Posted by
Sam Heath on Thursday, February 14, 2008 1:29:42 PM
Today is Valentine’s Day, that time of year Charles Schulz always had Charlie Brown checking the mailbox in vain hoping for a Valentine. Schulz certainly understood romance, and for me this was one of the things that made “Peanuts” such an endearing strip and Schulz such an admirable human being. He so very well understood human nature with all its faults and weaknesses as well as strengths, and nothing so well demonstrated this as Charlie Brown’s unrequited love for the little red-haired girl, hoping for that Valentine that never comes.
While attending Mt. Vernon Elementary in Bakersfield how well I recall the making of Valentine’s in class, the cutting of red construction paper into the shape of hearts and pasting white lace paper around them; and there were those small, heart-shaped candies with the motto “Will you be my Valentine” some really courageous boy might give to one of the girls. Sadly, such a thing now would probably get the boy in trouble, accused of sexual harassment.
P. G. Wodehouse pointed out the great Musicals were the last time poets worked in America, and there are very few even my age who can name the two great musicals that were such superbly successful artistic works of real romance the lovers never even kiss. The audiences are so drawn into the very poetry of the unfolding drama of romance there is never any need for the lovers to kiss, and such a thing would have been so misplaced poetically as to jar the sensibilities.
But the poets who gave us the great Musicals were products of my generation raised to the great literature of our past, a literature filled with the romance of possibilities and filled with hope for a future; and this was the inspiration for such great poetic works of art brought to the stages and screens of America. However, like the welfare offices throughout America where hope goes to die, just so with other writers that were not poets, those determined to kill the inspiration and hopes of poets. And now it would seem these haters of beauty and romance in America have been enormously successful in their perversion of beauty and romance, promoting promiscuous sex, screaming noise and violence in their place.
My generation is quickly passing away now, and the haters of the beauty and romance so well portrayed by the great Musicals are saying “good riddance,” applauding themselves for their success in promoting “reality” rather than the “nonsense” of romantic poets. But, gentle reader, what will be the real loss to America when there is no longer any place for the dreamers and poets who in their hopes for a better America continue to express their longings for such things like beauty and romance in our lives?
Sadly for our nation there is proof abundant all around for the loss of beauty and romance, we see such proof of this loss in the barbarism of forsaking civilized good manners and speech, we are drowning in obscenities, vulgar behavior and speech on TV and elsewhere, the hammering sounds assaulting our ears and senses, some of this insane noise purporting to be “music,” but rather sounding like the screeching, drum-pounding demons of hell loosed against us!
While love might well be considered the cruelest of human emotions, knowing it will inevitably be betrayed by either death or infidelity, nevertheless selfless, unconditional and sacrificial love with no sense of sacrifice is the motive force and cause for the best and most noble works and behavior throughout the history of humankind; so much so that the Bible emphasizes love above all the other characteristics with which we are endowed, and the poetry of love is nowhere so well expressed as we find it in the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians where it is properly crowned to reign supreme as the finest expression and proof of our very divinity.