My Great American Unhappiness

My American Unhappiness (Dean Bakopoulos)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 350-55  | Added on Saturday, March 03, 2012, 09:24 AM

her new pastor, Revered Ty Willis of the New Promise Church, which has usurped my mother's Catholic faith, encouraged us to read the book of Job. I'm not sure if my mother read it—to her, church, in her post-Catholic phase, was a bit of a social club more than anything—but I did, and I was less than comforted. The horror of the Lord engaging in high-stakes bets with Satan, and the absolute lack of comfort that Job's so-called friends bring to his grief, did change my view of God. The book made me feel as though God, if he existed, was sort of capable of being a major, reckless dick. Christians in the Midwest are fond of saying, "Everything happens for a reason." The book of Job illustrates, I think, that that's not the case at all.
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My American Unhappiness (Dean Bakopoulos)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 646-49  | Added on Saturday, March 03, 2012, 10:07 AM

It is difficult to see so many people you know, so many busy and active people, if, frankly, you don't care how somebody's novel, thesis, art, job, marriage, life is going, not because you are heartless or cruel, but because you simply don't have the energy to hear about other people's struggles and triumphs. Your own joys and woes are exhausting enough, aren't they?
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My American Unhappiness (Dean Bakopoulos)
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How quickly has such an American ideal faded! Now, we are all slaves to institutions. Educated in them from the age of five, or younger, and often imprisoned within them, accumulating piles of debt, until we are pushing thirty. At the end of our educational process, we know what? How to plant a garden? Build a home? Repair and maintain machines? Hunt? Fish? Camp? Hardly. Rather, we leave these institutions with only one small skill—trading commodities, analyzing prose, ceramics, welding widget A to widget B—and we immediately need to find another institution to take us in: General Motors, Yale, the Federal Reserve, the UAW, Target, any place that will allow us to put food on the table. Once food is on the table, we must find shelter, often for a growing family, and instead of having any idea of how to build a shelter, we must buy a shelter, and because the costs of shelter are so absurdly prohibitive in comparison with actual wages, we must move immediately into the debtor system Thoreau likened to slavery. We must move into a home that is owned by an institution—Bank of America, Countrywide, CitiFinancial—and we must make ourselves adhere to a payment schedule. We must then secure health care coverage from a large institution, finance transportation through a large institution, deficit-spend based on the leverage of a large institution, worship the Lord at an approved institution, and then, one morning, our children enter a federally mandated pre-K program or a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year private preschool. And the cycle begins again. You can almost hear the tiny hearts of America's children breaking as they gather around the story circle or line up for a carton of milk. Slaves!
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My American Unhappiness (Dean Bakopoulos)
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"There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a little hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others."
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My American Unhappiness (Dean Bakopoulos)
- Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 733-37  | Added on Saturday, March 03, 2012, 10:17 AM

I suppose the idea for my project came to me shortly after college, when I was rather absent-mindedly thumbing through a copy of The Portable Chekhov, during a register shift at the bookshop where I once worked. Rereading the story "Gooseberries," I came across these lines: "There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a little hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others."
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My American Unhappiness (Dean Bakopoulos)
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In the blue light of the bus, on this, the first crisp and frosty evening of the autumn, all of the passengers look to me as if they are trapped in some giant, mobile freezer. They wear winter caps and thick coats for the first time in months, and their expressions are frozen and devoid of smiles, a motley crew of grimaces, pensive looks, and dour, soured expressions. Just a week ago they went coatless, bare-midriffed, sandaled. Now, this, the siege of winter already hinting at its arrival. It makes me feel as if we're awaiting somebody's death in that bus and I am thrilled to get off when my stop finally arrives.