John Strausbaugh Still Hates Emo Kids

We've written a lot before about our love for the mid-90's New York Press. Growing up as a teenager in NYC at a time when the Village Voice was lost in the wilderness and dedicated to churning out a news section full of endless crap identity politics pieces and coupling it with arts coverage that was even worse (Green Apple Quick Step? Lars Von Trier? What the hell?), the Press was our first indication that journalism could be... fun. We still blame them and Hunter S. Thompson for everything that happened after. Back then, editor John Strausbaugh was one of the big honchos in charge. Now he's out with a new book, Sissy Nation: How America Became A Nation of Wimps And Stoopits. Strausbaugh was just interviewed by another ex-Presser, Marty Beckerman, about the new book for blog Jewcy.com. It's one of the best pieces of unrelenting hate and bitterness we've seen since Jim Goad's prime. Check out this sample: I call us Sissy Nation because we have become a culture of fat, soft, stoopitized, fearful, whiny, infantile, narcissistic, fatalistic, groupthinking victims. Americans were once known around the world for their pioneering spirit, their bold individualism, their brashness and ballsiness. Now we're hiding from the world in our safely padded virtual reality bubbles... We all swim in the same sea of Sissitude, and none of us is unaffected. [...] Your average adult used to have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the tools around him/her worked, and how to fix them when they didn't work. A rake was a rake. A very simple and efficient device. If, say, the handle broke, most reasonably intelligent humans could figure out some way to fix it. That's why God created duct tape. It used to be that you opened the hood of your car and saw a recognizable internal combustion engine. It was iron and steel and wiring. It was mechanical. With a little bit of training -- I got mine from my dad, like most kids in my day -- you knew which parts did what, so when it failed to function in a certain way, you at least had an idea of which parts to check. Now you lift the hood of your car and it's like lifting the casing off your computer. You need a Ph.D. from DeVry and a million dollars in diagnostic equipment to work on it. So most of us don't even try. If something goes wrong, we ask The Man to fix it for us. Don't you find that demoralizing? True, it's a total book push but it's a good book push. We like bitterness.

Fishbowl

John Strausbaugh Still Hates Emo Kids

Neal

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