Take a 1950's era fundamentalist "hawk" a la Rush Limbaugh seeing liberals and communists in every shadow, ask him to do a semiotic dissection of a comic strip, and the results are mind-bending.

I never realised that Snoopy lying on the doghouse was actually a church, that Linus was a Christ figure, etc. holding the bastion of redneck Baptist morals high. I just thought it was a somewhat charming in a kitchy Bil Keane kind of way comic strip.

Add some anti-hippie and anti-liberal rants about how the kids play baseball and go to church like normal American kids, instead of smoking banana peels and tripping out to "Mellow Yellow", etc. and you have one of the most inadvertently hysterical books I've ever read.

I bought this book when I was a child w/o realizing it wasn't the typical collection of Charlie Brown reprints, but an good-natured attempt to examine how Peanuts reflected American culture. The writing seems dated now, but the examples of Peanuts that Loria chose to illustrate his observations are some of the best Peanuts panels ever. Of course, the panels are all from the 50s and 60s, i.e., well before Schultz lost his muse.

We've had spaghetti at our house three times this month.