A dutiful reader will email us soon with the answer to this trivia question: What television character, when asked about how she wanted to be treated after she died, answered, “I want you to take my ashes and spread them all over Burt Reynolds”?
Her idea seemed comical at the time. But not long after, life imitated television.
The bizarre tale begins after the wedding of the famous baseball player Joe DiMaggio and the actress Marilyn Monroe. During the marriage, the dutiful DiMaggio learned that Marilyn had bought a crypt at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. So he decided to purchase two himself: one directly above hers, the other adjacent.
When the couple divorced in 1954, DiMaggio chose to divorce her in death, too, and sold the crypt above hers to a friend, Richard Posner.
Eight years later, Monroe died.
We flash forward to 1986. Posner became ill. Sensing he was dying, he summoned his wife, Elsie, close to him as he lay in bed. “Lean down,” he said, and she did. And then he whispered to her, “If I croak, if you don’t put me upside down over Marilyn, I’ll haunt you the rest of your life.”
Apparently dutiful herself, Elsie Posner later obliged her husband’s last request. “I was standing right there,” she later told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “and the funeral director turned him over.”
Now we flash forward to 2009. Feeling the weight of a $1.8 million mortgage on her Beverly Hills home and wanting to pass the home to her children without any encumbrances, Elsie got a thoroughly modern idea: She would auction off the crypt on eBay.
She set a starting price of $500,000. But when the bidding frenzy ended in late August, Elsie Posner had another enormous reason to bless the memory of her ex-husband Richard. The crypt he had bought from DiMaggio went for $4.6 million.
This short story perfectly captures us. It reveals the spread of technology with the eBay auction; our fascination with celebrity and their deaths; our affluence that leaves some of us with $4 million to spend on a hole in a wall; and our fascination with sex.
Religion works its way in here, too, obviously. Mr. Posner believed in life after death, like most Americans. We believe to an extent unmatched almost anywhere. According to a recent Pew report, 82 percent of us believe in God, and 9 percent believe in some other higher power; 74 percent believe in life after death, and 85 percent believe in heaven (although one in three Protestants believes that only Christians gain admittance there). Only one in twenty-five of us claims to be atheist or agnostic.
Clearly, Richard Posner believed. But his belief went beyond that and demonstrated one of our most remarked-upon traits: our bigger-than-Texas optimism. Richard Posner obviously did not believe just in life after death; he believed in sex after death, too. And his only-in-America optimism led him to believe not just in sex after death but in sex with the sex symbol of his entire generation, through four feet of concrete, in a memorial park in Los Angeles, California.
Welcome to America the Optimistic.
On March 24, 2005, Americans witnessed a new import from England: a television show. It was called The Office, and a year later it won an Emmy as television’s outstanding comedy series.
The original version of the program aired in the United Kingdom in 2001 and was created by Stephen Merchant and the comedian Richard Gervais. America was not the first country to receive an imported version; the French adaptation Le Bureau aired in 2004.
When Gervais began to create the American version, however, he realized it would have to be different, because we are. When later asked about this, he noted four major differences between Americans and Brits: “You’re smarter, you have better teeth, you’re more ambitious, you’re slightly broader.” Then the comedian turned more serious, to a fifth difference: “But the big difference, Americans are more optimistic. You are told you can be the next president of the United States, and you can. In Britain, it’s ‘What happened to you?’ ”
Gervais knew about American optimism because he’d seen American movies, which for forty years had ended the way you’d expect in a nation of optimists: happily. They’re so predictable that when the screenwriter in Robert Altman’s satire of American moviemaking, The Player, insists that he’s not going for a happy ending, he observes, “It’s not even an American film at all.”
In 1969, Gervais was only eight years old, so he missed a rare period of Hollywood films that might have led him to view us differently. All four of that year’s top-grossing films—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider—ended unhappily. Butch and Sundance, Cowboy’s Ratzo Rizzo, and Easy Rider’s Wyatt and Billy all die, and Horses’ Jane Fonda character is arrested for her mercy killing of a marathon dancer.
What accounts for this unusual year in American film? Consider our culture in the few years leading up to it: the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr., (1968), and Robert Kennedy (1969), and the escalation of both the war in Vietnam and the American protests against it. Is it surprising, then, that both the happy ending and the American comedy suffered from 1969 to 1971, and that among the very few top-grossing comedies we had M*A*S*H* and Catch-22, which were a genre all to themselves—the antiwar comedy, with tones more cynical than comical?
But that was then. Of course, today we occasionally see sad endings—Terms of Endearment in 1983 and Steel Magnolias in 1989, for example. But they’re the exceptions that prove the rule: Americans believe in happy endings. But then, what else would optimists believe in?
We buy thousands of copies of “believe” songs from Mac Davis, Brooks & Dunn, and the Platters. If it rains today, we know tomorrow will be a brand-new day; this optimism features in the titles of songs by Sting, Michael Jackson, and Van Morrison, and in the musical about The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, and echoes in the musical about Little Orphan Annie, Annie: “The sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar.”
In America, even our orphans believe everything will come out okay.
We believe in optimism and insist that others share it. You see it in our politics, on a bumper sticker that started appearing in 2009: “Annoy a liberal. Work hard and be happy.” That sentiment suggests that conservatives do not merely disagree with liberals’ politics; they disagree with their negative attitudes. Liberals always are unhappy: wars in the Middle East, income equality, the condition of the economy. Don’t worry, liberals, the bumper sticker urges them. Be happy.
We see this everywhere we look. Indeed, while we might worry about the apparent increases in narcissistic behavior, we also might consider this: Narcissists are likely to call themselves very attractive and are very likely to make $70,000 a year by the time they reach age thirty. But wouldn’t optimists do that, too—and isn’t optimism one of our most valuable traits?
That’s the conclusion of the professor David Landes. In his exhaustive look at world economic history, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, he concludes that optimism is the salient trait of great nations.
In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive…. [T]hat is the way of achievement, civilization, achievement and success…. Educated, eye-open optimism pays.
And we certainly have it. In a December 2008 Harris Interactive/Financial Times survey, majorities in France (63 percent), Italy (62 percent), Spain (59 percent), Great Britain (58 percent), and Germany (52 percent) were pessimistic about their own economic situation. But 54 percent of Americans were optimistic about theirs. In a separate question, 83 percent of the French, 74 percent of Italians, 70 percent of Brits and Spaniards, and 63 percent of Germans said they were pessimistic about their country’s economic status. And the Americans? Only 52 percent of us felt pessimistic.
Harris regularly asks Americans about our overall life satisfaction. In October of 2009, 65 percent of us reported being very satisfied with the life we lead. In a Europe–U.S. comparison survey a few years earlier, 58 percent of Americans were very satisfied, almost twice the percentage found in Europe.
Even when our economy looked worse, in the middle of 2009, we held strong. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll, 75 percent of those surveyed had experienced the job or pay cut of a close friend or family member, yet two-thirds said they felt optimistic about their own family’s future in the next twelve months, a percentage about the same as researchers had found the year before.
Two final telling statistics reflect our cheery outlook. A recent study found that over 80 percent of us believe in miracles. While this doesn’t surprise American readers, it just startled the readers of this book’s German and French translations; only 39 percent of Germans and 37 percent of French people believe in miracles. What they are most likely to believe in instead is that their day has passed.
We believe in miracles on earth and miracles after it. Again, over 80 percent of us believe in life after death, but only half of French people do. This is not surprising, given that the classic French work of literature Candide (its full French title is Candide, ou l’Optimisme) is a merciless attack on the optimism of the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and is the book that brought the word “optimism” into our language, just after the American Revolution.
Perhaps this most clearly reveals just how new optimism is; the word itself is only, and exactly, three hundred years old as this is being printed.
Where did we get all this cheeriness and confidence? Might our history explain it?
Our ancestors arrived with all of their clothes on their backs or in tiny bags, many with valuable stamps or coins that they could exchange for a few months’ food and rent, and within decades they built an empire of mills and factories and all their products, turning our unique abundance into even more abundance. The historian David Potter thought this was the case, considering our character so much a product of our abundance that he titled his classic work on the American character People of Plenty.
We became the planet’s great believers, almost all of us to some degree a Jay Gatsby. By the end of Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, we learn that this man with a closetful of Egyptian cotton shirts of every color and a sprawling estate overlooking Long Island Sound is actually Jimmy Gatz, the son of a poor Minnesota farmer. We learn he had risen each day at 6 a.m., exercised from 6:15 to 6:30, studied from 7:15 to 8:15, worked for eight hours, and from 5 until 9 p.m. practiced “elocution, poise and how to attain it.”
When Americans returned from World War II, millions of them made South Pacific among the most successful musicals, and later movies, of all time. Its music—two songs particularly—seem to perfectly capture American optimism. One song sounds like The Power of Positive Thinking. It’s “Happy Talk”:
Happy talk, keep talkin’ happy talk,
Talk about things you’d like to do.
You gotta have a dream.
If you don’t have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?
Lest we were in doubt about the relentless hopefulness of this musical, set during a war of all settings, another hit from the show makes the message even clearer:
I could say life is just a bowl of Jell-O
And appear more intelligent and smart,
But I’m stuck like a dope
With a thing called hope,
And I can’t get it out of my heart!
The song was called “A Cockeyed Optimist,” and our cockeyed optimism only grew from there. We saw two Kennedys and Martin Luther King assassinated, an Asian war drag on without resolution, a president impeached, the Twin Towers collapse, and a deepening financial recession. Yet after all that, two years after the Towers fell, Ricky Gervais looked hard at us, took the American pulse, and said it was beating hard.
We still believed.
All of this raises for us an interesting question: Was the recent economic crisis just one of those cyclical events, perhaps set off by greedy financial firms? Or did we cause it?
Consider at least two of the events that contributed to the near-Depression: Banks offered mortgages to people who could not repay them, and people took mortgages they could not repay. But did either party to those transactions truly think the exchange was doomed from the beginning?
Why would they? We—whether we’re the ones working for a financial institution or the folks looking for a house—believe that tomorrow will be a brand-new day. Sure, things look a bit grim, companies are laying people off, and our credit cards are maxed out. But that’s today; tomorrow will be better. So optimists offer the mortgages, and optimists take them.
So if bad loans spelled our long period of doom, it’s worth considering: Did they reflect a weakness in us or just remind us that too much of anything—including optimism—can be dangerous?
Economists also frequently lament a related issue: Americans spend too much and save too little. Benjamin Franklin and others, years ago, stressed frugality: Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish; a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; save for a rainy day.
But that was Benjamin Franklin, and he wasn’t here to witness two world wars and see us become the greatest nation on earth, and then Ronald Reagan’s Shining City on the Hill. He wasn’t here to hear John Kennedy say we would have a man on the moon by the end of the decade and then witness one giant step on the moon just when he promised. He wasn’t here to see us dominate the digitalization of the globe. And Franklin wasn’t here to gather the confidence that comes from so many triumphs and so much growth.
So we believe, and then events confirm we should have. And before long, there’s a reason we don’t save for rainy days: We don’t believe in rainy days.
“Advertising sells one thing: happiness,” reports Don Draper, the ad guru of AMC’s hit TV show Mad Men. In announcing this, Draper echoes what a real-life marketer, Charles Revson, famously expressed. When someone suggested that his company, Revlon, made perfume, Revson corrected him. “In the factories, we make perfume,” Revson said, “but in the stores, we sell hope.”
Fortunately, both Draper and Revson find fertile ground in America. People who believe in major miracles, as we do, are even more apt to believe in lesser ones, like having thinner thighs in just seconds a day or becoming rich by working four hours a week. By our nature, we trust claims of “New and Improved!” because we believe in new and improved.
Skeptics—France has millions; the UK, too—are nearly immune to bold promises of a better life, and their advertising reflects it. Their ads are almost apologetic about asking for our patronage. But Americans listen to, and respond to, “New and Improved!” promises every day.
Americans believe, particularly in the greatness that surrounds them. It’s what inclines Americans to another distinctive American trait: hyperbole, which infiltrates our advertising. We find few countries in which the language is so consistently inflated—the best, the best of all time.
The tall tale is a classic example, virtually an American invention. Our belief in ourselves and our greatness manifested itself once in a favorite tall tale of the Kentucky river men, including the famous Daniel Boone, who could “squat lower, jump up higher, dive in deeper, stay down longer, and come out drier than anyone.”
Advertising hyperbole therefore hardly seems like hyperbole. The claims are grandiose and, judging by their repetition, effective.
So doesn’t this seem the case? Being optimists, we believe grand claims and take our cues from the optimists who make them.
To see how our native optimism has been tapped in marketing, we will find no better examples than two men and one enterprise: a publisher, an author, and a retailer.
Before 1982, America’s newspapers, in sober black and white, captured bad news: murders; car, airplane, and stock market crashes; and the untimely deaths of the famous. After decades of leading cheers for their local teams, sports pages regularly castigated the stars and the teams’ management and seemed to feature more crime reports involving players than scores of games.
Enough, Al Neuharth decided, and in August 1982, he gave us USA Today.
USA Today is Annie. It’s a rosier view of “us,” as the paper regularly refers to us. It talks directly to us and roots for us. To ensure we understand its cheery view, the paper abandons the traditional black and white. As we see with the iPod, the paper trades out the classic colors of serious adulthood—navy blue, charcoal gray, chocolate brown, and forest green—in favor of the bright Fisher-Price colors of our childhoods—red orange, goldenrod, light blue, bright green, and lavender blue. All of this deliberately suggests news as fun and play, typifying the paper that reasonably can be called “America’s Cheerleader.” USA Today knows: We believe.
To peek into one company that understands our optimism, click on Target.com—but click first on its competitor, Walmart.com.
Scan several pages of the Walmart site, and what do we see? Stuff: coats, swim suits, umbrellas, T-shirts. Where we don’t see stuff, we see long lists of it: America’s shopping list. What we don’t see, however, are people; there are none. From, this, Wal-Mart makes it clear: It just sells stuff at good prices.
Now click over to Target.com. What do we see? Women, men, boys and girls, babies. Now notice something else. Yes, they are wearing stuff, but what we notice first is not their stuff but their faces: They are smiling. They radiate happiness and optimism.
In sharp contrast to models in fashion magazines, who strike the catatonic pose of the catwalk—“I’m too sexy for my skirt”—the models on Target’s website strike the classic pose of the cheerleading squad for the high school yearbook photo. Each one appears to be posing for a tooth-whitener ad: She is beaming.
Target gets us; in marketing’s top circles, the retailer is famous for getting us. Wal-Mart thinks we buy stuff, but Target gets it: Stuff sells well, but optimism sells even better.
Finally, there is a writer who gets us, and sells millions of books partly because of it. Malcolm Gladwell graduated from Harvard and writes for the New Yorker, which sends us two clues that he might be a liberal and intellectual, and therefore perhaps a pessimist. Is he?
Consider this startling, only-in-America section from Gladwell’s introduction to Outliers:
What if we… began instead examining our own decision-making and behavior through the most powerful of microscopes. I think that would change the way wars are fought, the kind of products we see on the shelves, the kind of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, and on and on. And if we were to combine all of those little changes, we would end up with a different and better world.
Could Annie have said this better?
We love Gladwell because he tells interesting stories very well. But we also like how Gladwell makes us feel. He assures us that things will get better, that the sun will come out tomorrow.
He believes, and we love him because we do, too.