In breaking news, Cannabis Culture magazine poses the question that the mainstream media has been afraid to ask: “Is the spinach which gives Popeye his super-strength really a metaphor for another magical herb?”
And then makes a convincing case:
The best evidence is that during the 1920’s and 1930’s, the era when Popeye was created, “spinach” was a very common code word for marijuana. One classic example is The Spinach Song, recorded in 1938 by the popular jazz band Julia Lee and her Boyfriends … the popular song used spinach as an obvious metaphor for pot.
Second, anti-marijuana propaganda of the time claimed that marijuana use induced super-strength. Overblown media reports proclaimed that pot smokers became extraordinarily strong, and even immune to bullets. So tying in Popeye’s mighty strength with his sucking back some spinach would have seemed like an obvious cannabis connection at the time.
The eternal question over just what, exactly, were in those “Scooby snacks” is certain to be next for these intrepid reporters.
In other comic-related news, The New York Review of Books tackles a growing concern in American literature: the rise of the comic book geek as serious author. In an essay about Jonathan Lethem called “Welcome to the New Dork,” critic John Leonard writes:
According to Lethem, men without women employ comic books to compensate for their absence. When his characters aren’t listening to Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads, or dreaming up scenarios for interactive video games, or hiring out as “advertising robots” at the local Undermall, or destroying the world with air bags made of cabbages, they are thinking about Stan Lee and R. Crumb, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Dr. Doom, and Captain America. If Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Walt Whitman, and Carl Jung show up in “Super Goat Man,” the most ambitious of these stories [from Lethem’s November 2004 collection “Men and Cartoons”], they are really only red herrings or highbrow beards in an epic tale of an Electric Comics superhero from the Sixties who is reduced in the Eighties to teaching a college seminar on “Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life 1955-1975.”
Leonard really hits on something here. Over the last couple years, the crop of 40-something novelists which includes Lethem, Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen (in his apologia for the “Peanuts” comic strip recently published in The New Yorker) have all publicly come out about their fascination with the comic books of their youth. Michael Chabon leads the pack, having cited the creators of Superman as a partial inspiration for his comic-driven novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, published his own graphic novel, The Escapist, and given the keynote speech at 2004’s “Eisner Awards” for comic book publishing. Moody, for his part, once published a comic strip in Details magazine, and his novel “The Ice Storm” followed a “Fantastic Four” motif.
Not to be outdone, the slightly younger 30-something set has also jumped into the act, with McSweeney’s coming out with a “comics” issue last year.
So what’s that all about? Leonard’s thesis, in part, is that “Male adulthood proved to be much less fun than the masked dreams of pop culture had led little boys to believe.” Perhaps, but it also seems tied in with the contemporary urge to marry what has been considered lowbrow with highbrow culture, and to merge the rich storylines provided by comic books with the wide-open post-post-everything literary scene that’s seen it all — twice. Okay, gang — there’s your instructions for that doctoral thesis!
Over at The New Republic, things take a decidedly more “reality-based” turn. Dan Ephron checks in with the story of Ali Hattar, a Christian journalist in Jordan who gives conspiracy-laden speeches denouncing the United States and who currently faces two years in prison for his work. It’s a sticky subject for both Jordan and the United States, which holds that country up as an example of the freedoms that should be enjoyed by other countries in the region. Ephron notes that “Jordan has tried hard to stifle even trifling anti-American rhetoric with measures that, since the al Qaeda attacks of September 11, have grown increasingly repressive. And that erosion in government tolerance of dissent not only undermines Jordan’s image but also causes many Jordanians to laugh off George W. Bush’s frequent remarks about advancing democracy in the Middle East.”
And just in case you thought you could avoid it, think again. The Terri Schiavo case looms large over the magazine racks this week, with The Weekly Standard‘s cover asking “Who Speaks for Terri Schiavo?” The answer, apparently, is The Weekly Standard. Eric Cohen, one among many to comment on the case in this issue, blames “ideological liberalism” for “failing” Schiavo. Claiming that modern liberalism has betrayed “the vulnerable people it once claimed to speak for,” Cohen cherry-picks his evidence in an attempt to portray liberals as bloodless ghouls, unstirred by human suffering.
(The really dismaying thing about all this is that Cohen’s argument is by far the most thoughtful in the all-Schiavo-all-the-time issue of the Standard.)
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.