There is no history of lynchings associated with the Popeye, and Popeye isn't the caricature of all sailors[1], so I'll be offended at whatever I want to be offended at thank you very much.
Please note, I said "should not" instead "can not". You
can be offended by whatever you feel like, I'd just put it to you that, with Marxist mobs on the march, keen to genocide
both of us, that maybe your efforts at indignation would be better spent at them, rather than the cartoon ad copy of a Jewish liberal from 80 years ago.
I remember back in HS in the 1980s when I went to an overwhelmingly white, southern private high school. I purposefully turned a blind eye to all of the racism I saw out of self preservation. One day I saw a fellow student drawing a swaztika on the computer. I was like "Why the hell are you doing that?" He was like "I'm German. This is part of my German heritage." I started to say something....then I realized he used the same argument many of my fellow students used about the confederate flag. (And yes I know not all confederate flag waivers are racists. But the kids that had the KKK cartoon on their dorm wall? Yeah...that was racist.)
I wish my high school experience was as benign as that.
See, I've never run across much of that "white privilege" that supposedly is just lying around to be picked up like Mario coins by white folks only.
I grew up poor in a small town in NJ, in a winterized 900 square foot summer cottage, so I didn't get a private school choice.
The town sent it's HS students to two schools that they had "sharing" agreements with for funding, the one to the south was an OK, mostly white suburban school. The one to the north was a failed ghetto school, almost universally black, and by the late 70s when I was shipped there as part of racially motivated "blending scheme" dictated by government, it had devolved into another "Eastside High".
Until I could, basically, "run away" at 16 during the summer after finishing my sophomore year, I had to endure racism heaped on me that makes drawing unsettling pictures a welcome respite.
I was beaten, punched, mugged, had knives and guns drawn on me, multiple times, simply for being the "white boy".
I still recall to this day, approaching a dude who was a Nation of Islam follower and great espounder of the edicts of Malcolm X.
While this dude, I can't recall his name, he had taken a Muslim name of some sort, but had started in the system at the same time as me with a "given" name of James Wright, was certainly not "friendly" toward me, he had not taken part in the general badgering of the handful of whiteys and gave off the air of an "intellectual", so I figured if anybody might give an honest answer to my question, it would be him.
What was my question? Simple: why do you hate me so much?
Well, I got the answer you might expect, a half hour harangue on the evils of the white race, and a prognostication that ultimately people like him will be in power, and when they are, they will use that power to exterminate me once and for all.
His words:
"exterminate once and for all".
Not much to say past that point and I haven't told anybody the details of that encounter in over thirty years now....
I became the "Boy Named Sue" after that.
I grew up fast and I grew up mean and got the fuck out of there as soon as I could.
I don't give the Flit ads a pass. That doesn't mean I've cancelled Dr. Seuss. But just like I can't tell you what you can and can't read, you can't tell me how to feel about what I read or chose not to read.
Well, good, and I'm not even a huge fan, Giesel was an unabashed lefty, no doubt, so I don't have a dog in the hunt.
Life is full of slights and "disrespects"...too much power given to those minor affronts leads to hatreds much worse.