Year: 2013

As Blockbuster gets ready to close its remaining 300 stores in the US, Alexis Madrigal pays homage:

This was our version of the great communal gatherings of the theater! This was our attenuated version of public space! We didn’t even browse the objects themselves, but avatars of the cassettes. Remember? All the tapes were stored behind the counter, and you’d carry this empty box that represented the movie up to the front register and they’d pull it out of their archival cabinet and load it into a clear plastic container for you. Josh Greenberg wrote a book about the creation of the home movie industry, From Betamax to Blockbuster, and he highlights how strange that was, “In the video store, customers browsed movies, represented by boxes that contained nothing more tangible than the experience of watching a movie itself.” For the industry, it was a way of helping you forget you weren’t watching on the silver screen, but the 22″ TV your parents bought at Walgreen’s.

Liz Galvao, who worked at Blockbuster in 2004 and 2005, remembers “one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.” But Jason Bailey, also a former employee, feels differently: “Let’s not soft-soap the fact that this was a chain that ran roughshod over local businesses, gouged customers on a regular basis, employed scores of movie-ignorant dullards, refused to stock controversial titles, imposed a bullshit ‘family’ morality that was hypocritical at best, and operated on a business model that was less about Film than it was about Product”:

Here’s a story that encapsulates everything you need to know about Blockbuster Video:

during a down moment in the initial, training shift for my part-time job at the Big Blue, I posed what seemed a fairly safe small-talk question to the store manager: So, what are your favorite movies? It was an icebreaker that had served me well in my three previous video store gigs; I’d been doing it since I was a teenager, mostly at rinky-dink mom-and-pop operations, but since the slick, well-funded Blockbuster franchise had driven them all out of town, I finally had to give in and go to work for the Evil Empire. But even my cynicism about my new employer didn’t prepare me for an answer I’d never heard from a fellow employee in all my years in the video store business. “Oh, I don’t really watch movies,” my manager cheerfully and matter-of-factly replied. “I mean, I’m around ‘em all day, so I don’t really wanna watch ‘em when I go home.” She wasn’t my manager for long; within a few months, Blockbuster had promoted her to district manager. And that was Blockbuster Video, in a nutshell.

But the Big Blue isn’t quite dead yet; Kathryn Olson presents a map that shows “the company is still going strong abroad, with 1,295 locations outside the U.S., including in Brazil, Mexico, the U.K., and Australia.”

Not long after Norm Ornstein called for a constitutional right to vote and Stephen Lurie made the case for an amendment guaranteeing K-12 education, Alex Seitz-Wald proposes a full rewrite:

Clocking in at some 4,500 words – about the same length as the screenplay for an episode of Two and a Half Men – and without serious modification since 18-year-olds got the vote in 1971, the Constitution simply isn’t cut out for 21st-century governance. It’s full of holes, only some of which have been patched; it guarantees gridlock; and it’s virtually impossible to change.

“It gets close to a failing grade in terms of 21st-century notions on democratic theory,” says University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson, part of the growing cadre of legal scholars who say the time has come for a new constitutional convention. Put simply, we’ve learned a lot since 1787. More than 700 constitutions have been composed since World War II alone, and other countries have solved the very problems that cripple us today. It seems un-American to look abroad for ways to change our sacred text, but the world’s nations copied us, so why not learn from them?

Chris Bray rolls his eyes:

The Constitution survived (for example) the long historical moment in which the Weather Underground was routinely bombing government buildings; three of the nation’s top leaders were assassinated; civil rights activists were clubbed and shot and attacked by police dogs and knocked over with firehoses; and churches were bombed, sometimes with children inside them, but it can’t survive any longer, because Ted Cruz. Be grateful that Seitz-Wald isn’t a doctor, too, because you’d go in with a hangnail and come out on chemotherapy.

The Senate doesn’t work anymore, he writes, because the Constitution is broken:

“Today, the Senate is an undemocratic relic where 41 senators, representing just 11 percent of the nation’s population, can use the filibuster to block almost anything and bring government to its knees.” But the filibuster isn’t a feature of the Constitution. It’s a product of Senate rules. …  In any case, no one complaining about American gridlock actually means that they hate gridlock. Here’s a deal for you, and it’ll solve the problem of gridlock right now: Give the deep red states far more power in the national government. Gridlock will end right away, and government will get busy doing things: banning abortion, banning gay marriage, slashing federal welfare spending, purging the military of gay and lesbian service members, increasing the military budget, expanding American military power, locking Gitmo and the military tribunal into permanent, uncontested features of our national life. Congratulations – no gridlock at all!

On the centennial of Camus’s birth, Jerry Delaney considers the philosopher’s 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus:

The opening lines begin with what Camus called the first and most urgent of questions: If the world has no meaning, why live? If life is pointless, why not end it? Logic would favor suicide. Or so it would seem. But Camus quickly points out that absence of meaning is not why people commit suicide. People who commit suicide already have meaning in their lives. What they don’t have is a life. They commit suicide because they have no dignity, no self-respect, no pleasure, no honor, no value. They are checkmated in humiliation, without the minimal elements of a satisfactory existence.

Camus concludes with a startling statement: “Life will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.” The idea stops us on the page; we have to think about that. Camus is saying, by inference, that the things that make our life worth living are in our own hands. Forget about God. What people need is not an abstract benediction but concrete means to live with dignity and self-respect. Camus’ idea is not particularly profound, but he states it with a compelling lucidity and force. Unlike most philosophical insights, which slip from our grasp even as we grip to hold on, the Camus observation sticks. What Camus did was give us a language to express what our experience in life had already prepared us to accept; he gave coherence to those inchoate ideas and unspoken assumptions that were roiling deep and unspoken in our minds.

To mark the occasion, TNR pulled this 1946 review of The Stranger from their archives:

[N]othing is so characteristic of Camus as his refusal to give answers that would be merely logical, to ignore the diversity and the contradictions of experience. The theme of The Myth of Sisyphus, a collection of philosophical essays, is the absurdity of the Absurd, the impossibility of making a logical rule out of it. Pessimism or optimism. God or suicide. Reason or Unreason. These are all attempts to jump out of the real problem by giving it a final solution. Camus calls them “refusals to acknowledge.” In the same way, despair is the most intimate reality of man. To make of it a moral rule would be at the same time to debase it and to get rid of it. “Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness,” says Camus in his Letters to a German Friend, written in the thick of the battle and probably the noblest document of the state of mind of the European Resistance.

Albert Camus speaks of happiness against a background of despair, and that is why his voice rings true. Aware as he is of the absurd, he stresses nothing like clear consciousness. And from the ultimate loneliness of man, he draws one consequence, which is the necessity today of reestablishing real communication among men, these “brother enemies” divided more than ever before by false thoughts and violence.

It’s worth remembering that Camus was born in Algeria, a place that loomed large in the French politics of his day. Tim Allen elaborates:

Camus didn’t hesitate to affirm the influence of his African years on his life’s work. Writing in 1958 in the preface to a new edition of his first collection of Algeria-centric essays, L’envers et l’endroit (sometimes translated as The Wrong Side and the Right Side), Camus states, “I know that my inspiration is in The Wrong Side and the Right Side, in this world of poverty and light where I lived for so long and whose memory still keeps me away from the two opposing dangers that menace every artist: resentment and satisfaction. […] I was placed halfway between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all is well in this world and with history; the sun taught me that history isn’t everything.” …

Perhaps befitting his intercultural status as a pied-noir (that is, a person of European descent living in French North Africa), Camus wholeheartedly embraced this notion of the halfway. His decision, however, often meant that he had to blaze his own trail, and consequently expose himself to strident criticism. During the Algerian War, for instance, Camus famously refused to support the cause of Algerian independence and did not condemn outright the atrocities committed by French soldiers. Though Camus vocally opposed the violence of war in all of its forms, and wrote frequently about the suffering of native-born Algerians under French colonial rule, he could not bring himself to reject the pied-noir community that had raised him. Algerian resentment over the perceived offense lingers to this day.

Here’s how Camus described the writer’s task in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (excerpted in the above video), a task that consisted, for him, of two core principles – “the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression”:

[T]he writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art. Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions of men will free him from his isolation, even and particularly if he falls into step with them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art.

Previous Dish on Camus here, here, and here.