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| And At The End, A Charlie Brown Christmas |
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| Peanuts, a strip about the Thirties confused with the Fifties, and Enjoyed into the Nineties, Can Successfully Stand for the 20th Century |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, December 15, 1999. We close in on the last holidays of the year, and - for those idiots who suddenly feel the last years of a century are base nine - the decade, century, millennium. As such, it is perhaps appropriate to note some transitions and some milestones. Inevitably, these are milestones for my age group, which is at the half century mark, the geezers. So, rock and roll, politics, and Peanuts. It was great to see Paul McCartney return to a small club and sing, and with great good taste did only one Beatle song. McCartney was always in love with performance, more than Lennon and Harrison if not Starr, and it is nice to see that in such a frothy rock and roll world of frauds and worse, there are sincere and relatively decent blokes. It was, yes, condescending to a degree, and convenient to jump start his new cd, but Sir Paul delivers. If you are going to be a Lord, might as well be a good and decent sort, what? Annoyingly, McCartney looks in better shape now than he was in 1965, or at least not notably any worse. He has a close family and has the respect of the press, fans, and industry and livestock for his vegetarian life. He is apparently constitutionally incapable of being impolite or rude in public. Compare and contrast to Jagger and Richards, who became - very quickly and quite recently - jokes. It is hard to recall just how revolutionary McCartney once seemed, how cutting edge, how important to pop music. He is an icon, but with high intelligence, knows it and plays the roll with as much rock as a schlerotic back allows. It's good to see George W. Bush biodegrade, and with him the diseased Republican party, home to nascent bigots and fascists. The GOP needs to take a flame thrower to its far right as well as to its hypocritical center, which courts and condemns it as needed. The hypocritical love fest around Bush designed to just get a Republican President stinks. But Dubya is above his high water mark and viewing a receding tide from within a shell he cannnot fill. Having been informed his numbers plummet the more his mouth stayed shut, Bush opened up in the last debate and is currently receiving congrats for his performance. But it was a performance. The words were nonsense and carefully crafted and smelled of the lamp, and not his but his writer's. It is becoming evident, now, that Bush is an intellectual fraud, and whatever your views, he should be avoided like the plague. When Bush starts his plummet, and he will, you will witness such vitriolic internal warfare among the Republicans it will not survive into the next century in the form in exists now. This, as someone who wants to be a Republican but cannot join a party with Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and David Duke. And now, Peanuts. Charles Schultz, dying of cancer, has drawn his last comic strip, which will appear in February. Let us brace ourselves for the marketing horrors that United Syndicate will inflict upon us in the weeks ahead. Before that begins I feel obligated to point out the one thing Schultz did that set Peanuts apart. This was comic pacing. Like Jack Benny, Schultz used silence and sustained slow burns. If you look at the Sunday strips from the very beginning, a great many of them feature silence, uncluttered with words. It made Peanuts what it is, and it was both risky and gentle genius that brought it off. I've never heard Schultz praised for that, and he should be. You have to be very confident to do that as a standup or an artist. It has been a quarter century since Peanuts has been the cutting edge of that art form, or was hip, or - sadly - particularly funny. I hardly ever look at it anymore, knowing what it would contain, but taking some comfort it was still there, like a family home you never visit. It was the comic of my childhood that gave me a link to my older brothers and parents, who thought it hysterical, which it sometimes was. When you compare it to genuine genius of execution, like Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, and in its writing, Doonesbury, Peanuts suffers, but that was inevitable. Doonesbury in particular sometimes mimics the Schultz pacing. All Schultz's characters immediately became the cliché artists dread, and although it made him rich, Schultz never caught the wave again and his last decades were warmed-over pleasantries. Even Lucy and Linus' younger brother was named Rerun. Nobody else can draw Peanuts again, by contract, and this dignified artistic end speaks well of Schultz. Big deal. But if you were forced to use something as a symbol for the last half of the 20th century for all the generations that followed the so-called Greatest Generation, of which Schultz was a member, even the Hippies and Yuppies and all the other groupings that compose us today would not be wrong to choose the fat headed kid with the smug beagle, standing in existential peace if some confusion with a nervous smile. When Charlie Brown ends his prolonged gentle childhood as the son of a barber - in dog years, don't forget, Snoopy is 350 years old - so will many of us. About time, perhaps, but still worth a glance back to trees laced with kites, flying doghouses engaged in combat, at expletives that could be included and children oblivious to politics or a world outside their own. And the invisible parent that made it possible now putting his affairs in order as the year changes. We end the century with the last Charlie Brown Christmas. Fitting. |
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