Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

by Chuck Klosterman

I’m writing about. I was honored to write this foreword. I still can’t believe I was asked to do so. But I wish the essay I ultimately typed into my keyboard remotely reflected the essay that still exists inside my skull. Something was lost in the translation; I think I just choked. My relationship to Peanuts—and specifically to the character of Charlie Brown—is so overwhelming that I couldn’t describe the things I wanted to describe. It was too uncanny. I feel more intimately connected to Charlie Brown than to any musician or any athlete, and I care about Peanuts more than any novel or any film. I’m almost embarrassed by the depth of this feeling. I haven’t watched A Charlie Brown Christmas in at least twenty-five years, solely because I can’t emotionally reconcile the final scene: I can’t get over the fact that the other kids don’t tell Charlie Brown that his decision to pick the tiny, pathetic tree was ultimately the right call. They wish him a Merry Christmas and help him sing “Hark! The Herald Angels,” but they never concede he was correct. This will bother me forever. Even writing this paragraph is making me angry.