Charlie and Lucy are trying to tell us something

[awc]

2008 Presidential Election, in a nutshell!

lucyscrewscharlie.jpg (57.82 KiB) Viewed 326 times

I stumbled upon this cover at Amazon and it gave me pause. With the election around the corner, this cover instantaneously resonated with me. "Here we go again," I thought, "just like Charlie Brown." I'm so disgusted with the choices this time around, just as Charlie is always initially skeptical, even upset, about Lucy's offers. Obama's self-coronation during that extravagant 30-minutes of brazen obfuscation tonight reminded me of Lucy's persuasive pitches to Charlie.

Is Charlie Brown the average American voter making the same old mistake of believing Lucy the professional presidential candidate?

Or is Charlie Brown the average American voter and Lucy an embodiment of America's mainstream media? The media's overall failure to critique political proposals using current economic theory contributes to Charlie's self-defeating willingness to keep believing that ball can be kicked. Maybe when Lucy is making her case to Charlie, she represents both politicians and the media, who are so complicit in spinning stories as opposed to conveying facts.

Does Charlie Brown embody both the professional politicians and those voters who recklessly invest them with power, in which case Lucy represents the natural world ("underlying truths about how markets work"), which is why no amount of promising free lunches on the one hand or believing in free lunches on the other hand is ever going to end well for anybody?

Perhaps Charlie and Lucy are simply demonstrating the poignant truth, which is that repeating behavior, regardless of how well-intended it may be, that not only fails consistently to produce positive outcomes but also regularly spawns increasingly negative results is not only assinine but also, ultimately, suicidal.

What does it mean that Charlie keeps subjecting himself to Lucy's caprice? Do we love him for believing Lucy will someday let him kick the ball or do we pity him for always letting her persuade him to believe that this time it will be different? Would Lucy holding the ball for him once somehow make-up for all of the times she's let Charlie down?

[daveed]

Maybe when Lucy is making her case to Charlie, she represents both politicians and the media, who are so complicit in spinning stories as opposed to conveying facts.

That's how I see it. Lucy is, in effect, continually committing fraud. She offers to take up a position within established rules, and then reneges on that position, betraying Charlie Brown's trust. And CB is required to participate or else the system no longer exists.

Or, I'm just so blue with anger over this fucking election that I'm reading way too much into a beloved comic strip that didn't shy away from depicting pain, loss and disappointment...

[awc]

Maybe when Lucy is making her case to Charlie, she represents both politicians and the media, who are so complicit in spinning stories as opposed to conveying facts.

That's how I see it. Lucy is, in effect, continually committing fraud. She offers to take up a position within established rules, and then reneges on that position, betraying Charlie Brown's trust. And CB is required to participate or else the system no longer exists.

As my inbox is overflowing with Facebook updates about "Obama rallies" and "my savior Obama," and "getting out the vote for Obama," and "it's not too late to vote for Obama," and other nauseating, cult-of-personality pro-Obama sentiments, I can't help but feel disappointed in voters and that makes me look at the cartoon in a new way. Lucy and Charlie are effectively in cahoots. Both of them are screwing us over. Here's how.

By now, Charlie should know better. He keeps making the same mistake over and over again. It's funny at first, but by the tenth time it's an absurd existential crisis. He refuses to hold Lucy responsible for all of her past failures. Yes, she should be held accountable for her fraudulent ways. But he's the ultimate enabler. He chooses to refuse to say, "enough is enough." And so change never comes. "This time it will be different" (ie, "Change We Need") becomes, in fact, "Other than the details of the lies I will tell you, things are never going to change." When Charlie consents to this arrangement even though he clearly is inviting harm, he is not blameless in the havoc she wreaks.

Lucy represents Political Powerbrokers. Her power is based on convincing Charlie to sanction her authority over him. She does everything she can (ie, she tells elaborate lies) to get him to consent to her holding the ball for him. Of course, she can't actually force him to participate. His initial voluntary participation (ie, his vote) is what gives her the authority to defraud him. Atlas Shrugged readers will recognize this as "the sanction of the victim." Politicians need this to appear morally legit. They need the appearance of operating in accordance with the rule of law in order to attain power. As Lucy appeals to Charlie's desire to believe the best of people, so do savvy politicians appeal to our sense of idealism. They do this over and over again, election cycle after election cycle. And even though government's performance consistently falters (as Lucy keeps failing Charlie), the appeals and the ideals they are based on do not change. In fact, the worse things become, the more inspiring appeals to those ideals sound. How ironic!

The ritual of Lucy making her promise to hold the ball is akin to the ritual of presidents swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution. Though no POTUS in recent memory has been asked about Constitutional issues in any substantive way by mainstream media nor has any I can remember shown much respect for our government's rulebook, the ritual signals to Americans that he is on their side. The entire election process has become a way of pretending that the American people have consented to ANYTHING that the government does. It is assumed that because the methodology of the election process is sound, therefore anything an elected government dreams up to do is also somehow sound. Obama will claim a mandate to increasingly nationalize the U.S. healthcare system, for example, but where in Article 1 Section 8 does he get the power to do that?

Bottom line, Charlie should be insisting that Lucy sign a contract in which she acknowledges her role in enabling him to kick the ball she's holding, on penalty of her being fined or imprisoned for undermining the experience. Short of that, he should simply move on after she defrauds him. And her reputation should lead to her being socially ostracized. But here in the U.S., voters celebrate politicians like Lucy. They, like Charlie, enable the lying liars.

Effectively Charlie and Lucy together represent "the system," one in which actors play their obedient parts dutifully, and, tragically enough, the repercussions of their actions are felt by actors (1) who reject the fraudulent premises of "the system" and (2) those who aren't even born yet but will inherit the debts incurred by the Charlie-Lucy axis of evasion/aggression.