It’s slightly disturbing to read this and discover just how negative it is.

The average cartoon is like, (1) Charlie Brown I have something to tell you. (2) Charlie Brown, you’re a klutz! (3) This means your life is over! Give up! (leaves) (4) “There’s no hope.”

Now, it is true that sometimes things can be a little negative/fun, like the cartoon Pickles (from the 90s, originally), where it’s like the retired couple are always sniping at each other, but the sexual tension is kinda pleasant, and you walk away congratulating them for it, especially at that age. (Incidentally Charles did like Pickles, but it’s obviously not unusual for a negative person to feel comfy getting something less negative back.) But this is like…. The non-sexual/romantic version of “Twilight”, you know. “Sometimes I really hate myself.” ~ Edward to Bella. And really: aside from the issue of gender and romantic attachment, Charlie Brown and Bella Swan are the same person, more or less. “Ah! I can’t sit down in a chair! I can’t do it! I can’t do it! I’m a failure!” …. 🫣

Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes the folky set gets things right, but it is Very-Sad how well this defeated midcentury man has dominated the popular cartoon consciousness, you know. When I grew up in the 90s, we had a Peanuts play at school, not a Pickles play, obviously. Charles has the support of the mothers of the empire, basically. And it’s like, hear me out: we might still be the Romano-British empire, right. We were planted here, and told not to change. So what happened to the rot at the root, the permanent frost, the deep-negativity, right?…. I guess it has to be taken for granted, and given a place at the table, even when we’re trying to have fun!

…. All that being said, it is true ~also, that when things are popular, they tend more towards being positive or negative, not subtle. With the exception of say, a popular Danielle Steel drama—eg girl survives terrorist attack, lives beautiful life despite hardship—there tends to be more feeling, less hedging of the bets. You either feel wonderful, or you get cranky and mutter curses under your breath. That’s how most people are, although I suppose most people think that they shouldn’t be the way that they are. So, although Peanuts would probs have been better if it weren’t a pre-whatever (pre-1977? pre-1968? pre-2000?) example of American provincial male negative thinking, still, one has to be open to feeling a little defeated now and then if one is to play the game. Of course, Charlie Brown probs could have been shown to win at something now and again—but, hey.

…. Of course, the strange thing is, people can feel reassured by negativity: they’re not “expected” to be positive, everyone else is as negative as they and their friends are, they’re “entitled” to keep their misery, and nobody is gonna take it away, right.

(shrugs) I think that Bella’s negativity creates a far more “fun” product, but hey—whatever.

…. I guess that Charlie Brown is the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man”, though. ~Doesn’t have a point of view; knows not where he’s going to…. Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.” And he does represent a sort of diversity of human negativity; the camera of history loves the big tyrants, and sometimes the petty crook gets on TV, but then there’s just~ Nowhere Man. He’s not Hitler, but he lives right around the block, so he wins our neighborhood negatively contest. And we love him. 🥸

…. I don’t want you to get carried away. Yes, I do think that Charlie Brown/Charles Schultz is negative, in a way that I don’t think that Twilight is negative, although the character Bella is negative. There’s no need for further comparisons, but some other things out there are a little negative, but marginally entertaining, while others mostly fail at this. But don’t get carried away that I call it “fault conscious” like my Holocaust book, you know. Dreadfully boring things, many Holocaust books. You’d think that dying and going to hell would be like, not a horror movie, but an unusually slow day at the bureaucratic races—an impression only partly due to the actual nature of the Nazis/WW2, you know. Anyway, I remember in a previous LT incarnation I read Hitler’s book (to humanize the fucker), and also read Edmund Burke’s famous book because it was like the more rational face of someone who didn’t want the world to change, in one way or another. (To speak very imprecisely—don’t parse all those terms mechanically.) And it always bothered me, because I wasn’t trying to say they were both the same, but I separated out everything by politics in that time, so they were both “the right”, you know (and not the center-right: Burke was committed).

But anyway, now I classify by mood I think I call it, but the problem is the same: ordinary people are negative sometimes, and so are dragon-dictators, right. (shrugs) I guess it’s one of the lessons of life that people can be negative, without being…. Exciting~ for lack of a better word, you know.

Peanuts has very broad appeal to kids. I collected the books when I was a kid, and the Possum is partial to it now. ( )