Introduction: America Defined and Refined

Abstract

Optimism is a defining feature of that thing called “American.” It is implicit in virtually every mythic posture that Americans generate, from the ideas of progressivism and manifest destiny to the all-encompassing notion of the American Dream. In fact, as Richard Rodriguez implies above the very idea that someone—some “American”—could possibly not feel optimistic smacks of unpatriotic intransigency. After all, if for some unimaginable reason, someone—some “American”—falls victim to disappointment and loses his (a gender tag that invariably applies) optimism, America’s health care system has pills to treat what surely must be considered an illness. Optimism is an American state of being. To be otherwise is to be out of tune, out of touch, unnatural, ill. Not to be optimistic is a sickness; it requires isolation, to be quarantined, lest it spread, like some smallpox epidemic among a vulnerable native population.

Americans feel disappointment so keenly because our optimism is so large and is so often insisted upon by historians. And so often justified by history. The stock market measures optimism. If you don’t feel optimistic there must be something wrong with you. There are pills for disappointment

Rodriguez, “Disappointment”¹