The American Spectator

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Sissy Culture Vulture

By David Weigel on 2.29.08 @ 12:02AM

(Page 2 of 2)

It sounds a little detached from reality because it is. The book's subtitle, "How America Became a Culture of Wimps & Stoopits," is a reference to a Star Trek episode wherein dopey aliens steal what they need from other cultures to survive. (What a manly man like Strausbaugh was doing watching Star Trek is a mystery. Did he accidentally swing a wrench and knock the TV onto the Sci-Fi Channel while he was putting together a bear cage?)

After pages and pages of bellyaching about technology, Strausbaugh admits the world that's coming reminds him of the automated dystopia in E.M. Forster's novella The Machine Stops. And he admits that New York magazine nailed his lifestyle when it defined tight T-shirted, long-haired, wittier-than-thou oldsters as "grups," a term inspired by, yes, another Star Trek episode. Strausbaugh's Luddite senses are locked in: All of these advances were predicted in sci-fi, damn it, and anyone who thinks they're living happier lives because of them are dupes for the Borg.

That dedication to the past leads Strausbaugh to a few worthy targets, even if they've been shot through by plenty of other authors. He sees creeping sissification in the coddling university culture, in the pill-for-everything pharmaceutical culture, in the welfare state, that "hideously undemocratic, un-American effect of trapping poor Americans in a state of permanent infantilized dependency on the public teat."

But he is at his most frenzied and funny when he's wrong, and his most labored when he is right, hitting these notes that the uncool likes of David Horowitz and Newt Gingrich and Thomas Szasz have been hitting for years. Here, he sounds too much like Tony Soprano: Crushed, despairing, hallucinating the better world of 40-odd years ago where people didn't have these sorts of problems.

STRAUSBAUGH'S PUBLISHER has had a devil of a time marketing the book. The copy I got came with a press release promising an expose of the "sissy vote" in this marathon-through-quicksand of a presidential campaign.

This narrow rant (Strausbaugh himself has called it that) barely touches on the subject, but like that grand sissy Bill Clinton I can feel the pain of that Virgin Books flack. You've got a sinecure at a publishing house when the "information economy" is employing more people than the manufacturing economy. On your way to work, on your way home, you have more diversions, more cheaply accessed, than any generation has ever had. And yet here you are, promoting an epistle on how all of this stuff is symptomatic of the American empire in its senescence, a gateway to a wimpier world.

Strausbaugh ends the book on a Swiftian note, suggesting that America weaken its enemies by giving them the same soft lifestyle we sissies are inflicting on ourselves. Imagine if you informed some schlub in Lagos or Sao Paolo or Tashkent that from now on he'd have to live like an American: that you were going to give him a cornucopia whether he liked it or not.

The problem is, when you imagine that, Strausbaugh's satire sounds like a long rant about nothing.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Bill Clinton, Satire, Books