"I feel strongly that the essence of Charlie Brown is premature existential despair and world weariness..."

"... and both this song and the holiday special give you an inaccurate idea of the Charlie Brown ratio of despair to maudlin moments of transcendence. Then again, there’s a sort of evocative melancholy in this song that’s making me regret placing it here, scores of slots below 'Dominick the Donkey.' Eh, it’s probably fine."

Writes Alexandra Petri, explaining her placement of "Christmas Time Is Here" at #80 on "A ranking of 100 — yes, 100 — Christmas songs" (WaPo). 

I found her reasoning very amusing, throughout. Maybe you don't have access to WaPo, but — if you have Spotify — here's the whole list:

"The English expression 'the social fabric' was coined in the 1790s, the age of the machine loom, when observers worried..."

"... that the growth of factories and cities, and the movement from farms and towns, was leaving people isolated and alone. Over the next century, all sorts of thinkers, from the Romantics, De Tocqueville and Marx to Hegel and the utopian socialists, agreed that something called 'society' was coming apart.... In a 1953 book called The Quest for Community, the American sociologist Robert Nisbet lamented the modern state’s 'successive penetrations of man’s economic, religious, kinship and local allegiances.'... Nisbet, the man who quested for community, was something of a misanthrope. At home, he liked to watch Gunsmoke on the family’s black-and-white television, play croquet with his kids and potter in his rose garden. He went to church only at his wife’s insistence. He did not enjoy society. 'I very much like individuals,' he’d say, adapting a quote from Linus Van Pelt in a 1959 issue of the Charles Schulz comic strip Peanuts. 'It’s people I can’t stand!' There is no such thing as society, Thatcher would say later. There are only individuals. Thatcherism, in the end, came from Charlie Brown. Conservatives had long placed their faith not in society, but in the free market. But the gap between liberalism and conservatism closed in the 1950s, when liberal intellectuals, terrified at the prospect of a collapse of liberal democracies into totalitarianism, lost faith in the idea of society and abandoned their commitment to social democracy.... Instead, they strove to protect the individual, and the individual’s ability to make choices, as if the act of choosing, and the market-driven rhetoric of choice, could inoculate the masses against becoming a mass...."

"Is society coming apart? Despite Thatcher and Reagan’s best efforts, there is and has always been such a thing as society. The question is not whether it exists, but what shape it must take in a post-pandemic world" by Jill Lepore (The Guardian).

Lots more at the link. If the part I've quoted seems sketchy, there's much more connective material at the link.

Happiness is a warm gun.

"Sir Paul McCartney remembers Beatles icon John Lennon in New York march against gun violence."

"One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here," he said, "so it's important to me."

He added he was unsure if gun violence can be ended, adding: "But this is what we can do, so I'm here to do it."

ADDED: Perhaps you didn't know that the phrase "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" was based on a headline on a gun magazine. John talks about that in the clip I've embedded, and here's Rolling Stone's description of the song (which it ranked, in 2011, as #24 on its list of "100 Greatest Beatles Songs" (personally, I ranked it #1 for a long time (and don't have any current ranking))):

The title was inspired by a headline in a gun magazine George Martin had showed Lennon that read Happiness is a Warm Gun — a variation on Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz's 1962 bestseller Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. "I thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say," Lennon said. "A warm gun means that you just shot something."

Remember "Happiness Is a Warm Puppy"? It's kind of the worst of "Peanuts":

There were very rare moments of soft cheese in Peanuts'piquancy. For example, Lucy hugging Snoopy and declaring "Happiness is a warm puppy." That moment turned into a pioneering "book," composed of "Happiness is … " messages with accompanying drawings by Schulz, that became the No. 1 "nonfiction" work of 1963, and a prime mover in the Peanuts merchandising empire...

In the strip, Schulz would mock both merchandising and himself. When Lucy tried a second time to snatch Snoopy's warmth for her own happiness, he growled back, "My mother didn't raise me to be a heating pad!" Schulz himself said it best: "Anybody who says Peanuts is cute is just crazy." But he also enabled the merchandising machine....

I associate that non-edgy commercialization of "Peanuts" with a lot of 1960s/1970s idiocy, especially that atrocious cartoon "Love Is..." Unless I'm mistaken, every page of "Happiness is a Warm Puppy" begins with "Happiness is..." and some other damned nice thing. I'm trying to look inside the book at Amazon, and I can't see enough pages to be sure, but I'm grossed out by the introduction: "Now more than ever, we need the simple exuberance that Charles Schulz and his gang of Peanut-sized philosophers so perfectly express."

Oh, that's a new introduction, written for the 2006 edition. I guess "Now more that ever" meant now that we've got the worst President ever, George Bush. Anyway, the original edition came out before the arrival of The Beatles and even before John F. Kennedy was — bang bang shoot shoot — shot.

When The Beatles did arrive, they sold the ultimate niceness: Love. And then we lapped up "Love is..."



Click to enlarge. Yes, adult partners are pictured as naked juveniles who have no genitalia but who are sexually attracted to each other and go to bed together, dressed, at long last, in pajamas. This one-panel comic has been running, in that mind-crushingly limited form, since 1970. I certainly haven't read even a small percentage of the panels that have run over the decades, but I'm just going to bet that neither the man nor the woman has ever said anything as rejecting as "My mother didn't raise me to be a heating pad!"