Word: reals
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...This was something new in the newspaper comic strip. At mid-century the comics were dominated by action and adventure, vaudeville and melodrama, slapstick and gags. Schulz dared to use his own quirks - a lifelong sense of alienation, insecurity and inferiority - to draw the real feelings of his life and time. He brought a spare pen line, Jack Benny timing and a subtle sense of humor to taboo themes such as faith, intolerance, depression, loneliness, cruelty and despair. His characters were contemplative. They spoke with simplicity and force. They made smart observations about literature, art, classical music, theology, medicine, psychiatry...
...Charlie Brown was something new in comics: a real person, with a real psyche and real problems. The reader knew him, knew his fears, sympathized with his sense of inferiority and alienation. When Charlie Brown first confessed, "I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel," he was speaking for people everywhere in Eisenhower's America, especially for a generation of solemn, precociously cynical college students, who "inhabited a shadow area within the culture," the writer Frank Conroy recalled. They were the last generation to grow up, as Schulz had, without television, and they read Charlie Brown...
...felt lost, unsure of himself. With no one to turn to, he made loneliness, insecurity and a stoic acceptance of life's defeats his earliest personal themes. At the same time, he possessed a strong independent streak and grew increasingly stubborn and competitive as life and its injustices, real and imagined, piled...
...strip and never to bring in issues from outside. He never made overt political statements through "Peanuts." He remained apart from specific social and political causes, never joining the battle of ideas. Having established an idiom and a mode that commented on modern ills such as commercialization, real estate development, generational distrust, Schulz extended the area of doubt in modern life only insofar as he made it funny to doubt. But, as the '60s intensified, as the Vietnam War failed and nothing quite worked out, as the triumphal quality of American life modulated, "Peanuts" became a refuge. Schulz became...
...Situation Report: Once the most dangerous among the "rogue" nations in Washington?s gallery, the archaic Stalinist state is desperate to come in from the cold - if only to stave off mass starvation and economic collapse. And in its efforts to rejoin the real world, the North Koreans have the all-important support of South Korea, which is, after all, the state that those 40,000 U.S. troops are on the Korean peninsula to protect. But then there's the little matter of Pyongyang's missile program, which has long been the centerpiece of arguments for the National Missile Defense...