Faux Sixties Humility: Charlie Brown vs. Gen. Montgomery

Peanuts’ heyday was the 1960s, and in many ways Peanuts encapsulates so many of those points that The Sixties held so dear:  Freudian psychology, juvenalia, faux humility.  We have this Naive Art style (contrast this with the draftsman-like art of cartoonist Winsor McCay in Little Nemo in Slumberland).  Everything in Peanuts is slightly askew, off-centered; it’s the let’s-not-get-to-the-point pose of the embarrassed, self-hating majority.

1967

The headline stating “Charlie Brown and Snoopy: Winners at Last” also highlights the Cult of Loserdom that was fetishized beginning in the mid-1960s.

1944

23 years before, we have a true balls-out LIFE cover featuring General Montgomery in his beret, lambs-wool coat, and cable-knit sweater. Somehow I doubt that the Cult of Loserdom got much press back in 1944.