Excellent article, though I did laugh at the idea that America’s real civilizational glue is now “remembering how the carpet smelled inside Blockbuster.”
A Roman senator mourning the decline of the Republic: “The youths no longer respect the old gods.”
A modern American conservative: “You don’t understand, there was something sacred about the McDonald’s ball pit.”
The depressing part is that you may actually be right that commercial memories have replaced historical memory for a huge number of people. Americans can probably identify the old Toys ‘R’ Us mascot faster than their own state’s founding figures.
Though in fairness, a lot of shared national identity historically was built through common public experiences. America just outsourced those experiences to Coke ads, malls, sitcoms, and the NFL.
Also: “The past is a foreign country”
True. But apparently it’s a foreign country with fluorescent arcade lighting and a Hollywood Video membership card.
Maybe related: local Facebook pages are full of people nostalgic for their dead mall, wishing an unspecified Somebody would pour hundreds of millions of dollars in to restoring it to its former glory.
The mall nostalgia is definitely part of that. It's also funny that their disappearance is now a source of cultural pessimism when their EXISTENCE was a source of cultural pessimism 30, 40 years ago. They drove mom and pop stores out of business and were criticized for being soulless husks than replaced the town square. Now it's our organic, rooted community that was destroyed--by something
This is why Blockbuster always sucked. Gobbled up mom & pop videos stores, divested any of the good inventory (horror especially, debatable if you consider the "back room" stock good), and put our 200 copies of Phantoms instead.
Dead mall videos and mall nostalgia videos get tens of millions of views on YouTube along with nostalgia for Sbarro/mall food court, and Pizza Hut buffets videos. The comment section always turns into a three-way fight between right wingers who believe malls were killed by Magic American superpredators, center right and center left who believe malls were killed by Amazon, and leftists/far left who believe malls were killed by private equity.
I'm team "It was Amazon in the den with better prices". In the case of my hometown mall, though, I usually comment that its demolition was long overdue: per acre, the average detached house in the borough generates far more in property taxes and wasn't at risk of falling down.
MAs did the damage to malls loooong before Amazon or PE had their chance to loot the corpses. The one thriving mall left in my area is very, lets say "upsale", and no bus lines come anywhere close to it.
Although not quite the same issue, this Blockbuster and ball pit nostalgia reminds me of the uproar over Cracker Barrel changing its brand - which Scott also wrote about.
I can’t believe we have boomers who make Blockbuster a political thing.
I’m going to be honest: the Confederacy doesn’t mean much to me because my family has always lived in the North and arrived in America after the Civil War. We are pre-Hart-Celler, though, so I am not some random brown.
I also don’t think relitigating the Confederacy is a worthwhile cause for the modern American right. Here is how you can be pro-Union from a right-wing perspective. It’s simple:
The planter class were greedy traitors who imported foreign labor to undercut White labor so they could make money. They are no better than the H-1B visa employers we all rail against now. This doesn’t mean every Confederate was a bad person, and it especially doesn’t mean their descendants are bad people.
Ironically, Trump championed policies that were more in line with the Union and the American System: central planning, tariffs, and industrial protectionism.
Toys ‘R’ Us, Blockbuster, and Pizza Hut Nationalism is brought onto millennials because of nostalgia. The demographic situation is much different than even the 90s. Millennials, especially millennials on the Right, remember a country where every nice suburban public school in Texas was more than 10-20% White.
There's a massive built in assumption here from Greer. It goes something like this: 'Obviously this 'real culture' from much before our actual experience is more authentic because older and right wing or something'. It's very lazy. First of all, the same inaccurate, rose tinted spectacles view colored the perception of our ancient past, as now does our recent past, even when our history was valued and venerated. Our ancestors may very well laugh at our celebration of blockbuster or whatever, but they would also consider the romanticized presentation of the times they lived in, or the idea that life was somehow more authentic, or people were more moral, in their time, ridiculous. You can get about as accurate a view of day to day life from photos, or even a well written history book, as you do from a commercial or a movie. To assume that a human had a better life because their existence was less dominated by commercial pursuits is just taken as a given by Greer without any actual evidence. He mocks millennials for embracing a time they view as safer, but ignores that in this past that we once had an authentic connection to, the brutality of life dwarfed anything seen during the crime explosion of the 70s/80s. And while I would agree that crime was definitely higher then, I'm not sure we can say with absolute confidence that it's lower than it was at the turn of the millenium because many major metropolitan areas now simply don't track the data and try to obscure it for political reasons. Even if it were technically true, what good is a marginal decrease in crime if vast areas are no go, the cost of living is ridiculous and there's no ability to get ahead? Comprehensively, quality of life has gone down since then.
As a pragmatic measure, I very much agree with Scott that we have to know our past so that political enemies don't weaponize it against guilt prone whites (lying about how we treated slaves, pretending blacks were just as smart and kind, lying about how awful the indians were, etc.) but unfortunately, the right takes it a step further and actually longs for that world and says 'when we take power, we can bring back that spartan existence for our people' as if that would fix things, leaving aside how undesirable it would be.
The trouble with whites is neither side can actually just articulate the problem without adding something extra. The left knows something's wrong, but instead of acknowledging that our ability to live affably and comfortably is being destroyed by diversity and self hatred, they make it about racism/climate change whatever. The racial right understands the problem but creates this false dilemma and tries to morally/socially pressure people into this faustian pact that goes something like 'If you want our help to avoid this, we don't let you have degenerate liberalism minus these problems. We'll only help you if we can create the spartan theocracy of our wild fantasies'. This is stupid on a number of levels. One, people back then believed stupid things too. Moreover, they didn't want to eradicate degeneracy and most people back then saw such people as ass cancer. As Pearl Davis has pointed out, women were throwing it back, monogamy even then was a myth, people were degenerate back then they were just better at hiding it and there was less comprehensive documentation. Two, so many of the right rely on the degenerate society of mass affluence they claim they want to destroy and are so often found not to be practicing the doctrine they preach. Like with the left, who never want to live around the diversity they champion, the radical right reveal themselves with their preferences. They don't want their bedrooms policed either and don't seem too eager to give up modern conveniences and creature comforts. Even in these based epochs we've lost touch with, people tended to remember little things, like blockbuster. Does that mean their cultural memory had been replaced by commercialization? No, this is just a fundamental misreading of human nature, similar to some marxist thinkers.
The solution? Scott should just acknowledge that enjoying comfort and affluence (degeneracy, movies that are good, an economy and technology that was user friendly, an increasing problem) were enjoyable and people were responding to the incentives they received from their own brain. Longing for it is not a pathology, or only in a sense that it's a waste of time to long for something that can't be forced back into existence. Even if changing economic conditions bring on something like the return to the older forms, people will tire of that and move back towards the end of history as soon as they are able to. People don't actually long for the things that dissident right wingers claim they do...they don't actually pursue this in their own lives. The end of history is down but it's not out. One of the reasons that raising consciousness about the demographic issues tends to fail is because so many dissidents absolutely insist on tying it to all kinds of other social and political agendas that most people (including themselves) don't actually want.
You mean to say Millenials in the South are not going to the Dixie Shop in Myrtle Beach South Carolina, and buying dixie flags for posterity's sake? Not reading about Robert E Lee? Not buying classic books about the founding fathers or Jefferson Davis??
Excellent article, though I did laugh at the idea that America’s real civilizational glue is now “remembering how the carpet smelled inside Blockbuster.”
A Roman senator mourning the decline of the Republic: “The youths no longer respect the old gods.”
A modern American conservative: “You don’t understand, there was something sacred about the McDonald’s ball pit.”
The depressing part is that you may actually be right that commercial memories have replaced historical memory for a huge number of people. Americans can probably identify the old Toys ‘R’ Us mascot faster than their own state’s founding figures.
Though in fairness, a lot of shared national identity historically was built through common public experiences. America just outsourced those experiences to Coke ads, malls, sitcoms, and the NFL.
Also: “The past is a foreign country”
True. But apparently it’s a foreign country with fluorescent arcade lighting and a Hollywood Video membership card.
"You sir won the highly respected comments section"
Maybe related: local Facebook pages are full of people nostalgic for their dead mall, wishing an unspecified Somebody would pour hundreds of millions of dollars in to restoring it to its former glory.
The mall nostalgia is definitely part of that. It's also funny that their disappearance is now a source of cultural pessimism when their EXISTENCE was a source of cultural pessimism 30, 40 years ago. They drove mom and pop stores out of business and were criticized for being soulless husks than replaced the town square. Now it's our organic, rooted community that was destroyed--by something
This is why Blockbuster always sucked. Gobbled up mom & pop videos stores, divested any of the good inventory (horror especially, debatable if you consider the "back room" stock good), and put our 200 copies of Phantoms instead.
Dead mall videos and mall nostalgia videos get tens of millions of views on YouTube along with nostalgia for Sbarro/mall food court, and Pizza Hut buffets videos. The comment section always turns into a three-way fight between right wingers who believe malls were killed by Magic American superpredators, center right and center left who believe malls were killed by Amazon, and leftists/far left who believe malls were killed by private equity.
I'm team "It was Amazon in the den with better prices". In the case of my hometown mall, though, I usually comment that its demolition was long overdue: per acre, the average detached house in the borough generates far more in property taxes and wasn't at risk of falling down.
My local mall was in fact killed by magical Americans.
MAs did the damage to malls loooong before Amazon or PE had their chance to loot the corpses. The one thriving mall left in my area is very, lets say "upsale", and no bus lines come anywhere close to it.
Although not quite the same issue, this Blockbuster and ball pit nostalgia reminds me of the uproar over Cracker Barrel changing its brand - which Scott also wrote about.
Yes! Article was already long but there was something about that in an original draft.
I can’t believe we have boomers who make Blockbuster a political thing.
I’m going to be honest: the Confederacy doesn’t mean much to me because my family has always lived in the North and arrived in America after the Civil War. We are pre-Hart-Celler, though, so I am not some random brown.
I also don’t think relitigating the Confederacy is a worthwhile cause for the modern American right. Here is how you can be pro-Union from a right-wing perspective. It’s simple:
The planter class were greedy traitors who imported foreign labor to undercut White labor so they could make money. They are no better than the H-1B visa employers we all rail against now. This doesn’t mean every Confederate was a bad person, and it especially doesn’t mean their descendants are bad people.
Ironically, Trump championed policies that were more in line with the Union and the American System: central planning, tariffs, and industrial protectionism.
the article clearly says it's millennials, not boomers, making blockbuster a thing.
Toys ‘R’ Us, Blockbuster, and Pizza Hut Nationalism is brought onto millennials because of nostalgia. The demographic situation is much different than even the 90s. Millennials, especially millennials on the Right, remember a country where every nice suburban public school in Texas was more than 10-20% White.
There's a massive built in assumption here from Greer. It goes something like this: 'Obviously this 'real culture' from much before our actual experience is more authentic because older and right wing or something'. It's very lazy. First of all, the same inaccurate, rose tinted spectacles view colored the perception of our ancient past, as now does our recent past, even when our history was valued and venerated. Our ancestors may very well laugh at our celebration of blockbuster or whatever, but they would also consider the romanticized presentation of the times they lived in, or the idea that life was somehow more authentic, or people were more moral, in their time, ridiculous. You can get about as accurate a view of day to day life from photos, or even a well written history book, as you do from a commercial or a movie. To assume that a human had a better life because their existence was less dominated by commercial pursuits is just taken as a given by Greer without any actual evidence. He mocks millennials for embracing a time they view as safer, but ignores that in this past that we once had an authentic connection to, the brutality of life dwarfed anything seen during the crime explosion of the 70s/80s. And while I would agree that crime was definitely higher then, I'm not sure we can say with absolute confidence that it's lower than it was at the turn of the millenium because many major metropolitan areas now simply don't track the data and try to obscure it for political reasons. Even if it were technically true, what good is a marginal decrease in crime if vast areas are no go, the cost of living is ridiculous and there's no ability to get ahead? Comprehensively, quality of life has gone down since then.
As a pragmatic measure, I very much agree with Scott that we have to know our past so that political enemies don't weaponize it against guilt prone whites (lying about how we treated slaves, pretending blacks were just as smart and kind, lying about how awful the indians were, etc.) but unfortunately, the right takes it a step further and actually longs for that world and says 'when we take power, we can bring back that spartan existence for our people' as if that would fix things, leaving aside how undesirable it would be.
The trouble with whites is neither side can actually just articulate the problem without adding something extra. The left knows something's wrong, but instead of acknowledging that our ability to live affably and comfortably is being destroyed by diversity and self hatred, they make it about racism/climate change whatever. The racial right understands the problem but creates this false dilemma and tries to morally/socially pressure people into this faustian pact that goes something like 'If you want our help to avoid this, we don't let you have degenerate liberalism minus these problems. We'll only help you if we can create the spartan theocracy of our wild fantasies'. This is stupid on a number of levels. One, people back then believed stupid things too. Moreover, they didn't want to eradicate degeneracy and most people back then saw such people as ass cancer. As Pearl Davis has pointed out, women were throwing it back, monogamy even then was a myth, people were degenerate back then they were just better at hiding it and there was less comprehensive documentation. Two, so many of the right rely on the degenerate society of mass affluence they claim they want to destroy and are so often found not to be practicing the doctrine they preach. Like with the left, who never want to live around the diversity they champion, the radical right reveal themselves with their preferences. They don't want their bedrooms policed either and don't seem too eager to give up modern conveniences and creature comforts. Even in these based epochs we've lost touch with, people tended to remember little things, like blockbuster. Does that mean their cultural memory had been replaced by commercialization? No, this is just a fundamental misreading of human nature, similar to some marxist thinkers.
The solution? Scott should just acknowledge that enjoying comfort and affluence (degeneracy, movies that are good, an economy and technology that was user friendly, an increasing problem) were enjoyable and people were responding to the incentives they received from their own brain. Longing for it is not a pathology, or only in a sense that it's a waste of time to long for something that can't be forced back into existence. Even if changing economic conditions bring on something like the return to the older forms, people will tire of that and move back towards the end of history as soon as they are able to. People don't actually long for the things that dissident right wingers claim they do...they don't actually pursue this in their own lives. The end of history is down but it's not out. One of the reasons that raising consciousness about the demographic issues tends to fail is because so many dissidents absolutely insist on tying it to all kinds of other social and political agendas that most people (including themselves) don't actually want.
You mean to say Millenials in the South are not going to the Dixie Shop in Myrtle Beach South Carolina, and buying dixie flags for posterity's sake? Not reading about Robert E Lee? Not buying classic books about the founding fathers or Jefferson Davis??