For use: Friday, August 4, 2000 and thereafter

 

Future Shoes: "75 Snoopys, All in a Line"

by Michael Finley

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

You lucky out-of-towners. You fly into glamorous Saint Paul in your fancy jet aeroplanes. Maybe you check out our humongous mall. Catch some minor league action with our famous Twins. Perhaps you pay your respects to the site where Dred Scott sat overlooking the lonely Mississippi during his 1857 Supreme Court trial.

But what really grabs you is our 75 Snoopys.

Charles Shultz, creator of the Peanuts cartoon strip, grew up five blocks from where I live. When he passed away last winter, the city decided to pay him permanent homage, and maybe pick up a rep as a place where something happy happened.

So they commissioned the creation of 75 acrylic statues of Snoopy. The statues are all from a single mold, but each has been painted or collaged by a different artist to make an individual statement. Thus there is an astronaut Snoopy by the science museum, a blue sky Snoopy by a scenic overlook, etc. Seventy five Snoopys, count 'em. One, by the baseball stadium, features your standard white beagle, alongside a politically correct African-American beagle.

The statues make one want to, as Dorothy Parker put it, fwow up.

They are in Snoopy's ecstatic greeting-card mode, arms outward, eyes joyfully closed to slit. Little kids love Snoopy. But these statues violates the heart and soul of Schultz's cartoons, which was not ecstasy, but anxiety. The unrequitable loves, the unachievable extra points, the breakthroughs of understanding and acknowledgment that never quite break through.

There is a schism in the world of Peanuts comparable to a religious schism, between an honest down-to-earth vision and a false pietistic one. Schultz's pietistic period, focusing on the dog and his flock of birds, began when Shultz merchandised his characters, in the late 60s. Hallmark and other companies had no use for the grimness that Charlie's and Linus's lives entailed. So they encouraged Schultz to develop a "low psychedelic" front, spotlighting the little dog. It was the precise moment when Peanuts stopped being funny.

So by all means visit your friends in Saint Paul. Doggone it, you can even enjoy the statues. But please understand if us natives don't want to accompany your sightseeing tours.

Or if you do want us to accompany you, download the map at http://www.pioneerplanet.com/archive/snoopymap/snoopyindex.html -- it pinpoints the location of every Snoopy in town, so you can steer clear of them, and hew to the ethic of long-suffering and sorrow that was Schultz's real legacy.