Prophetic Allegory: POPEYE and the American Dream

    (American Life Books, 1983)

From the back cover: Segar's mature style and thought are best exemplefied in “The Pool of Youth” and “Popeye’s Ark”, hereafter reproduced. Consider the scene when Popeye, having built an ark with the goal of founding a new country where there would be no problems and everyone would be happy, discovers a new continent. He addresses his “sheeps” rather in the style of John Winthrop on the Arabella or Lenin at the Finland Station. But the context’s very different. There are no lofty sentiments about eternal freedom, no deistic self-evident truths; instead, a passage that translated into regular English might well have been written by Samuel Johnson. In fact, in Taxation No Tyranny, the old eighteenth-century Tory expressed himself in almost identical terms:

All government is ultimately and essentially absolute. In sovereignty there are no gradations. There may be limited royalty, there may be limited consulship; but there can be no limited government. There must in every society be some power or other from which there is no appeal.

Popeye puts it in less elegant terms: “It will be a land of liberty and justice for those who obey me, and those who don’t will be forced to." So much for the favorite dream of three or four generations of
liberals about government “withering away" once social institutions have been changed so as to allow the natural goodness of humankind to express itself. The only way government will wither away is if civilization itself collapses, if all humankind is wiped out in some cosmic catastrophe—for we, as distinct from animals, live by patterns of human relatedness based upon abstract ideals; and that means “some power or other from which there is no appeal.”
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