People like to do comedy bits about Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang as adults. Now John McCain has joined the fun and presented us with Sarah Palin, who is plainly Lucy Van Pelt with childbearing capabilities and flunky aides. To crystallize the resemblance, let me quote a description of Lucy and Linus by the right-wing journalist Christopher Caldwell. I’ll use quote marks because Blogger’s block-quote function has gone sick. We begin with Lucy:
“She’s an American nightmare, a combination of zero brains, infinite appetites and infinite self-esteem, who is (for that reason) able to run roughshod over all her playmates. … Lucy is a moron, of course, and an aggressive, insistent one. … Linus, meanwhile, is both the smartest character in the strip and its most naive. He hopes that working a problem through mentally — or theologically — will offer him some protection. … Lucy associates his thinking with ‘weakness,’ and in this she is right. She exercises such power over Linus that he is left with nothing of himself, not even his unquestionable intellectual superiority.”
I know what you’re thinking: Linus is Obama or the Democrats or (in a very real sense) all of us. Maybe, but he’s not Charlie Gibson. To put it differently, comic strip characters shrink a bit when they’re taken off the page and made into people. The real Lucy would have sliced off Charlie Gibson’s head and handed it to him in a security blanket: “‘Doctrine’? Why would President Bush need a woman doctor? In this time of war I just don’t feel right second-guessing the president’s choice of,” etc., etc.
I don’t quite buy it. The “Lucy as evil force of nature” thing has never been very convincing to me. Lucy’s a bossy six-year old. She’s a fussbudget, but she’s also sweet and vulnerable a surprising amount of the time (what about her relationship with Schroeder?)
I agree that she’d give a better interview than Palin, though.
Tom’s not saying Lucy is a force of evil, he’s saying she’s an aggressive, loudmouthed, somewhat stupid bully… and he’s right. She’s also defiantly anti-intellectual, constantly supplying her own totally invented explanations for natural phenomena with an assured, self-satisfied tone that brooks no dissent or contradiction, let alone independent thought. In this, she really does make a good metaphor for modern neo-conservatism, and for right-wing political movements of this kind throughout history.
Of course, like all the Peanuts characters, she can’t be totally reduced to this metaphor, and she has other attributes that flesh her out in different ways. But that doesn’t diminish the effectiveness of her more symbolic qualities.
She’s an aggressive loudmouthed bully, certainly. I think “anti-intellectual” is a stretch and a half. She does get goofy ideas and stick to them…but she’s a kid. Her ideas (palm trees are trees you can get your palm around) are pretty adorable. Plus, you know, she’s a psychiatrist.
I agree with Ed *and* with Noah! Lucy does have her sweet side, but Palin appears to be a good mother (just as Nixon was a good father). Even awful people can have a non-awful side.
Yeah, Linus is great, but I wouldn’t want him running a country.
By which I mean that I don’t think Linus is all that much like Obama. He might grow up to be a professor but he wouldn’t be a presidential candidate.