Compare the organized world of Milne, where everything works out in the end, with the confusing world Schulz inflicted on his "Li'l Folks." Charlie Brown loses every ball game, every attempted kick of Lucy's football, every game of checkers, can't win the Little Red-Haired Girl. No wonder he gets psychosomatic stomach pains and has to keep shelling out that big nickel each week for Lucy's useless psychiatric advice.
I wish I could say that reading Peanuts will reveal to you a superior philosophy to help you navigate the whitewater rapids of fate. You'll have to settle for a demonstration of PoMo instead.
Postmodernism is a view of the world, originally a style or genre of art. As with Tao, it's difficult to put the meaning of Postmodernism into words. Not because it's an insult to Postmodernists, just I'm not totally sure myself. As with Taoism, anyone who can put Postmodernism into a few words probably doesn't really understand it.
Fortunately, I don't profess to understand it. So I'm going to try to narrow it down to a few thousand words. To reduce the whole concept absurdly, there are two main bits to understand Postmodernism. One is sort of an Existential view of the world. The protagonists of Postmodern literature, theatre, sculpture and comics generally feel that Life is crappy, God is dead (or at least really quiet lately, and why is that?), and therefore the True Meaning of Life is up-for-grabs.
Speaking of "meaning," the other main bit of Postmodernism is this muddy, yucky concept called "Deconstructionism" or "Poststructuralism" or something like that, which goes like this: How do you find the official, most widely-accepted meaning of any word? You look in a dictionary. But the dictionary only shows you a dozen other words, each of which you have to look up, and they might take you back to the original word that you didn't know. Each of those words is subject to debate and interpretation. Some words get associated so strongly with other ideas or accidental events, that their meanings change. For example, an "issue" used to mean a "topic" or a "subject." Through abuse by corporate culture, the word "issue" has now become a euphemism for PROBLEM. It never used to be negative, but now most people would assume you're talking about a bad thing if you said you had some "issues" to discuss with them.
Destruction is always fun, so the Poststructuralists had a blast when they realized they can take this idea that words are muddy, debatable, practically meaningless, and apply it to everything from architecture to politics to science. Since words have no meaning, every idea you thought was logical is meaningless, because you only understood that crap through words. So you never picked a political party because there was any logic to it -- you were only justifying everything you wanted to believe. Architects never really designed buildings to resist earthquakes based on solid principles -- they were rationalizing what they felt would be solid. And all science slips out the window the same way.
Personally I have a gut feeling that words have a little meaning. Even though it's muddy, even though you have to jog around a lot of other words to describe one, and then the word is still up for debate somewhat, I still feel like there's a nugget of meaning down there, and that humans can usually communicate a couple of those nuggets when they want to.
Poststructuralist theory would say that I'm just grasping for straws, wishing for the phantasmal "structure" to our words and ideas about which Western culture has always deluded itself.
But even if you're not consciously trying to use a literary theory to tear down the foundations of Science and Rationalism, you might accidentally end up producing "Postmodern" art, or art that expresses your confusion, your search for meaning, your inability to find meaning. Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" grew up in the middle of the Depression, got the joy of travelling to Europe or the Pacific Islands in way-economy class conditions, on their way to kill and be killed and watch friends get killed. Some of the people who lived through these horrors ceased believing in God. Even the ones who still believed were changed.
Their horror is reflected in their art, sculpture, literature, architecture, tv shows. Look at the genres of stories that sprang up from these survivors of wars, depression, genocide. The hard-boiled detective story. The wary cowboy -- not yer spritely Roy Rogers type, but the chubby, eye-patch-wearing Duke, or Clint the Squint. Faulkner and Hemingway making big bucks with or without happy endings to their books.
Peanuts is all about one depressed little boy in a world of frustration, taunting and failure. How many times did Charlie Brown say, "I'm going to stand here in the rain until I catch pneumonia and die!" (Excuse me if I don't spend the next three years researching this exact number for you.) The rough answer is "plenty." If you've read enough of those paperback reprints from the fifties and sixties, you'll know that this scene was repeated frequently, not only by Chuck, but by Linus and Snoopy too. Usually angry at a parent or friend or Ms. Othmar, thinking suicide would be a nice revenge on the person who mistreated him.
You catch a whiff of the fifty years of anger that will flow through these characters when you read the very first strip, from October 2, 1950, ending with "HOW I HATE HIM!" as Charlie Brown walks off frame.
BACKWARD or ONWARD 