ABSTRACT
The chapter takes its title from a famous 1933 Popeye cartoon used herein to illustrate how music, art, and media can propagate and perpetuate deeply racist beliefs or other prejudices in ways that viewers and auditors might not realize because living in almost willful ignorance of their own history. The chapter’s larger theme is American imperialism and the complicity of music or other teachers in political or other propaganda unless committed to unmasking jingoism and other distortions of truth embedded in national historical and educational narratives. Comparisons are made with the British Empire in which the arts were as much tools of imperial dominance and control as was the military. The United States presents a classic case of how media and the arts play essential roles in the exercise of soft power both nationally and globally through the seductive appeal of popular culture. Children and youth now live in a music and art saturated virtual world driven by populist politics and market forces in which it is more difficult than ever before to distinguish truth from fiction or deliberate falsehood.
