I don't know why I like certain mid-century mass-culture products, but I honestly do.  I like Fiestaware.  I like Mr. Rogers.  Someday I'll say more about Mr. Rogers in this space, though I doubt I'll ever talk about Fiestaware.  (It's solid, durable, and colorful--that's all.)

And I definitely like Charles Schulz's cartoon, Peanuts.  The only one that comes close to it is Walt Kelly's Pogo, but that's less persistently about quotidian existential questions and more focused on the inanities of modern politics.  Schulz was famously a theological writer, though hardly ever overtly so.  Yet throughout his strip, there is always the sense of, I would say, mercy.  This piece almost gets it:

“if I were asked to pick the character most likely to find happiness if he or she ever grew up—the real kind, not just the glib, warm-puppy kind—I wouldn’t hesitate to pick Charlie Brown. Maybe he does find a form of redemption in his suffering? He feels his failures deeply, he suffers profoundly, and yet he remains ever willing to take another run at kicking the football or trying to get his kite aloft or pitching the next game or hoping this year, finally, to receive a valentine. If he is a blockhead, it is in part because he cares so much; diffidence doesn’t merit the insult. Like his creator, he has passion and persistence. If he were real, I like to tell myself, Charlie Brown would be fine.”

The key to Charlie Brown, I'd say, for all the despair, is his hope.  Which is both the cause of his torment and the merciful wellspring of his persistence.  Today, when we've by and large confused hope with optimism, we cannot tell the difference.  But there is a difference, and Charlie Brown teaches us it.