LIBERTAS has an interesting post about how that Will.I.Am “Yes We Can” Obama video––in which celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Kate Walsh sing over and mug in front of Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary “concession” speech––is emblematic of a new kind of Hollywood political support. Dirty Harry riffs on a post by Jim Geraghty, who notes that the clip’s “substance-free message of ‘yes we can, unity is good, we have hope and the hopes of children are important’” is unobjectionable “because there’s no ideas in it; it’s entirely emotion.” He goes on to say that aligning oneself with that emotion is less a political action than participation in a “pop-culture phenomnenon.”And because pop culture is something American’s know how to participate in without thinking, by extension Barack Obama becomes the ready-made candidate for those who can’t really handle much more than passive consumption of an image as a stand-in for a feeling.

Dirty Harry actually sees this as a good thing. He likes the idea of ” a quiet advocacy from Hollywood for their guy (or gal)” because it stands in contrast to previous celebrity-led political spectacles, in which stars “have hurt their own careers and the candidate they want elected saying unbelievably stupid things.” But writing about the “Yes I Can’ video at NewTeeVee, Wagner James Au couldn’t disagree more…

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Blogging at BoingBoing about a recently-released 4-DVD set of 1930s Popeye cartoons, Mark Frauenfelder wrote, “Cartoons don’t get any better than this.” I thought that a little funny (well, maybe not funny ha ha, but…) because just last night, my boyfriend and I were watching TV and when a commercial came on for the same box set, Mr. Karina said, “I wonder if that set includes all the racist Popeyes.”

I had not previously been aware that there was a sub-genre of Popeye cartoons that were racist, although I admit that I probably should have been. He’s already an unpleasant enough stereotype of a sailor–why wouldn’t he also be a vehicle for of-the-era anti-other prejudices?

Of course, I went straight to Google and did some research. According to Karl F. Cohen, who wrote a book called Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons And Blacklisted Animators in America, while a number of Popeye shorts are generally considered to be borderline too racist for TV, there’s been no formal attempt to remove these shorts from the marketplace, and it’s up to individual TV stations to decide which episodes to air.

All of the examples he names come from the 1940s, and therefore wouldn’t be contained on this new boxset. However, one of these, a sterling bit of World War II-era propaganda called You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap (1942) is readily available on YouTube, so it must be on some disc, somewhere. Of the eight shorts named by Cohen (who is in turn citing Paul Mulan), only one is in Spout’s database: Fightin’ Pals (1940). No one’s reviewed it yet, but according to its IMDb profile, the action starts when Bluto “sails off to Darkest Africa for exploration” and doesn’t come back right away. Popeye follows, and finds the good doctor with “a bevy of native beauties attending to his every need.” On Spout, I’ve helpfully tagged it “Racist Popeye” for future reference.

Thus concludes your lesson in Reprehensible Pop Culture of the Early 20th Century for today, kids. Go out and play.

Burning Man, the infamous annual week-long neo-hippie desert sojourn, is partnering with a number of corporations in the name of getting green. Predictably, this has ruffled a few feathers, as it seems to fly in the face of at least one or two of Burning Man’s core principles.

Brian Doherty, who literally wrote the (or, at least, a) book on Burning Man, says the problem lies in the fact that some members of the Burner community have watched a certain Cameron Crowe movie a few too many times. To quote liberally from an article published today at Reason Online, titled “Generation Dobler”:

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