“Exuberant, can-do optimism is the key American mode. I detest morbidly world-weary European affectations, like the cynical postmodernism that flooded American academe in the 1980s. In college during the delirious 1960s, I rejected Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a self-indulgent paean to the doom and gloom of post-Nazi Paris. It's no accident that the bleak Godot remained canonical for mandarins like Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag. The sunnily optimistic overkill of the Doris Day Debbie Reynolds era needed an antidote, but we already had it in beat poetry, with its gritty street populism. Secularists may squirm, but central to American optimism is the evangelical tradition, whose religious revivals countered lingering New England Calvinism. The thunderous hymns of American gospel choirs are inspirational folk art, vanquishing Europe's exhausted elitism. ”
