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Doing It For Peanuts

For the last few days I have been reading the comics in the Florida Today newspapers that somehow and quite randomly get delivered to my house. I did not subscribe to the paper except that I agreed to a free trial sometime back. Lately I seem to get the paper on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The deal that I agreed to back in February was two weeks of free weekend trial papers and if I did not cancel then they would start charging the bill to my card. I have seen nothing charged to my account and have only been mailed bills that ask me to pay in advance for weekly subscriptions, which is not what I desired.

Still I get newspapers at random but generally three or four days a week. For the most part I do not want or need them. The Sunday paper is nice. It has coupons. Coupons are worth something.

It is not that I want to be ignorant of what is going on in the world. I have generally gotten my news from TV and lately The Internet. Every morning I watch Fox and Friends 1st before settling in to do a little writing or editing. In the evening if I am not working, I watch some of the evening line-up on Fox News Network. I'm pretty-much informed, at least as much as I want to be.

I used to deliver papers for Florida Today. Even though I received gratis copies, I rarely read them. It does not surprise me though that they are delivering papers to me for free. When I was delivering I had a couple of people meet me at the door at 4:30AM just to tell me that they had long ago cancelled their subscription. Someone being up that early to just tell you something is significant. There was little ole me, still half-asleep trying to explain to them that until it was cancelled out of the system I would still be given the papers to deliver to them. They told me to deliver them to someone else.

Apparently not much has changed in the five years since I delivered papers.

Anyway, to the subject and reason that compelled me to post a Blog entry.

When I was a kid I loved Charles Shultz's incredible comic strip called Peanuts. It might have even been the vehicle that taught me how to read. It was and still is a classic in ever sense of the word and in the sixties it engendered 30-minute made-for-TV seasonal specials that when I was a kid were events that were even advertised at school. It was 'Must See TV' decades before there was Friends or Seinfeld.

Anyway, out of some sense of nostalgia I started reading Peanuts this week and I guess I may have started thinking a little too deeply about the premise of the storylines. Writers do that and as unforgivable as it might be, we even comment on what we notice. Some of us become better at the critique of the work of others than actually composing something original. It is a sad thing to witness the birth of a critic. Hopefully that is not where I am heading.

From reading Peanuts, one could easily draw the conclusion that the creator of the strip was at least a little bit whacked. Granted the same could be said about a lot of artistic work but - me being me - I pursued it to another level as you knew that I would.

Is nothing sacred? Am I now going to attack the integrity of Peanuts by calling a comic strip unrealistic? Duh!

Well, now that I have started, let's play through this exercise anyway; let's think this through:

Okay you have a dog that most everyone in the strip treats as a equal, even some of them think that he is a kid, albeit a strange looking kid. At times it seems that only Charlie Brown ever treats Snoopy like a Dog. After all, Snoopy sleeps outside in a doghouse and eats from a dog bowl.

Then again, Charlie Brown lets Snoopy play on a baseball team that is managed by, who else but Snoopy's master, Charlie Brown. Charlie is also the pitcher who could not throw a jellybean past a blind man even if his back turned to him at the time. I guess good help was hard to find or it is a very small neighborhood. Be that as it may the star player on the team appears to be Snoopy! Yes, a dog is the best player on the little league team. Time to change neighborhoods, I think.

No, this is not the premise of an inane made-for-TV Disney movie about the super-'human' exploits of an animal. In fact the only super hero in the series may be Linus with his incredible security blanket.

Peppermint Patty, who honestly believes that Snoopy is a kid, is madly in love with 'Chuck' while Charlie Brown has eyes for only the Little Red-Haired Girl - ah unrequited puppy-love can be among life's most painful experiences.

Lucy is simply sadistic. She holds a football and invites Charlie Brown to kick it and at the last instant she pulls it away. She is just not a nice person. For his part, Charlie is not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree as he continues to fall for it.

Lucy is madly in love with Schroeder who can play a toy piano like it is a Steinway.

As odd as all that might seem, it is still a comic strip that people of my generation read, pretty-much accepted and generally enjoyed.

Of course Snoopy was much more than one of the gang who happened to play outfield - but did he ever catch a fly ball? Snoopy was also a writer. He would sit astraddle the roof of his doghouse, typewriter in front of him - precariously perched on imagination as it would have had to teeter this way and that, provided that it was balanced upon the crest of the doghouse roof; comic strips are two dimensional and therefore do not have to obey the laws of physics.

Regardless Snoopy somehow composed the exploits of a dog, 'Our Hero' who oddly resembles Snoopy (literary license was never revoked for this blatant violation of the space/time continuum). Somehow 'Our Hero' flies atop his doghouse, scarf fluttering in the wind when all along he is convinced that he is flying his trusty Sopwith Camel. Alternatively his doghouse is magically transformed into the WWI vintage British plane. At any rate, 'Our Hero' bravely challenges the best, the infamous World War I menace, The Red Baron.

This line of thinking has led me to wonder whether there were any 'magic' mushrooms in Snoopy's Dog food?

Let's not forget Snoopy's friend, Woodstock, a bird of sorts but only because Woodstock can fly. I always wondered what sort of bird he was. In the winter Woodstock iceskates on a makeshift rink formed in Snoopy's dog bowl.

I don't know why but the other morning as I was reading Peanuts I suddenly realized that it was a pretty surrealistic and generally random comic strip. Maybe that is why it translates well even today. These are times when random is 'in' and surrealism is expected if not demanded.

I guess I wonder why it never occurred to me before how really bizarre the premise of Peanuts was. Maybe it was because in the sixties I lived only for the sugar-rush of another Snicker's bar and a Coke to wash it down. Maybe it was because my teachers told me that Peanuts was worth watching on TV and/or reading in the paper. Did anyone ever take a moment to consider the ramifications of subjecting impressionable minds to such a warped version of comic reality?

Even Garfield makes more sense! Cats are smarter than dags and perhaps even lazier. They certainly are the schemers of the pet world.

Next up, my cynical take on Mother Goose and the Brother's Grimm; we still read this crap to our children and even so we expect them to turn out any less warped than we did?

E

posted by Unknown @ 11:12 PM