You're a Good Man

One piece of classic Americana is the Charles Schulz comic strip "Peanuts" of which the main character is Charlie Brown.

Charlie Brown is an average kid, gullible, mediocre, and unremarkable. Perhaps this is part of his charm. While the other kids all excel in something (Lucy in her business ventures, Peppermint Patty at sports, Schroeder at music, etc.) and even the dog seems to have a taste of success, Charlie Brown remains "normal" in every sense of the word.  When he grows up, we can quite easily imagine him becoming some sort of middle manager.

Which is to say, Charlie Brown is a loser.

Perhaps the most poignant example of Charlie Brown's temperament is his constant to-and-fro with Lucy, who constantly offers to hold the football for him to kick and without fail yanks it out just before he reaches it, sending him hurling toward the ground with unspent momentum. Every time Lucy offers to hold the football dear old Charlie Brown questions her sincerity, but she always convinces him that she won't trick him this time. And she always does.

Charlie Brown is trusting and sweet, but naïve in every way. And of course we all recognize the greatest sign of this as his unrequited love for the elusive "little red-haired girl", whom we never see.  In fact, other characters rarely even acknowledge her existence. 

Charlie Brown doesn't recognize the good thing he has going with the girl who is actually in love with him, and even more importantly, knows he's alive: Peppermint Patty.

Dear, poor Patty.  We feel for her.  She has always loved Charlie Brown, but he barely notices her.  She has a cool nickname for him that no one else uses.  She's always trying to include him, to help him.  But of course, he's only interested in her "friendship".  She grants him this, but only because she hopes that one day he'll come around and realize that she's perfect for him.

But Charlie Brown would rather pine after the unobtainable and possibly nonexistant red-haired girl than actually work it out with a girl who would make him very happy.

In all this, however, we still have nothing bad to say about Charlie Brown because we all identify with him to some extent.  He's the penultimate loser, the naïve child, the insatiable dreamer in all of us.  And that's why all we have to say as he trips over Lucy's trickery, stumbles around the red-haired girl, fumbles through a baseball game, is this:

"You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."