I Yam What I Yam Department
The Gospel According to Popeye:
Bud Sagendorf and his creation Popeye provide a splendid model for reimaging outmoded theological constructs. While the popular comic strip appeared to most observers in the '30s to be little more than a mindless children's "slug fest," in truth, it plumbed hitherto uncharted depths of syncretism.
The choice of appellations, the characters' professions, even their physiology all combine in a rapturously elegant -- yet sublimely accessible -- new theophany.
That Popeye himself is the heroic Christ-figure is plain enough even for conservative Southern Baptists in Dallas to grasp. His constant battles with the brutish Brutus, a brilliantly conceived anthromorphized realization of man's sinful nature, evokes the toils of Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock up the mountain, only to have it roll down again.
Just as sinful man sins, repents, and yet sins again, the battles of Popeye and Brutus echo Paul's "The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." (Romans 7:19). In fact, Popeye's iconic "Blow me down!" will find its greatest expression in latter-day televangelist Benny Hinn's breathless, ritualistic summonsing of the Holy Spirit. What are we to make, then of Popeye's miraculous draught -- spinach? Is it not clearly "the bread of life" that, when consumed, revitalizes the sinful man? Why spinach? In the immortal words of Bonhoeffer, "Eh? Vy not?"
From the Door, of course.
Roy M. Jacobsen
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