{"id":6071,"date":"2020-08-29T07:21:07","date_gmt":"2020-08-29T14:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/?p=6071"},"modified":"2020-08-26T14:10:11","modified_gmt":"2020-08-26T21:10:11","slug":"when-you-think-you-understand-a-strip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/2020\/08\/when-you-think-you-understand-a-strip\/","title":{"rendered":"When you think you understand a strip…"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a strip from the 1950s<\/a> where Charlie Brown is examining the books on Lucy’s shelf and finds such titles as\u00a0Can a Fuss-Budget Find Love and Happiness?<\/em>,\u00a0The Decline and Fall of the Fuss-Budget<\/em>, and, as a punchline,\u00a0Can a Fuss-Budget Become President?<\/em> And I thought I got the joke, I really did. After all, I recognized that second title as a reference to the classic history\u00a0The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire<\/em>; I hadn’t read that six-volume eighteenth century set, but I had read the lighter 1950 book\u00a0The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody<\/i><\/em> by Will Cuppy, which may well have been on Schulz’s mind. So I thought they were all playing off titles at the time, and it was clear to me what the last one was: some book asking the question “Can a Catholic Become President?” I actually own a book on that question, although not under that title.<\/p>\n

Now, I’m going to pause here for some of the younger members of the AAUGH Blog readership. That whole question may seem odd, wondering whether a specific type of Christian can become president. However, in the 1950s, this had not yet happened, and people expressed concern that a Catholic’s president’s first allegiance would not be the US, but to Rome, and that rather than being a leader, he would follow the dictates of the Pope. (This was before the public assumed that elected officials would be very weak adherents of whatever faith they laid claim to.)<\/p>\n

Of course, all this was answered in 1960 when a Catholic\u00a0was<\/em> elected president, and everything went fine. (Well, except for the assassination. Okay, not everything went fine, but the Catholicism was not a difficulty.)<\/p>\n

Here’s the problem I realized today: the strip is a year too early. It ran on August 2, 1956, and while I’m sure people had mused on the topic before then, it really didn’t become a question until 1957. That’s when folks really started looking at Senator John F. Kennedy as a possible candidate for the presidency. It’s not something that would’ve had the public discourse that would make it a good punchline in 1956. But I can’t find an appropriate book title that would match it. I’m sure I’m missing something.<\/p>\n

(There’s an old line about “America is where any man can become president… and usually does” that I want to attribute to Will Rogers, but given how today is going, I’m probably wrong.)<\/p>\n

Header image from Dear President Johnson<\/a>\"\"<\/strong>, copyright by the Bill Adler estate and the Charles Schulz estate.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a strip from the 1950s where Charlie Brown is examining the books on Lucy’s shelf and finds such titles as\u00a0Can a Fuss-Budget Find Love and Happiness?,\u00a0The Decline and Fall of the Fuss-Budget, and, as a punchline,\u00a0Can a Fuss-Budget Become President? And I thought I got the joke, I really … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4260,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","filesize_raw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}