Fwd: 1999-12-15 Statement by the President on Charles Schulz

[Carl Remick]

>Schulz was actually a brilliant artist, and
>created one of the most radical aesthetic documents of the mid-Sixties; he
>got real corporate in the Seventies, of course, but there was a solid core
>to his work, a resistance to the existential anomie of suburbanization and
>consumerism, which you don't find in lesser strips.

IMO, Schulz offered nothing but sappy style and sentiments.  I really came 
to loathe Peanuts.  Whatever "resistance" to consumerism Schulz may have 
offered in the early days was far, far offset by his relentless 
merchandising of more recent times.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune today 
notes that Peanuts is "the basis of a franchise that collects $1 billion a 
year."  The paper also has this heart-rending comment:  "The only child of a 
St. Paul barber, Schulz spent his first 36 years in the Twin Cities. The 
Depression years were some terrible times, he told a Star Tribune reporter 
two years ago. The $20 million a year he grossed later couldn't erase the 
too-many pancake dinners of his childhood."  No, I guess it would take a 
hundred million bucks a year, or more, to compensate for that trauma.

Carl
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