Good Grief

Scratch the surface of Scott's lyrics, even his titles, and deeper layers are revealed, often darker layers.  They can be easily overlooked, but they are a subtle presence that gives depth and weight to the work, even when nearly concealed by the catchy hooks and pop melodies.

The title of Game Theory's 1990 compilation, Tinker to Evers to Chance (free download here), is a baseball reference that I superficially recognized.  It seemed like a clever title for a compilation of greatest hits.  Until recently, I knew only that it referred to some great moment in baseball, and it incorporated three names that are evocative of deeper concepts (inventive tinkering, eternity, and randomness).

Evidently Scott played a lot of baseball in his younger days, or at least more than I did.  From the perspective of the hitter — the perspective of the team at bat, and its fans — the title refers to the exact opposite of a greatest hit.  In the words of the 1910 poem that immortalized the baseball trio:

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double —
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."

When I read the poem, another baseball story came to mind, a baseball saga that was familiar to every child in America during the years of Scott Miller's childhood.  After years of persistence, which became decades, it seemed that the young protagonist was doomed to perpetual failure, a failure that reached the mythical proportions of Sisyphus.  This was the story of Charlie Brown:





"Hero or goat" was a running theme in Peanuts for a long while — for example, it also came up in the 1969 movie A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

I suspect that if Scott Miller ever saw or remembered those classic Peanuts moments as an adult, he would have made (and probably did make) the connection from Peanuts to René Girard.

René Girard, a philosopher of anthropology and religion, was one of Scott's intellectual idols.  Scott wrote, "for me, he is the greatest thinker of our time — as important as Einstein would be if everyday life required that we all move around at close to the speed of light."  (Ask Scott, April 29, 2002).  Others agree; scholarly admiration of Girard's work is supported by billionaire Peter Thiel.

A major subject of Girard's work was the religious concept of the scapegoat.  Scapegoating evidently took a position of outsized importance in Scott's intellectual model of the world.  Referring to politics and ethics, Scott wrote, "I'd had an inchoate sense of the supreme importance of both Christianity … and societal scapegoating structures (mostly, I guess you'd say, from writing "poetry" seriously for a long time), and Girard put a lot of the mysterious elements together into a breathtakingly lucid cultural theory."  (Ask Scott, April 26, 2004)

On the strength of Scott's recommendation, I recently read some of Girard's writings.  But I bring a perspective that differs radically from Scott's.  My chosen profession has schooled me in skepticism and cynicism.  When I see a book titled Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, alarm bells go off, and red flags are raised.  My first thought was something like, "I hope the title is intended to be funny or ironic, because if it's not, Girard is likely to be either an intentional fraud, or a pompous fool with delusions of grandeur."

After reading further, no humorous intentions were evident to me, but René Girard doesn't strike me as an intentional fraud.  I'm inclined to think that Girard believes, grandiosely, that he has seen the truth and written the truth.  So far, I find that Girard has developed several superficially appealing kernels of insight, and has interpreted them through his own pre-existing biases.  My opinion is that as a result, Girard exaggerates or overgeneralizes some of his major conclusions to the point of being dead wrong.

I do find Girard's insights interesting, and perhaps worth serious consideration.  Girard is probably well-known among a limited population of philosophy or theology majors, who may have taken courses where he was required reading.  I hate to find myself taking a position so contradictory to Scott's, but if I could argue with Scott today, I would argue that the level of Girard's fame as a "great thinker" is just about exactly at the level where it should be, in comparison to Einstein's fame.  In other words, well-deserved obscurity.

If it seems to be called for, perhaps I'll take on René Girard or his defenders in a future post.  But I'm no philosophy major, and as philosophy texts go, Peanuts is more my speed.

It is not a stretch to say that, like Girard, Peanuts dwelled on the concept of the scapegoat as protagonist.  In its treatment of Charlie Brown as the "goat," the boy who could have been a hero but who perpetually let his team down, Peanuts offered us an endearing kind of scapegoat, one who always bounced back to take another blow.

Scott's lyrics often seem to suggest a tendency to take blame onto himself, to make himself the scapegoat.  He had every reason to blame others for his lack of commercial success, but the rich sarcasm in "you were a prince to give me a chance" seems to be balanced by painful sincerity in the line "I didn't spot the setup."  He even reiterated this point, for those who missed its importance the first time, at the beginning of the Loud Family's second album.  Following yet another painful failure to hit it big, he opened with a reprise of "Spot the Setup", disarmingly adding, "I wasn't relaxed and comfortable, I'll do better next time."

In numerous songs that touch upon failure, at least a portion of Scott's bitterness seems self-directed, but hs search for hope or salvation seems outwardly directed.  Consider "The Red Baron," a title that is certainly a Peanuts reference.  Scott's character in the song berates himself for "decisions made too fast," and calls himself "a high ranked jerk" who let down his friends.  Even as the woman he loves leaves him behind, he absolves her ("don't explain a thing," "stay the way I hate you"), and he fruitlessly asks, "Who's going to finance our deliverance?  Who's going to have a little sympathy?  Who's going to say you can't do this to me?"  Scott could have shaken his fist in the air and shouted, "Curse you, Red Baron!" just as Snoopy did when he was shot down from the sky, going down in flames, time and again.  But instead of cursing the one who shot him down, and instead of taking action to change things for himself, Scott plaintively calls upon a third party, an implicit God-figure who could set things right, if only He were listening.

Peanuts was loved by adults because underneath the superficial humor, a darker layer of adult themes gave depth and weight to Charles Schulz's work.  Schulz wrote in 1975, "The initial theme of Peanuts was based on the cruelty that exists among children."  As a scholarly analysis put it:

Schulz repeatedly undermines adult beliefs about childhood as a carefree, idyllic state of grace; insistently, he pokes at the dream of childhood innocence, as if to undercut our utopian hopes.  His version of childhood is rarely sentimental and often piercingly frank; as one reviewer has put it, the children of Peanuts live lives of "quiet malevolence".  Despite the strip's surface cuteness, cruelty among children is one of its earliest and most obvious themes, as biographer David Michaelis notes.  Schulz himself recognized that his cartoon kids were ruthless egotists and that Peanuts may have been "the cruelest strip going".

Schulz recognized, in a 1985 interview, that Charlie Brown's perpetual disappointment "still breaks a lot of hearts, that there are readers out there desperate to see Charlie Brown win a baseball game....  'But I can't do that,' Schulz says.  'Because then your basic premise disappears.  The foundation collapses.'"

Perhaps.  But much to my surprise, I learned that long after I grew up and stopped paying attention, Charlie Brown was allowed to taste sweet victory.  Seriously.  In the Peanuts comic strips of March 30 and March 31, 1993, the iconic loser hit a game-winning home run.  He even had a chance to do it a second time, a few months later:



...and given the chance to prove it was no fluke, to prove that he had finally overcome the "goat" typology, he actually did it again.  (See here and here.)

Charlie Brown never asked for "a life where I've won all the times that I've lost" — instead, after more than 40 years, he was still earnestly trying his best, still taking on his age's dream.  And perhaps one day he looked his creator in the eye, still hopeful, still foolishly optimistic, and Charles Schulz relented.  The crueler, darker side didn't need one more win.

I haven't uncovered any source that tells us why Charles Schulz changed his mind, and extended grace to his creation.  Did Schulz no longer think he was risking the collapse of his premise, his foundation, his creative integrity?  I suspect that Schulz still was worried about that.  But in his greater maturity, he decided to take that risk.  Perhaps he decided that his creation deserved better, or that his readers deserved better, than that dark world of perpetual cruelty and misfortune.  It is well-known that Schulz identified with Charlie Brown, and perhaps eventually Schulz came to believe that he himself deserved a kinder fate.  Or perhaps Schulz became tired of creating that mean-spirited world, day after day, and the toll it must have taken on his own soul.

Charles Schulz wrote, "I recall all too vividly the struggle which takes place out on the playground.  This is a struggle which adults grow away from and seem to forget about.  Adults learn to protect themselves."

Some do.  Others drop their sword and their shield far too soon.

Would another creator, one more powerful than Charles Schulz, have eventually relented and given Scott Miller the grace of a game-winning home run?  Would the shoulder upstairs have forever remained cold?  Would St. Michael have eventually allowed Scott just one win — just one home run, just one solid kick at Lucy's football?

To be honest with myself, I think not.  That's not God's business, that's just the music industry.  (The devil's business, some might think!)  I have a feeling it's all rigged.

Nevertheless, here's something relevant that Scott wrote about grace (Ask Scott, Nov. 30, 1998):

I think the hope for humility and selflessness is that a certain aspect of transcending subjectivity involves overturning notions of how self-love is perceived in one's self and others, and how it is earned.  To think it can be earned as if at a job is to perpetually suspect you haven't done enough lately to earn it — it has to be a matter of grace, a matter outside causality; this is why the great religions talk about faith and forgiveness.  You can't earn personal forgiveness except by the grace of the person you've offended, and you can't earn cosmic, ontological forgiveness — a feeling of self-love — but by the grace of whatever you call God.

The last sentence twists in an interesting way.  Scott analogizes "personal forgiveness" to "cosmic, ontological forgiveness," which is a fair enough analogy.  But then, almost as an aside, Scott equates "cosmic, ontological forgiveness" with "a feeling of self-love."

I could argue with Scott about that.  In every school or workplace, one can find a few unpleasant people who seem to have an excessive "feeling of self-love," but who don't seem to have earned any cosmic forgiveness.  But I'll set that argument aside.

Instead, let's consider Scott's first point.  The Girardian scapegoat, or the "goat" of Peanuts, can achieve his grace, his forgiveness, his self-love, from someplace "outside causality."  It cannot be earned, but is only given "by the grace of whatever you call God."  In other words, not by placing the blame, not by cursing the Red Baron, but by begging mercy from St. Michael.

I truly don't know what Scott called God, and where he placed his faith.  I don't know whether Scott placed his own bets on a nameless grace.  I can only offer my own opinions.

As a believer in God, I think one of a human being's highest callings is to become more like our creator by imitating God's example.  We can follow in God's footsteps by becoming creators, by producing works of creativity.  When we become artists, we are both a creation and a creator.  The art can be the artist.

And if I am interpreting Scott's words from 1998 correctly, I think he might agree with this much:  if we who create are able to see the image of our creator in ourselves, then perhaps we can find grace within ourselves, and grant it to ourselves.

But grace is not the same thing as winning the game.

Grace is the ability to see the blessings we have been given, and to be content.


Addendum:
Scott Miller's friend and bandmate Gil Ray graciously responded:

Gil Ray:  Interesting stuff. Way over my head, though..didn't get much book learnin'. Scott would go off on this kinda stuff during radio interviews...I quickly learned to a. quit going to them, and b. look for beer. :)

Additional responses from longtime fans of Scott are reproduced as anonymous comments below.