who provides Charlie Brown his rare moments of transcendence...
...The little boy, who often spouts self-defeating philosophies like "I only dread one day at a time," knows certain truths denied to Lucy Van Pelt and all the other too-worldly folk, little or otherwise...
...The argument between Charlie Brown and Lucy has gone on for five decades without coming to a conclusion...
...Life is a simple proposition to Lucy: It's about getting what you want when you want it, and finding a convenient excuse when you botch things...
...Commercially, Peanuts and its assorted merchandise have grossed more than $1 billion worldwide...
...The little girl with him, who had seemed intently interested in his words, responds: "We had spaghetti at our house three times this month...
...He can't bring himself not to trust her when she offers to hold the football for him to kick...
...Once again finding himself entirely alone in a world that cannot possibly comprehend him, the little boy utters his mantra of despair: "Good grief...
...but dislike...
...Get more friends...
...Lucy replies...
...Charlie Brown is not like the others...
...Snoopy who gets to go behind enemy lines during the war wearing a giant mustache and inquiring of the German lovelies, "Wo ist der Root Beer Hall...
...For that thought alone, Charles M. Schulz deserves his little corner of pop immortality...
...Dislike me...
...Schroeder sits in front of a toy piano playing nothing but Beethoven, always Beethoven, ignoring the vampish Lucy as she tries to catch his fancy...
...Charlie Brown's younger sister Sally is madly in love with Linus, whom she persists in calling "my sweet babboo" even though every time she does it he hollers from out of frame, "I'M NOT YOUR SWEET BABBOO...
...Cartoonist Schulz, now seventy-seven and suffering from colon cancer, has decided to close up shop next month after fifty years and more than eighteen thousand daily comic strips...
...How could anyone dislike me...
...When Linus goes away to camp, he is sure his parents will move away and not leave a forwarding address—and that he will be eaten by a queen snake in the forest...
...Li'l Folks" was a more appropriate name for Schulz's work, because though his characters certainly lead the lives of young children—going to school and summer camp, playing Little League and dress-up, suffering from first crushes and sibling rivalries and chronic dependencies on baby blan-kets—Schulz endowed them with adult sensibilities and neuroses so well-developed that they more than justified Lucy's decision to open a psychiatric practice instead of a lemonade stand...
...Characters like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Snoopy are the Casey Joneses and Paul Bunyans of the twentieth century: figures from home-grown folk tales who have become archetypes that may long survive their creator...
...So, getting back to your original question . . ." Defeated by Lucy's implacable sense of self, Charlie Brown tells her to forget it...
...Jealous maybe...
...Does it bother you," Charlie Brown wants to know, "to think that there may be people around who dislike you...
...They're obsessives, these kids...
...He has a good heart...
...It may seem silly to use the word "argument" when discussing the appeal of a comic strip, but it's the heart and soul of this extraordinary cultural phenomenon...
...she is will to power...
...No, that's just not possible...
...And what writer could forget Snoopy's novel, which begins, "It was a dark and stormy night...
...When he's not playing, he's carrying around placards announcing "There Are Only 16 Shopping Days Left Until Beethoven's Birthday...
...My anxieties have anxieties," he tells Linus, and he's left to watch in wonder and jealousy as his dog Snoopy—the only real kid in the bunch—gets to lose himself in an active and joyous fantasy life...
...Happiness is a warm puppy," Charlie Brown says...
...ate struggle to make sense of a chaotic existence—and driven to distraction yet again by the fact that the existential questions which obsess him are of absolutely no interest to his ever-present interlocutor, Lucy Van Pelt, in Charles M. Schulz's comic strip, Peanuts...
...It's Snoopy who gets to play the great World War I flying ace...
...Does that make sense to you...
...Decades before school districts began drumming self-esteem into American children, Lucy Van Pelt was the nation's prime example of the perils of too much self-esteem...
...yes, I could understand that . . . I could see how someone could be jealous of me...
...He's just trapped inside his own head, and he can't get out...
...When someone complains about her crabbiness, Lucy responds by saying, "Can I help it if I was born with crabby genes...
...she has good sense...
...Charlie Brown can find joy in catching a snowflake on his tongue, jumping in a big pile of autumn leaves—or just giving a happy Snoopy a hug...
...It held the attention of readers on six continents because it managed to capture a central human conflict day after day in an endearing and amusing way: Should you struggle with the difficulties of being alive, or try to glide over them in order to achieve happiness...
...Schulz has always hated the name Peanuts, which was imposed on him by his syndicate in 1950 after it turned out that his original choice, "Li'l Folks," had been copyrighted by someone else...
...The boy is, of course, Charlie Brown, engaged as usual in his desperJohn Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a columnist for the NEW YORK POST...
...Charlie Brown asks...
...In Part One, a shot rings out, a maid screams, and a pirate ship appears on the horizon while in Kansas a young girl is growing up— but not to worry, because as Snoopy assures us, "In Part Two, I tie all of this together...
...I also think that if I were happy, I could help others to be happy...
...life had more purpose to it...
...He is will to knowledge...
...Five cents, please...
...Peanuts is the most successful and enduring newspaper feature ever created of any kind...
...There's nothing to dislike...
...rather, she was an early proponent of cognitive therapy: "What do I do about this loneliness...
...she can't bring herself not to pull the football away every time just for the pleasure of seeing him fall on his back...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 15
