How to Read Donald Duck
In the course of Donald’s travels, we are given portraits of three societies and cannot help but draw comparisons. The first world is our own: modern day Duckberg, bustling with experts and petty bureaucrats. There are scientists, poring over dusty museum relics. There are eggheads of another sort, barons of the poultry industry who would process the world into one giant egg, as the globe in their conference room suggests. And there are the doltish but equally greedy farmers, seeking to package nature for profit by breeding squae fryers with round corners. Each group is after the same object in the same devouring way because it represents money: the square egg.
In such a society, position and salary are everything. Hierarchies form, and the object of life becomes climbing the ladder so you can step on the guy below. When we first see Donald, he is a lowly Fourth Assistant Janitor, struggling to move up to Third. The cadre of archaeologists aboard ship is just as stratified: each assistant can pass orders and omelets only to the next level. Even ptomaine posioning must move in an orderly fashion along the chain of authority.
We might expect better of the Andean natives, who dress in traditional costume and appear to make a simple living gathering reeds. But toruist trade has reached into the mountains, and the locals are out for every centavo they can snatch. Learning that Donald wants square eggs, they mass-produce replicas using the modern convenience of a Ward and Roebuck cement mixer. Donald, who charges into the village waving a fistful of dollars, is not much better and deserves to be swindled. The natives are simply playing the money game back at him.
Only the valley of the square people is untouched by greed. Sheltered from the rest of the world by mountains and mists, it seems to be Utopia. Everyone is friendly, southern hospitality is the order of the day, and the Ducks are hailed as dignataries, in marked contrast to the treatment they received as assistant janitors. Indeed, the valley’s name seems oddly out of joint with its happy disposition. But utopias, as Barks was fond of showing us, have a way of becoming Plain Awful.
The only other visitor ever to have penetrated the mists was another American, Professor Rhutt Betlah of the Birmingham School of English. By an ironic twist, this explorer was himself the relic of a lost civilization; and like many colonizers before him, he left the stamp of his culture on the land. Carrying southern customs and dialect even further south, he established, in insular and agrarian Plain Awful, an outpost of insular and agrarian Dixie. The natives, being square, were ripe for the transformation.
It is remarkable how much Plain Awful resembles the ante-bellum South. The folk may not work cotton plantations, but they live close to the soil — so close that they fuse human and topographic features, taking on a rocky look. President and Congress constitute a traditionally idle aristocracy, ruling by ceremony rather than action. In some ways this is good: it means that rank is purely nominal. Donald and the boys are welcomed as equals, given meaningless titles, and treated with honor. But nothing seems to get done in Plain Awful. Someone must quarry the great stone blocks that make up the local architecture, but we never see laborers. Ceremony and egg gathering, these are the daily rounds. Toil and sweat in the quarries fall outisde this pattern and are reserved as a punishment for outcasts.
This lurking threat makes us realize how awful the square world really is. Like the Old South, it is built on a rigid social system that ignores the variety of life. If the natives look sculptured, it is because they have been forced into identical shapes by their daily round and their hard stone beds. There is only one law in Plain Awful, but it is a statue so proscriptive that no others are needed: Everything Must Be Square. The cube has replaced the dollar as almighty totem. — Geoffrey Blum “Gracious Living in Plain Awful”
(The book of Marxist ideology by the same title as the title of this post, which has nothing to do with this post: available in most university libraries..)