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What made you realize that our gluttony, sloth, cowardice and stupidity are all part of one thing?

It dawned on me slowly over the years. I’ve been ranting about each one of these things, and a lot of people have been pointing them out since the 1950s—political pundits, psychologists, sociologists, cartoonists, comedians —but everybody has just been pointing to one thing at a time. We all panic about the fact that we’re all obese. Then we all go nuts over the fact that kids aren’t learning anything in American schools anymore. Then we all go nuts over the fact that we all go nuts over everything, and these manufactured panics. And it just dawned on me relatively recently that these are mutually reinforcing symptoms of one great syndrome—Sissiness.

A lot of what you say has made us Sissies seems to be a result of technological innovations. What’s going on now that’s different from, say, the Sissitude that the Bronze Agers must have felt they’d slipped into compared to their Stone Age ancestors?

There’s a difference between labor-saving tools and time-wasting gadgets, and we have crossed that threshold in a lot of ways in modern times. My favorite example is the rake. We’ve gone from the Rake Age—which lasted God knows how many millions of years—to the Leaf Blower Age, one of the most ridiculous inventions of the 20th century. The rake was a perfectly fine tool for moving leaves into a pile. It sounds nice when you use it. It’s very simple. Any reasonably intelligent adult can use a rake, and if it breaks, you can figure out how to fix it. Now there’s the Leaf Blower, which seems to be invented only to annoy your neighbors and make you deaf if you are using it. And you can’t fix it if it breaks. And it’s a really inefficient way to move leaves around. It’s a great example of where we’ve gone from communication devices to gadgets that we pretend to be communicating with one another with. From the entertainment world to complete-immersion, virtual reality distraction world. And so on and so on. We’ve always been able to distract ourselves. We’ve always been able to stoopitize ourselves. Lots of people have been stupid since the beginning of man. But we have reached a point in our technology now where we can thoroughly and ubiquitously do that to ourselves in ways that we were never able to before.

The term “anti-American” appears only in the campus Sissy chapter, as part of the descriptor “sullen, knee-jerk, head-bobbing, campus-Marxist, I-hate-my-daddy anti-Americanism.” Yet this is a pretty anti-American book. Is there a valid kind of anti-Americanism?

I consider it a very pro-America book, but anti-Americans. American the ideal is a great ideal. The American experiment in democracy is one of the watersheds of human history. In praxis, it has always been extremely flawed, but the ideal was phenomenal. And that ideal was to create a social environment where each one of us had the opportunity—not the right, but the opportunity—to achieve what he or she could, to live as fulfilled a life as he or she could, to make of his or her time here as much or as little as he or she could. We have moved from that to this collectivist, herd-mentality ant farm that we live in now, where the ideal of the individual is not only not a cherished ideal anymore, it’s mistrusted. Individuality, eccentricity, not running with the herd is deeply mistrusted in this collectivist, herd-mentality, hive-brain, Invaders of the Body Snatchers world that we live in now. So, that’s what Americans have become, and that’s what I’m against. Not America.

Are you sure we really want to Sissify the rest of the world? Because you’ve held up the mirror to the American Sissy, and it’s not pretty. Isn’t there some alternative?

It seems to me that there are not many. I think we can either de-Sissify ourselves, which I don’t even pretend to know how we can do at this stage, because I’m a Sissy, too. I mean, let’s face it, I’m American. Or, we kind of have to Sissify the rest of the world, to make them all as Sissy as we are. Because, if not, those lean and hungry barbarians are going to come flooding over our borders and flooding into Fundadome, as I call it, and spear us on their bayonets and slurp us down like oysters with google eyes stuck on top of them. So I don’t think we have a whole lot of alternatives—I’d love to think that we could de-Sissify ourselves, but I don’t have a plan for that. This is not a self help book, and, as much as I’d love to go on Oprah, I’m not Oprah and I can’t tell all my fellow Sissies how to de-Sissify themselves. And I have my doubts that we can pull that off, so I think we better hurry up and Sissify the rest of the world. And it’s clear that the rest of the world looks at us and would love to be in the luxurious position to be Sissies themselves. A lot of them are half as Sissy now anyway. So I think we should just help them along, move them along, and let’s all become Sissies together. And then it will become one big World World, one big virtual reality that we all lie around in like oysters in the bottoms of our shells with google eyes stuck on top.

You name a very few non-Sissies: Geoffrey Canada, half of Oprah, Lance Armstrong, the Williams sisters and Schwarzenegger. We want a few more. I’m going to name some people. Can you tell me if they’re Sissy?

No.

Why not?

Because people going to Last Exit will just look them up on the Internet and want to dress like them and figure that they’re not Sissies. Part of not being a Sissy is to be your own person, your own stand-up individual, make up your own mind about things, have your own opinions. And part of that is to have your own role models and find your own damn role models and don’t ask somebody like me to tell you who they are. So no.

John Strausbaugh launches Sissy Nation at 7 p.m. tonight at Borders Books, 461 Park Avenue at 57th St. Then he’ll be grumbling about the death of New York City at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow, Feb. 7, at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Ave. at 103rd St, as part of a panel discussing the essay collection New York Calling.