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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Real life is cruel to the Charlie Browns of the world.

And from what I've seen of the cruelty and lack of empathy in American culture, I stand by my assessment.

The enduring success of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (despite its hokey Coca-Cola sponsored origins) strongly runs counter to this idea. The other kids in the special are outright mean to Charlie, but at the end no one identifies with the other kids' perspective, nor do they themselves.

Part of the reason the Halloween Special never gained the same cultural relevance/popularity is probably because it doesn't have the same progression. The other kids are mean to Linus and he persists despite it all, but ultimately it ends with no resolution to the mocking.

[Content warning: this post has been written while the author is on cold medicine and before having any coffee. Read at your own risk!]

But you know those other kids are going to go right back to being assholes as soon as "the magic of Christmastime" wears off.

It seems like the message is kind of, "It's ok to be an asshole, as long as at certain, 'special' moments, you show a token gesture of goodwill."

I haven't watched the whole show through in decades, so it's possible my memory is faulty, but I don't recall any of the mean kids making any sort of apology or atoning for their behaviour. It's just "and now we're all friends because Christmas!"

And then the next day, Lucy's back to tormenting her ostensible "friend".

In the Christmas Special, the kids come to see Charlie Brown as right and are fairly vocal about this ("he's not a blockhead after all", etc.). It is somewhat tethered to the religious elements voiced by Linus, which gives the turnaround to Charlie's perspective a kind of cultural weight, i.e., the audience is intended to understand the kids as wrong in some kind of fundamental way. It's not as simple as "the magic of Christmas".

In the Halloween Special, the kids don't do the same for Linus, apart from Lucy who pulls him out of the cold and tucks him into bed.

The dynamic between Lucy and Charlie is a lot deeper than her cynical kicking the ball trick. Schultz uses their interactions (the psychiatry booth, him keeping her on the baseball team even though she's consistently terrible) to reinforce an overall theme that optimism is better than pessimism. Occasionally he directly peels back the layers behind Lucy's crabbiness like when Charlie's in the hospital.

It's easy enough to interpret Peanuts as being that. But Charles Schultz was not trying to present that. He was presenting the world as it is, and how one person can still maintain his optimism in spite of all that. This is made abundantly clear in some of the other strips, like the Father's day strip where he explains to Violet that no matter what, his dad will always love him, and he doesn't care that Violet's dad can buy her all the things.

Schultz was a relatively devout Presbyterian (though still very much a free thinker and criticized the direction American Christianity was going and its attitude about the various wars during the 60s-80s). He was incredibly optimistic about humanity, but he showed in Peanuts the reality of our "default" state, especially among kids.

Keep in mind that these are all 2nd and 3rd graders in the story.

The message is that kids are often assholes to other kids, picking one or a few to gang up on. Which is true.

It appears from your other comments that you're American too. So the question is, are you that cruel too, or you do posit yourself as the one magical exception to the rule?

I'm not the one magical exception, no. But I and Americans like myself are clearly not representative of mainstream culture or politics here. You can't argue for the overall humanism and empathy of American culture after we voted for Trump twice and while 40% of us still support the administration, ICE and everything that's happening here.

And of course when I say "mainstream" culture I mean "white." The cultures of oppressed people necessarily harbor more empathy than the culture of the oppressors, because their survival depends on it.

And yes I'm white, too. Your gotcha didn't work. Better luck next time.

> 40% of us still support the administration, ICE and everything that's happening here.

This number is misleading. Overall job approval does not entail equal approval for "everything." Typically, job approval depends a lot or even mostly on the economy. There was a famous expression from the Bill Clinton Presidential campaign...

Anyway, back when I studied math, 40% represented a minority, not a majority. And I'd like to see your polling on Charlie Brown; it feels like you're just projecting your personal feelings onto that rather than relying on any empirical data.

98.15% of American voters in 2024 voted either for a party funding, arming, and abetting a well documented genocide; or for one that promised to fund, arm, and aid that genocide even more.

Those same parties have raised ICE's budget every year since its inception, inflicted sanctions that have killed millions of innocent civilians over the last couple decades, and spent trillions upon trillions in a 'war on terror' that has only increased instability. Not to mention the bipartisan support for torture, mass surveillance, surveillance of world leaders, threats to ICC judges, sanctions on UN Rapporteurs, threats to The Hague, massive subsidies to polluters, etc etc etc etc etc.

You can argue all you like that the voters were trying to be practical, that there were no other truly viable options, or try and say that history's most documented genocide of all time wasn't a real genocide somehow...

But it says an incredible amount about the character and quality of modern US society. None of it good.

Right, so you don't really have any strong evidence for opinions about Americans at all. You have extremely strong opinions about Israel/Palestine which you're transferring onto Americans.

Ok Eli.

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