QUESTION: What does it mean to have a Panglossian outlook?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Who said” We didn’t land at Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us!”
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History for 11/29/2009
Birthdays: Gaetano Donizetti, Busby Berkeley, C.S. Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, Chuck Mangione, Vin Scully, Gary Shandling is 60, Cathy Moriarity, Don Cheadle, Joel Coen, Jacques Chirac, Kim Delaney, Diane Ladd, Anna Faris is 33

1890- The first Army-Navy football game held at West Point. Midshipmen beat the cadets 24-0.

1915- In the first years of animated films, one artist like Winsor McCay did everything. This day John Randolph Bray's "Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa" cartoon debuted. Bray adapted Henry Ford's assembly line system to making animation, creating positions of layout, background painters, inkers, cel painters, checkers and camera. After 1919 Bray shifted his studio’s focus from entertainment to technical and training films. Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, Max & Dave Fleischer and Shamus Culhane all got their start at Bray's.

1942- U.S. declared coffee would be rationed along with sugar, gasoline and rubber. And lots more. People put their cars up on blocks "for the duration". Gas Ration cards were listed as C, B & A. The C card meant essential war worker, police & fire, so they had unlimited access to gasoline. A cards were the least important.

1959-The Second Grammy Awards, broadcast for the first time on television. Bobby Darins’ rendition of Mack the Knife won top honors.

1961- NASA sent Enos the Chimp into orbit.

1963-THE WARREN COMMISSION- President Lyndon Johnson set up the Warren Commission to investigate the murder of John F. Kennedy. He had originally thought the Dallas Homicide Squad was sufficient, but public outrage demanded more.
The Commission was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren and participants included future president Gerald Ford, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Alan Foster Dulles and future Senator Arlen Spector, who as a young attorney argued for the validity of the "magic bullet" theory”. That one bullet went through Kennedy, bounced, went through Gov. Connolly, ricocheted, went through Connolly a second time, zinged, and wound up sitting in Gov. Connolly's bedsheets in the hospital with no surface dents or marks on it -or something like that.
After ten months the Warren Commission concluded that President Kennedy was killed by a lone nut and there was no conspiracy. In 1975 the House Committee on Assassinations concluded to the contrary that Kennedy probably was the victim of a conspiracy but what it was is unknown. To this date there are still two million documents pertaining to the case kept classified, including Lee Harvey Oswald's tax returns, and how in a cold war blacklist-happy country, someone like Oswald, who had renounced his U.S. citizenship and lived in Moscow could re-enter the United States without a passport. Theories abound –that Attorney General Robert Kennedy squelched evidence that might have tarnished his brother’s record by proving his links to mobsters, to the CIA, Castro or space aliens pulling the trigger. No matter, in the end the Warren Commission’s unsatisfying conclusions spawned a generation of conspiracy buffs.

1963- After the Kennedy assassination, comic Vaughn Meader announced he was giving up his act impersonating the dead president. Meader’s comedy album The First Family sold 7.5 million copies in 1962, but now it wasn’t funny anymore and Meaders career collapsed. He died of emphysema in 2004. When Lenny Bruce first took the stage after the Kennedy assassination, he opened with a long drag on his cigarette and sighed:” ….Man…. Vaughn Meader is really screwed!”

1967- Robert MacNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and architect of the Vietnam War, resigned to become president of the World Bank.

2001- former Beatle guitarist and composer George Harrison died of cancer.
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Question: Who said” We didn’t land at Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us!”

Answer: Malcolm X said it in a speech. He was alluding to the fact that African Americans were not brought here as willing immigrants.