Imagine a boot stamping on a human face for all eternity

Amnesty International says women and children get the worst of war. The Chilean government has admitted that torture was its official policy during the 1970s and 80s. A U.S. Army Reservist who tried to blow the whistle on the abuse of Iraqi detainees was declared delusional, strapped onto a gurney and flown out of the country.

And that brings us to "Peanuts."

It seems that St. Paul has become home to a multitude of statues of characters from the "Peanuts" comic strip -- the iconic, weirdly ironic daily feature that, like a growing number of others, lives on in syndication long after its creator died. The link is to a nicely cranky op-ed protesting the presence of Peanuts in a park.

When I was a little kid, geting bullied in school and continually humiliated on the sports field, I was so tired of adults patronizing kids and pretending kids had it so great, when my life and that of most of the other kids I knew was more or less a boring grind in a crypto-fascist small town: the strongest lorded it over the weakest, and anyone who didn't fit the definition of "normal" was viciously mocked. I loved the "Peanuts" strip because I felt it revealed American childhood for what it really was.

But when I grew older, I got creeped out by the strip repeating this message decade after decade. I wanted Charlie Brown to somehow finally get over. About a year before his death, I even wrote a fan letter to Charles M. Schultz, the strip's creator, asking him to grant Charlie Brown some sort of redemption. After all, Schultz was the richest cartoonist the world had ever known (though Matt Groenig might have surpassed him by now, I dunno) -- what investment did he have in his character continuing to fail over and over again? What did he have to lose?

I never got an answer, and Schultz died without ever changing the strip's central message: that life was having a football being yanked away from you, over and over again, for eternity. Nice strip for kids!