JBrown wrote: Except I don't think America's unwarranted sunny disposition has much to do with lack of intelligence, it has more to do with the expectation that one is supposed to at all times put on a smiling face. Not just to please the customers & boss but also because discontent, pessimism, dissatisfaction, are--must be!--rooted in personal failings and to admit these feelings would be to reveal a terrible mismatch with the world. We're all happy just like we're all middle class.
Joanna: Well, yes and no. I agree with your description of the "have a nice day" syndrome. At the same time, you cannot have failed to notice the "I'm mad as hell and won't take it anymore" strain.
No -- I don't notice it at all. Could you give some empirical backing to this (other than anecdotage)?
Joanna: Geraldo and Fox tv capitalize on this.
Geraldo & Fox are very different affairs, and I see no reason to combine them in this way. And Geraldo of course constitutes a special selection. Of course out of 300 million people you can find anything you want to find for your purposes. How many people out of that 300 million appeaar in a year on Geraldo? Not a very good sample of anything. This tells us nothing about u.s. culture (or group psychology) as a whole.
Joanna: That's the other side of the happy face. Except, it's not anger. I think it's really anger covering up fear.
Evidence? Fear of what? I simply have never noticed anything in the people I've met over 77 years that would justify this. Again, as with the handful that appear on Geraldo, doubtless one can pile up some anecdotate, but as cultural analysis it doesn't seem to fly.
Joanna: The worst combination. It is the anger that one is willing to put in the service of the powers that be in order to get a seat on the life boat.
Oh come now. Where is your evidence that people think they are on a sinking boat? Considering how hard the press works to generate fear about pedophilia, street crime, etc. the actual fear of either seems pretty forced. I just don't think Fear is a useful category for the u.s. today. If I were to engage in such amateur mass psychologizing I would think Thoreau's quiet desperation a more useful start, but I don't have much evidence for that either. I think we would do best to knock off on the amateur psychology.
Joanna: Hitler understood this anger-fear-emotion perfectly and exploited it for all it was worth.
Evidence?
Carrol Joanna
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