Ran this one in Fall 1991. So yeah, it’s out of sequence, but appropriate for the day.
No, Leonard didn’t mean Linus any harm, which is why I tacked on that line, “Wanna buy a Fisher-Price chainsaw?” It’s Halloween; it’s a trick. The poor kid did need straightening out, in many ways.
Just for fun, let’s read a few things into Peanuts, shall we?
Lucy ran a psychiatry booth. Not the usual thing a little kid would do; put aside the fact Charles Schulz made the Peanuts gang do a lot of things little kids would do. Instead of a lemonade stand, she ran a psychiatry booth. Consider what sort of kid would come up with such an idea. Someone who figured she knew enough about psychiatry to peddle it to her friends, especially gullible ol’ Charlie Brown, right? Clearly someone who spent a lot of time with her own psychiatrist.
Why? Obviously the crabbiness. The fussbudgetiness. Girl had a lot of anger. We can speculate most of it has to do with the Peanuts gang’s absent parents, who worked long hours in menial jobs because of being on so many Red Scare blacklists. (Okay, the blacklists are just pure speculation on my part.) Regardless, they abandoned their kids to be raised by television. So Lucy acted out.
From the ’50s to the ’70s, Lucy was just a terror. She mellowed out a lot more from the ’80s onward. In real life this was because Schulz finally divorced his difficult wife, and no longer had real-life irrational behavior to inspire his strips. In the Peanuts world, Lucy must’ve got some better meds.
In the meanwhile, there were about 30 years (let’s say three, in Peanuts years) where she was just awful to everyone around her. Even boys she liked, like Schroeder. So just imagine how bad Linus got it from her. It’s a wonder he didn’t develop the complex escapist fantasy life Snoopy invented for himself.
Oh yeah, Peanuts is rife with mental health issues. It’s a lot of the reason the strip has been so popular: There are a lot of undiagnosed people walking around out there, and all of ’em can relate to Peanuts in one way or another, and think it’s ’cause Shultz was so clever. Nah; it’s because he was so screwed up.
Linus’s blanket fixation (which my nephew has also started doing lately… but he doesn’t lose his nerve when he misplaces it), the misinformation about gully cats and queen snakes and hedge toads, the belief Snoopy can function as a viable attorney, and last and not least the Great Pumpkin: The boy jumbled up reality on a regular basis, largely as a coping mechanism for his out-of-control home life. Lucy acted out, which is why she got the therapy, but Linus and Rerun needed it just as much. If not more: The boys were smarter than average, which meant they had greater potential—and greater potential to do harm.
Someone needed to sit Linus down and explain his tendency to confuse things, then blindly insist no, he got it right in the first place, would not serve him well in the future. Unless he wanted a career at Fox News. There, or in many political think tanks, he’d thrive. Anywhere else, he’d have to deal with the rest of the world, which finds him freakish and sad, and he’ll never understand why he got so much blowback… ’cause he world made perfect sense to him.
True, his distortions are fairly benign. But that’s because in Peanuts, he’s a child. The consequences are minor at that age. They’re gonna grow. Bear in mind that one year he got Sally to stay in the pumpkin patch with him, and ruined her Halloween. Now, imagine him as a father, forcing his own kids to join his mad quest for a sincere pumpkin patch. (That is, once he can get any potential wife to let his neighbor’s delusional dog officiate their wedding.)
And on that happy note, happy Halloween. And an even happier All Saints Day tomorrow, when candy goes on sale!