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Thursday
While corresponding with one of my English readers the other day, I looked for silver linings in what is currently happening in the United States. To many Americans, what we are witnessing makes us unrecognizable to ourselves, with masked agents snatching people off the streets and sending them, all rights suspended, to concentration camps abroad and concentration camps and private prisons at home; with Trump threatening to strip American citizens of citizenship rights; and with non-stop assaults on universities, scientific research, life-saving vaccines, the media, law firms, foreign aid programs, the environment, public wilderness areas, Medicaid, food assistance, and on and on. Our GOP-controlled Congress and the Supreme Court appear to bend to Trump’s will at every juncture.
While pointing to the growing resistance, I wondered whether I was being “Pollyannish” in my search for optimism. The descriptor is taken from Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel Pollyanna, which I read as a child, along with some of the sequels. In it, the newly orphaned 11-year-old plays what she calls “the just being glad game,” in which she finds some reason to be glad in every situation, no matter how desperate.
Over the years, “Pollyanna” has taken on negative connotations as it is applied to those who are hopelessly naïve or who rationalize excessively. According to Wikipedia, Richard Nixon talked about the need to steer a course between Pollyanna and doom-predicting Cassandra, which is to say between ungrounded optimism and out-and-out pessimism (although Cassandra, one could point out, was always right). Others have expressed versions of the same. The ultimate takedown of Pollyannaism may be the concluding scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where Brian, as he is being crucified, is told to “look on the bright side of life.” The movie ends with six crucified prisoners cheerfully singing and whistling,
If life seems jolly rotten
There’s something you’ve forgotten
And that to laugh and smile and dance and sing
When you’re feeling in the dumps
Don’t be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle—that’s the thing
Chorus:
And, always look on the bright side of life,
Always look on the right side of lifeAs far as takedowns, I award second place to Professor “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide.
More on Pollyanna in a moment. First of all, a number of political commentators in recent years have been critiqued for excessive optimism. Poll aggregator Nate Silver accused Democratic pollster Simon Rosenberg of being high on “hopium” (in response Rosenburg defiantly changed the title of his newsletter to “Hopium”), and Robert Hubbell has been charged with undermining Democratic resistance with such positive takes as (to cite Tuesday’s blog) Trump will not in fact be able to cancel the 2026 elections and the Democrats are not in disarray.
Hubbell notes, “Over the eight years of the newsletter’s existence, I have received a dozen or so critiques (usually from Never Trumpers) that my newsletter is too hopeful. These critics have often said that I need to frighten people by alarming them about how bad things can get.”
He also reports one grassroots activist leader complaining,
Your column today gave tens of thousands of readers a great excuse to think to themselves, “Hubbell says we’re going to smash the Republicans because of what they’ve done, so I don’t need to do anything.”
Hubbell’s response is that “part of Trump’s strategy is to dispirit and demotivate us. The media are gleeful accomplices in selectively bashing Democrats while overlooking the corruption and criminality of Trump. Our side needs some hope, perspective, and confidence.”
He concludes,
We need some confidence and swagger to counteract the self-assured pundits who are telling us all is doomed for Democrats. That is not true. We are strong, focused, and determined—and we have not capitulated to a wannabe dictator as has the entire Republican Party. That gives me hope in our future prospects—and it should do the same for you.
Back to Pollyanna, who says the “just being glad game” originated when she was hoping to find a doll in the charity barrel at the local Ladies’ Aid Society. The girl and her impoverished minister father—the mother has died—are dependent on such gifts, but instead of a doll, the society can only send over a pair of crutches that someone has left. Pollyanna explains to a skeptical interlocutor the gladness to be found in that:
“[T]he game was to just find something about everything to be glad about—no matter what ’twas,” rejoined Pollyanna, earnestly. ‘And we began right then— on the crutches.’
“Well, goodness me! I can’t see anythin’ ter be glad about—gettin’ a pair of crutches when you wanted a doll!”
Pollyanna clapped her hands.
“There is—there is,” she crowed. “But I couldn’t see it, either, Nancy, at first,” she added, with quick honesty. “Father had to tell it to me.”
“Well, then, suppose YOU tell ME,” almost snapped Nancy.
:Goosey! Why, just be glad because you don’t— NEED—’EM!” exulted Pollyanna, triumphantly. “You see it’s just as easy—when you know how!”
Pollyanna explains that the harder the game gets, the more fun it is, although she adds that “sometimes it’s almost too hard—like when your father goes to Heaven, and there isn’t anybody but a Ladies’ Aid left.”
The relentlessly upbeat Pollyanna goes to work on some of the hardest hearts in the town, starting with the embittered aunt to whom she is sent. In scenes that recall Francis Hodgson Burnett novels, the orphan is first put in the stuffy and cheerless attic room (Little Princess) of a large house (Secret Garden) but refuses to be put off by dour countenances (Little Lord Fauntleroy). Instead, she insists on playing the glad game with discontented housemaids, reclusive misanthropes, crabby invalids, fallen women, orphaned boys, and imbittered spinsters. They are thrown off balance by her focus on the bright side of things and lives are changed.
In such stories, there must be a development where the game is tested to the limit, which occurs when it is feared Pollyanna will never walk again after she is hit by a car. Even she appears to give up. Although housekeeper Nancy reminds her of the glad game,
the poor little lamb just cries, an’ says it don’t seem the same, somehow. She says it’s easy ter TELL lifelong invalids how ter be glad, but ‘tain’t the same thing when you’re the lifelong invalid yerself, an’ have ter try ter do it. She says she’s told herself over an’ over again how glad she is that other folks ain’t like her; but that all the time she’s sayin’ it, she ain’t really THINKIN’ of anythin’ only how she can’t ever walk again.’
And:
‘Then I tried ter remind her how she used ter say the game was all the nicer ter play when—when it was hard,’ resumed Nancy, in a dull voice. ‘But she says that, too, is diff’rent—when it really IS hard.”
What follows are scenes that are reminiscent of It’s a Wonderful Life in that the town tries to gladden Pollyanna with stories of how she has gladdened them. In addition, people start behaving in ways that they know will gladden her, and an indirect consequence of one of these is a doctor emerging who knows of a cure. The novel ends with not only Pollyanna walking again but the doctor and Aunt Polly, no longer bitter, getting married.
As I was rereading the novel for the first time in over sixty years, I wondered if a relentless dose of Pollyanna might soften the stony hearts of the GOP, which has been taken over by a cult of cruelty. (We are witnessing the banality of evil, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell said Tuesday night.) All around the country people are stepping up to defend beloved immigrant neighbors from being kidnapped—not that one must be beloved to have rights—and such acts might have a broader impact. How is Make America Decent Again for a slogan?
To be sure, GOP members of Congress seem prepared to override all moral qualms with their Big Beautiful Bill—fear, greed, and ambition can wreak havoc with the heart—and there may be limits to Pollyannaism. How would her “just be glad” approach to life have worked in Nazi Germany?
But we’re not Nazi Germany yet. Trump barely eked out a victory and, since then, many of his voters have turned against him. Numbers are on the side of those who believe in the country’s foundational values, which means that undiluted pessimism is not only counterproductive but out of touch with the facts on the ground. Sure, we’re experiencing things we’ve never seen before but that also gives us an opportunity, after years of complacency, to treasure what is good about this country and to fight for it.
In other words, maybe by being Pollyannas we can restore America to its senses.
