"Don't Worry, Be Happy." Or "What, Me Worry?"

"Don't Worry, Be Happy" is a song made famous by Bobby McFerrin.  The lyrics are sort of vapid, as you can guess from the title, but the song is very catchy.

There must be BPers around who are familiar with "What, Me Worry?"  It was the slogan of Alfred E Newman, who was an idiotic-looking cartoon mascot on "Mad" magazine.  And the slogan is as intentionally idiotic as is Alfred E Newman's cartoon existence.  I very much doubt "Mad" magazine exists any more.

There are several current movements that support ideas like "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and "What, Me Worry?"  These movements center on dumbing Americans down, and discouraging them from stressing over slavery (and its current and ongoing echos), and certainly from having to think about much more complicated and subtle concepts like "Critical Race Theory" (this is upper level law school stuff, and not intended for college students, high schoolers, or earlier students), or gender-related issues, or sex at all.

I get loads of e-mails every day, from various sources and about various things.  Knowing me as you do, you can (correctly) guess that they're all liberal-leaning.  One I got yesterday comes from some organization called "Civic Shout" (I don't know anything about them, except I get their e-mails, and they're all liberal-leaning), and this one was complaining about the Ohio legislature's plan to prohibit college professors from teaching about climate change.  You really have to think about that.  College professors would be prohibited from teaching about anything, including something that is objectively true, and a huge and increasing problem?  "Don't Worry, Be Happy."  "What, Me Worry?"

In our state, it's the governor making fun of people who wear masks in an epidemic of an infectious disease, rules not to say "gay," and to adjust textbooks, and ban library books, to eliminate references and topics to which Ron DeSantis and his stooges don't want students and others exposed.  "Don't Worry, Be Happy."  "What, Me Worry?"

There are sort of two, or maybe three, or perhaps four, problems with this approach.  One is that topics like these are true.  Why should people not know what's true?  Related to that is that if we in this increasingly weird and backward-hurtling country could succeed in dumbing down the public, they would be...dumb.  In whose interest is that?  What, because ignorance, or denial, is blissful?  I don't think it is.  Watch Jordan Klepper interview the MAGA crowd.  You don't think those people know what fools they make of themselves?  Third, there's a saying, or variations of it, reportedly, or possibly, coined by George Santayana, that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," or "those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it."  (Although a 2013 article I read from Culture and Religion has the subscript "history shows that both those who do not learn history and those who do learn history are doomed to repeat it."  I don't think that's a reason not to learn history, or not to learn anything.  If you know where this is going, at least you have a fighting chance.)

But there's a curious and unexpected fourth adverse consequence of adopting the "Don't Worry, Be Happy," or "What, Me Worry?" approach to life.  I'm assuming here that people who adopt this approach sort of know they're kidding themselves.  Monday through Friday, I receive a post from an online publication called "Now I Know."  It's curious and usually interesting things most people don't know.  (But now, they do.)  The founder of this site and author of the posts is a guy named Dan Lewis.  Wednesday's main post was about Bazooka chewing gum, a 1957 contest to predict scores of two baseball games that year on July 11, and indirectly about baseball cards (Bazooka was/is owned by the Topps baseball card company), and one card in particular.  But what was interesting was the "Bonus Fact."  It reads "Baseball cards can help predict the future, maybe.  In 2010, researchers at Wayne [State?] University reviewed 230 baseball cards from the 1952 season, aiming to categorize the smiles on the players' faces.  As Time [magazine] reported, 'players who had more authentic[-looking] smiles -- conveying a deeper level of contentment -- were more likely to live longer than those who were only partially smiling, or not grinning at all.'  And the lifespan differences were huge -- genuinely[-looking] smiling players lived, on average, seven years longer than those who weren't smiling whatsoever." 

It turns out that if you're not being genuine, and you're faking it, and lulling yourself into a "Don't Worry, Be Happy" or "What, Me Worry?" mantra, and you sort of know it, you're not only kidding yourself, but you're killing yourself.

PS: Dan Lewis' posts are NowIKnow.com.  You can subscribe for free.  If you like them, you can contribute.  But you don't have to.  Check them out for a couple of weeks, and see what you think.  I've been following them faithfully for probably over 10 years.  You get a new story almost every Monday through Wednesday, a re-run from the archives on Thursday, and a new discussion about something, recaps of the week, and some weekend "long reads" on Friday.  The "long reads," of which there are usually three, are estimated to be less than 20 minutes each most of the time.