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NEW YORK—An American hack who used to write okay stuff until his left-wing employer signaled to him that activism is more important than journalism recently revealed that Americans are unhappier now than they’ve ever been before. Especially in places that voted for the Donald. According to the hack, Trump got the most votes in places where people felt the unhappiest. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Don’t people vote against the status quo when misery levels are rising? Mind you, it could also be that those who ask the questions (the hack did not specify who posed them) have a vested interest in the answers they get. Invent a misery level where voters are for Trump, then pour it on and predict strikes, crime, and anti-government demonstrations.

By the time you read this, American midterm results will be in, and boring pundits will be telling us why people voted the way they did. What they will not be doing is telling us why they mostly got it wrong, because sitting and talking with think-alikes does not a Delphic Oracle make. I am no longer for the Donald because I do not wish to see ratings and subscription numbers of left-wing rags like the Bagel Times improve, nor do I wish to see a media backlash to the Donald obscure stories that actually matter. Trump hogs the headlines and dominates all news, and knowing what lefty hacks are like, if a fully dressed Trump fell into the White House swimming pool, it would lead the news even if Russia unleashed a nuclear bomb that same evening. The trouble is there are more than 70 million voters who love the Donald, the so-called “Deplorables” by the poet Hillary Clinton. Last but not least, Trump is to presidential dignity what Harpo Marx was to speech. But the fact that the Justice Department may appoint a prosecutor to go after Trump makes his supporters not best pleased.

Never mind. We’re here to talk about American unhappiness in general. This was not the case when an 11-year-old Taki arrived at an American boarding school speaking Greek and German and a few English words to boot. The country back then was mostly white and Christian, and one had to learn the language rather quickly if one was going to take part in any school activity. Previous Athenian knowledge came in handy, like goalkeeping in soccer, wrestling, and tennis, functions that did not require speaking the lingo. That came soon enough, to the detriment of my excellent German. WASPs were the big bamboos back then. They ran the government, owned Wall Street and the banks, and were heads of universities. As a 12-year-old I remember my classmates, Ben Cooper, Bob Trowbridge, Bucky Weaver, Bill Trimble, Temple Brown, Colin Thompson, and so on down the line. (They sound like those brave Pilgrims on the Mayflower.) There was a Sonnenberg and a Taki, and that was it. We stuck out like a rich WASP does nowadays. But the country worked. Yes, there was Jim Crow, and some country clubs kept out Jews, but a Christian USA was a happy country; at least it was seen by many as the happiest nation ever. There were 150 million Americans, most of them happy as hell.

Seventy years or so later, things ain’t what they used to be. 350 million Americans are complaining nonstop about their lives, and in 2020 American cities burned and lots of innocents died because they were told over the internet that the country remains wholly dedicated to the subjugation of its minority population. The trouble is, the minorities are now majorities, at least in the cities that burned, so I’d like to know why these majorities are always whining and looking unhappy as hell.

The fear over crime that is rampant right now makes for unhappiness, as does the glorification of criminals in the movies. Another newspaper headline tells us that first-time buyers are losing out to older, whiter, and wealthier folk. Gee whiz, first-time buyers are really pissed, another unhappy group. Even migrants are teed off. A headline instructs us that they find chaos in New York courts. Homelessness, drug addiction, violence, and lawlessness were what the migrants were trying to get away from in the first place. Open borders don’t help. Senegalese and Somalis are pouring in, not to mention Venezuelans.

I could go on and on. Basically the Big R is so ubiquitous in America that it casts a shadow over everything. Racism. Or what the left uses as its panacea. Here’s Paul Gottfried and Richard Hines in Chronicles, a conservative monthly where I’m a contributor: “In reality, no one in the South would have raised an arm to fight for slavery. It was an inherited evil. The struggle was simply a constitutional one, based upon state’s rights, and especially on free trade, and no tariff.”

Nearly 100 million Americans descend from those who served the Confederacy. How do you think they feel when they see their heroes called criminals and their statues spat upon by more recent arrivals? What would Greeks say if some immigrant-Greek called Alexander the Great a slaveholding monster? What would a Frenchman do if Napoleon’s name were dragged in the mud? Or for that matter, would a Brit accept the fact Nelson and Wellington were war-loving, imperialist bums?

This is what’s going on over here, and it makes for a very unsatisfied multicultural society.