I ask you: Has anyone fallen so far as Mr. Peanut?

Going from foppish man-about-town to Public Enemy #1 faster than you can say “Hold my Monocle”? He’s got about as much public sympathy as a boozed-up Mel Gibson with an opinion. He’s banned from schools and restaurants and has entire websites and blogs dedicated to his eradication. Only Joseph Kony enjoys more notoriety at the moment.

I feel like the lowly peanut deserves a break. His pariah status is cramping my style. It would be so nice to send a peanut butter sandwich to school at least one of the 132 days I have to pack a lunch. Surely the turkeys could use a break too. Couldn’t we establish March 28th as Peanuts In Da House day?

But it isn’t really his fault, after all. He seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when we stripped our immunity systems of any useful job to do. Sort of like the victim of a hate crime. Thuggish antibodies sitting around with time on their hands and nothing to do. Who wouldn’t take a baseball bat to a nut in spats and a top hat? Something satisfying in the crack of the shell and the heaving lump of butter left behind.

In my extensive research (read: cursory Google Search) there is no organization dedicated to saving the peanut. Even the Peanut Board’s sheepish mission is to “provide peanut growers with a receptive and growing market.” Nothing about restoring the peanut to its former grandeur, elevating it to the king of nuts, going X-treme protein.

I guess the peanut never stood a chance, suffering first the indignity of the moniker “the goober pea”, the wholly unnecessary foam rubber confection known as the Circus Peanut and then becoming slang for pocket change. Not even an adorable cartoon, which as far as I can determine had nothing to do with nuts or nut products, could save it. How long before the verse becomes “Buy me an Energy Drink and Cracker Jacks”?

Somewhere George Washington Carver weeps.