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Sissy Culture Vulture

By David Weigel on 2.29.08 @ 12:02AM

Sissy Nation: How America Became a Culture of Wimps & Stoopits
by John Strausbaugh
(Virgin Books, 176 pages, $16.95)

Now that it's over we can agree that The Sopranos was the great testosterone soap opera of the decade. We had, even if we did not realize it, a need to watch beefy Italians cursing, slamming each other against bathroom walls, and splattering their rivals' brains across their tablecloths. HBO's epic filled that need.

The one buzz-killer -- one that killed more and more toward the end of the series -- was Tony Soprano's shiftless son A.J. Over seven years we saw him blossom from a chubby wimp into a skinny-but-stupid lay-about. In a late series episode the elder Soprano walks past his son and sees him "giggling on the computer, typing away in some little chit-chat room." Tony recounts the scene to his therapist and shakes his head: "I just wanted to slam his face in."

Again and again, Tony saw chances to toughen up his son but passed. He coddled the kid and eased his way to wimpery. When A.J. finally ties a cement block to his leg and jumps into the family pool, Tony yanks him out of the water and holds him close, stroking his hair, weeping. Back in Dr. Melfi's office, Tony frowns and blames himself for the lump that his son's become. But even then, Tony doesn't take responsibility. A.J.'s problems began, Tony scowls, when he inherited his father's "putrid genes."

David Chase's series was always as much about a dying way of life as it was about Tony Soprano's fractious families. How did mob boss Tony grow up so much softer and more depressed than his father? Why was Tony's son such a useless, confused lump? How did a country and a culture that produced Michael Corleone produce... this?

THAT, IN A WAY, is the question John Strausbaugh wrote Sissy Nation to answer. He did not write the book to explore the reasons: He wrote it to grab readers by the lapels and shake them until they saw his way. "I've been around long enough to have watched us retreat from self-exploration to self-indulgence," he writes. "I've witnessed our descent into Sissihood, and it really worries me."

If Strausbaugh wasn't constantly worried or constantly spotting signs of cultural decline, he might not write at all. A former editor of the acrid New York Press and a current contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Strausbaugh writes because he hates.

He walks down Chicago's Navy Pier and sneers at the "Holsteins" gorging themselves to death. He watches "blogger boys" infiltrate his beloved New York, listening to iPods, blocking out the world, pulling on ironic T-shirts that, no matter what slogan or brand they advertise, make them look exactly the same. Every day and in every way, he sees things getting worse and worse.

As David Chase and his Sopranos players could tell you, this isn't the most daring of arguments. Practically every boomer who's survived into the age of TIVO feels this way. All of them, like Strausbaugh, assume that their parents' generation got it right and that some crucial DNA strand got snapped around 40 years ago.

"Americans were once infamous around the world as the precise opposite of conformist sisses," Strausbaugh writes. "We were Yankees, pioneers, frontiersmen, cowboys and Indians." Things were already slowing down by 1951, when Strausbaugh was busy getting born, and he witnessed the last gasps of good music, sex, and, especially, good cars: "In the '50s, the '60s, into the '70s, your car was an individual statement. Your car had style, panache."

Strausbaugh, contrarian though he is, is a late convert to this philosophical school. The prophet Archie Bunker ranted about this decades ago. Redneck intellectuals like Jim Goad and Joe Bob Briggs have been warning from their red state bunkers about American sissification since the bad old 1980s and 1990s.

Strausbaugh adds to their critiques with a heavy dose of technophobia, vinyl-junkie Luddite grumbling about consumerism. It sounds ripped from the pages of Adbusters, and it doesn't add a lot to this case.

SISSY NATION DOESN'T blame corporations for the limpening of American wrists. Quite the opposite: Strausbaugh scoffs at sissies who blame Burger King for making them fat or Marlboro for turning their lungs into soot collection facilities.

But to embrace the full meaning of that and let the poor saps make their own choices would be too much. "We eat to grotesque obesity, or buy the biggest, loudest plasma TV on the block, or the newest zillion-function cell phone, or the most godzilloid SUV, or wear tons of bling, or live in gigantic McMansions," Strausbaugh writes with a heavy sigh. "Somehow none of it makes us happy, because none of it changes who we are."

Strausbaugh is working with blinders. Americans eat more, true, and some of them get sick doing so, but by and large we're living longer than when men were men. We buy big TVs and blackberrys, but the argument for that expressing individuality less than the vast rims of a vintage Caddy is... what, exactly?

Letter to the Editor

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