Counter-Currents
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The restaurant news headline read “300 Pizza Huts are Closing.” It was sent to me by a friend in the middle of the night, and I was up working, knowing what I would find before I opened it. Pizza Hut closing 300 restaurants intersects directly with an area of study that concerns me: How the destruction of social capital and the decline of a strong, white working-class manifests in our daily lives.
The report confirmed a trend I’ve been watching play out over the past several years. The Pizza Hut locations that are closing are doing so as part of the bankruptcy of a restaurant holdings company, and they are nearly all dine-in locations.[1] These are a special subset of pizza restaurants.
The old Pizza Hut dine-in locations were places even a low-income family could go to have a pleasant experience together. Good pizza came to your table on a hot iron skillet. There were arcade games to play and a jukebox to play your favorite music. Solariums were even en vogue during one epoch of the company’s history.
Nothing seems to be designed with the family in mind anymore, however. Everything is trending towards serving an atomized and lonely population — one devoid of a past, without much hope or vision for the future.
But those old Pizza Huts! Those majestic tiffany-style lamps, brick interior walls, coffered ceilings made of wooden beams, nice curtains adorning the windows — the quality that went into building a chain pizza place was tremendous. Quality and detail: relics of a bygone era.
Eventually, the Tiffany-style lamps were replaced with standard lighting you can find at any big-box home improvement store. Brick walls are expensive, and curtains are difficult to keep clean in a restaurant. The shift towards carry-out only restaurants progressed.
Articles about the closures mentioned a trend towards ordering online, delivery services, and of course Covid-19 shutdowns and fallout. These explanations are acceptable if you only want to discuss how the story is ending, yet I find they are somewhat incomplete if you are trying to understand why a population went from enjoying sitting in a solarium in the winter, watching the snow quietly fall outside while they were warm and safe inside with their favorite Eddie Money song on the jukebox, their kids safely playing arcade games nearby, to suddenly not. What kind of society gives that up in favor of eating at home alone with Netflix? Who would prefer to have their pizza delivered late, cold, and likely incorrect by a foreigner you summoned with an app on your phone to receiving it on an iron skillet brought by a cute waitress who speaks the same language to your plush booth and checkered tablecloth?[2]
While the bankruptcy almost exclusively affects the dine-in locations, the better-performing carry-out locations will be sold or otherwise remain operational.[3]
Some of the old dine-in buildings will be torn down and the land redeveloped while others will be repurposed. Like much of our history, they will then exist only in our memories. I’ll still drive by where they used to stand and remember being a kid clutching a Book It! ticket for a free pizza when my dad took me for dinner.[4] I’ll remember the local Pizza Hut being one of the first places I drove to after getting my license, and being the lunch spot during a frigid November when I was working in construction, replacing a roof right before Thanksgiving.
The Pizza Hut closings leaves another barren space in what used to be part of our public life. The corner stores are plagued with violence. The malls have the veneer of normalcy, but scratch the surface and you often find the demographics and behavior of a Third-World bazaar. Now there’s one less Friday-night spot friendly to our kind, one less place to spend time with friends, one less place to go on a date, one less place for a nice white family without much money to have a lovely experience together.
Going to Pizza Hut after Little League games — this used to be a popular selling point in the 1990s — and for birthday parties is a shared memory many of us have. With the decline of social capital exacerbated by increased racial diversity, the need for a traditional dining room also fades.
Pizza Hut is closing hundreds of their locations not because pizza is no longer popular. Sales are still strong for the industry and the company as a whole. They are closing because the people who once frequented their restaurants are now lonely, friendless, childless, and without families. In short, they’ve got nobody to sit and eat pizza with. Pizza Huts tended to be found in classic middle-American neighborhoods: lower-middle or middle-class whites with kids. Those places are becoming rarer with each passing year.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country here
Fast-food restaurants were once built around the idea of family dine-in. They sought to achieve a warm, friendly, and affordable experience. Family dining establishments were a strand in the healthy social fabric of society; perhaps even a crucial strand. Just as we can look to the condition of the local corner store or mall to gauge the neighborhood’s direction, we can look to the food service industry at a macro level to see broader trends in society: 30 years ago we saw had solariums and lunch buffets, kids eat free nights, and inviting interior spaces. Today we have sterile and cold dining rooms and a focus on carry-out and delivery. As the nuclear family declines, the need for social spaces declines, and in turn the ability to socialize, make friends, and meet new people declines. We seem to be in a death-spiral. Sometimes I wonder if all I’m doing is pulling back the yoke in a panic, accelerating the fated crash.
For some years now, I have been looking for one of those tiffany-style Pizza Hut lamps. I don’t want to order from eBay due to excessive prices and the probability of it arriving in far more than one piece, so I hunted them high and low offline. Someone on Twitter who had been following my “Pizza Hut posting” for years finally sent me a message with a link to a Facebook post by a man claiming to have one of the relics for sale. I messaged him; he was about 500 miles away. A friend of mine and I made a quick road trip out of it.
Arriving mid-afternoon in an older apartment complex on the outskirts of a large city, we found the man waiting with a nearly pristine lamp which I learned came from the remnants of a Pizza Hut he had managed for the better part of a decade. A light gossamer covers the inside, showing its age and provenance. The former manager estimated it to be around 40 years old. It had been a dine-in location, of course, and has since been bulldozed. Shortly before the very last pizza was served, he and the staff each took a lamp as a souvenir.
Because of the Covid lockdowns, he could not find work and was selling the lamp to cover some bills. When he asked me what my “offer” was for the lamp, I handed him what he had asked for initially and carefully loaded the lamp into a box filled with packing peanuts. I’m not sure I’ve ever driven that carefully in my entire life as I did on the way back home with what I consider to be a piece not only of my personal history, but of all of ours.
It is not unreasonable to assume that in the near future, there will be people living in the towns and cities we grew up in who will never have experienced something like a dine-in Pizza Hut on a Friday night.
Sure, maybe waxing poetic about a fast-food chain is lame to some out there. Maybe you “had to be there” to get it. Say what you want; I was there, in the solarium as it snowed, eating a buttery piece of crust and sipping from a red tumbler filled with Pepsi. If you weren’t, you couldn’t possibly understand.
But if you walked into my kitchen and saw the old Pizza Hut lamp hanging above the table, I bet you’d want to know the story.
Once upon a time in our society, even in something as boorish as a chain pizza restaurant, things were beautiful and elegant. Spaces were once designed with the family in mind — I might even go as far as to say with a nice, white family in mind. It’s hard not to think that we now live in the husk of what used to be. It is not my belief that there will be some total collapse of civilization, casting us back into the stone age. Some cataclysmic or watershed event might happen, sure, yet I am more of the belief that we already live in the ruins of an era that was far grander.
There is something deeply disquieting about outliving so many of your old haunts. You begin to lose track of where one life ended and the next began. You begin to wonder if you are the haunted one or if you are the specter.
Maybe there is a white family in a Pizza Hut in some other world, some other time, dropping quarters into the jukebox and the arcade, enjoying a hot hand-tossed pizza they can easily afford. Maybe there will be again in this one. Until then, I will be under the dim glow of a Pizza Hut lamp, forcing a smile because it was all so real, if only for a fleeting season in my life.
* * *
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Notes
[1] Amelia Lucas, “Pizza Hut to close up to 300 locations operated by bankrupt franchisee,” CNBC, August 17, 2020.
[2] Kelly Weill, “Hundreds of Pizza Huts Are Closing. What Happens to Those Weird Buildings?”, The Daily Beast, August 24, 2020.
[3] Jordan Valinsky, “300 Pizza Huts are closing after a giant franchisee goes bankrupt,” CNN Business, August 18, 2020.
[4] Book It! was a program started in the mid-1980s by the President of Pizza Hut to encourage children to read more books.
64 comments
I have some memories from there too. Good find with the lamp!
An alternate thought about dine-in fast food…
Perhaps this is a bit generational, but there was, in fact, a time when in most working-middle class communities (with stay at home mothers) there were only a handful of fast food restaurants, even with dining rooms, and families with cars were just as likely to grab food from a drive-in (Sonic style).
I think it was the 80s that saw a very marked increase in the food service industry, with new fast food chains exploding all around the country. Until the 80s, it was far more likely that a family ate 90+% of their meals at home at the kitchen or dining room table.
This had a plethora of benefits. The food was generally more fresh and healthy. Sometimes even garden grown. Families spent more time together with fewer distractions. Of course, this was a day when a family of 4-5 or more kids was the rule rather than the exception.
I do think there is a trend amongst families to eat at home together more often. Even if it is take-out. I’m absolutely sure and in full agreement that social alienation is playing a huge role in this. It’s easier to deal with grab and go dining at a drive-thru than it is to deal with diversity and horrible service at restaurants. Budgets are also becoming much more constrained. The added costs associated with tipping a waitress, and ordering individual separate meals is something many families are choosing to eliminate from their budgets.
No matter how you break down the analysis, however, at the end of the day, eating at home instead of dining out is a kind of regression to the mean, or a return to normal, typical eating patterns.
That doesn’t mean that the social and economic pressures that are driving it aren’t worth noting. But it is good, in my opinion, to also note the befits of trends that we might find alarming, because sometimes there are indeed benefits.
Well, just like the Mall Rat article wasn’t really about shopping, this isn’t really about pizza vs home cooked meals. In the era you talk about, there were malt shops, diners, soda bars inside most pharmacies, drive-ins, nice public pools, a LOT of third spaces for people to socialize with friends and those outside their immediate family where people could safely hang out and make friends and develop relationships.
Now we have almost none of those things. And although they have been reinvented over the generations, that isn’t happening now. Currently there are dating apps and the meta-verse and superhero movies.
I remember that period in the 80’s. A lot of restraunts came in, were popular, and after a few years the entire chain went out of business. This trend continued in the 90’s, although, not as much in my opinion. The city that I live in is like a lot of U.S. cities, restraunts come and go like the wind.
I am frankly amazed to see this article. When I heard this news, I had the exact same feeling. Being from a working class family in a working class town, Pizza Hut was like a biweekly ritual for me as a child. I share all of your nostalgia and all of your sadness at this news.
I felt silly for that, though, because I thought most people would scoff at the idea of mourning a chain of unhealthy restaurants. I could already hear people saying “Eat local!” “Grow your own food!” etc. I expected the only semi-mournful coverage to be based only on the economic implications. You’re right though – one of those things where you had to be there at the time to get it. As an American born in the latter half of the twentieth century, chain restaurants and malls were often the closest thing you had to any sense of community. Sad to say and not something I expect a lot of people to understand. Hopefully one day we will be able to experience some form of community that makes our memories of Pizza Hut seem as trivial to us as others make them out to be.
This article gave me a warm feeling inside, even if the premise is sad. I stopped eating Pizza Hut many years ago because of the heartburn their sauce would give me, but the vivid description of the restaurants decor and vibe was a nice trip down memory lane. Going with my Mom and brother with my oversized Book It! button sporting it’s latest red star will always be a cherished memory. Thanks also for adding the old commercial. It would play before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on my VHS, which I still own.
In the early 90s Pizza Hut was key to the best drinking night I had. Two friends and I supped at a table at the only Pizza Hut in our area, trying out their new stuffed crust pizza. Somehow that grease nourishment made us invincible Viking drinkers. Hours later we were closing down taverns and made it to false dawn. All of us, even I, who fancied myself a budding Bukowski, were lame-o tipplers usually, but that night countless pitchers were emptied, sent back to Valhalla on railcars, refilled, sent back, and refilled again. We saw false dawn and went home and slept a few hours and woke up without hangovers. Years later we would recall that night and agreed it was Pizza Hut that did it. We never repeated that stunt, unfortunately or not.
This beautiful article made my heart ache, then I read your comment and remembered a very similar fall night in 1983. It was my junior year in high school and there was a Pizza Hut on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill where – rumor had it – they were easy on checking id’s. Sure enough, five pitchers later, five of us girls were utterly hammered. We had so much fun that night. However, being girls, I don’t think we are any pizza at all and the next day was a long one indeed. My first hangover, and it was a doozy. I haven’t thought about that night in many years. You and Mr. Houck made my day.
You’re the real deal, dude. My favorite author here.
Sometimes I watch videos on YouTube, of 1980s old commercials, cheerful children, men and women without cynicism, smiling. As natural as breathing: white, healthy . . . happy.
I was just watching a few “best of” MTV videos from the early 80s and every single commercial had only white people. Well, occasionally a black, but with no message about blacks. Not an Asian or Mexican or Muslim in sight.
In one generation, all gone. One generation.
Absolutely. It’s amazing, powerful.
We’re like a fish on the bank, hook in mouth, thinking, “Ah, so that’s what water was!”
Thank you, means a lot!
This subject strangely touched me. I work at a pizzeria in a relatively large city on a college campus. Believe me when I say, that it is getting lonely out here. I have felt the past slipping away more and more now. Remembering places I once drove by or dined in or visited; these things I know are disappearing, to be replaced with something cynical and cold.
In the past months, I have felt a rending or tearing of the world. Like a dark shadow is being cast by a horror we have yet to perceive. We are in the eye of the storm currently, and though it seems like things cannot get worse, I have a spine-tingling feeling that it will become more horrible than we imagined.
The sadness and the raw helplessness with seeing our history being demoralized, degraded and destroyed, in favor of the new, useful and improved is a sight to behold. We no longer stare in shock or fear, but in resignation and sadness at the abyss where our past lies.
I wish the future was brighter, but I cannot shake the feeling that worse is ahead.
Imagine being 60; having been awakened since the mid-1970s; having started warning people about mass immigration in the mid-to-late 70s; having started reading Instauration (and reading The Dispossessed Majority and Which Way Western Man?) in the 80s, and then American Renaissance from nearly when it debuted in hard copy in 1990; reading The Camp of the Saints in 1993; having worked (for pay, as well as some volunteer stuff) for the GOP at different times across the 90s, always warning about immigration; having worked for Pat Buchanan’s Presidential run in 1995-96; having advised and conceptualized various local and state GOP campaigns in the 90s-00s; having been deeply involved in the immigration restriction movement in the late 90s-00s; doing a bunch of blogging under different pseudonyms in the late 00s and early 10s – and now discovering and reading CC from the mid-10s … and seeing my race having not one damn thing to show for any of it. Everything only ever gets worse.
And it will only continue to do so – absent a monumental act of collective white will to get us off this path to oblivion.
@Lord Shang – Yours is a stark and melancholy post. It is a hard truth that one finds little solace in having done their level best, even given the productive years of their life, to saving a race so indifferent to its fate. Much respect to you.
Thank you. One of the things which interests me in this thing of ours is the issue of personal motivation. Forget me; I was merely a Hard Right conservative Republican trying in my little activities to inject some sanity into the GOP. Only once was I ever physically threatened (by some Mexican radicals on a CA college campus in 1994, where I was giving a very factual but most unwelcome talk for the Pro side of a debate on CA ballot Prop 187 – the anti-illegal alien initiative), but nothing came of it. I did lose several potential girlfriends over my politics, however (which was probably for the best in the end).
No, what interests me is how to account for the David Dukes and Jared Taylors and Greg Johnsons, men who are very far from the media stereotype of “Neanderthalic white supremacists” with no talents or futures. Perhaps they are simply exceptional. But how can we motivate younger quality whites to make the huge personal sacrifices that advancing our cause will entail? I fear that we will not advance without heroes and martyrs. What motivated extreme political activists in the past, especially those facing unbelievable personal risks (long imprisonment, torture or death)? What motivated so many Marxist revolutionaries, who didn’t even have the Christian’s “hope of heaven”?
I think the answer lies somewhere between ethics and social psychology, but I confess I really don’t know.
I think it is actually harder to find people who will work for a cause than it is to find people who would die for it. And for now, the people who work — day after day, week after week, year after year, on sometimes draining tasks — are actually more important than martyrs. How do we get talented people to work for the cause? We don’t have to promise them heaven. We just have to pay them a competitive salary. How can we do that? We put our money behind professional white advocates.
This brings us to our present fundraiser. We are more than $50,000 from our goal and we have a bit more than six weeks to close the gap. If you have been waiting to give, now is the time to do so.
Just click here for the latest information on how to help: https://counter-currents.com/2021/11/milestones/
This article brought back many wonderful memories of my childhood in the late 70s and early 80s. In my hometown of Lompoc, CA, it was Round Table Pizza. I would go there with mom, dad and my brother. We’d sit at the booth or table, order our pizza, soda and a pitcher of beer for mom and dad. Dad gave us quarters and we played Asteroids, Space Invaders and Pac-Man. It was always a wonderful time. After dinner we would stop by Radio Shack next door so I could check out the latest Tandy computers and software, then a short walk to K-Mart for shopping. I hated going to K-Mart, though I tried to get mom and dad to buy the latest Men at Work or Rainbow tape. Even back then, K-Mart had the cassette tapes behind a locked cabinet.
None of that is there now. They all went away some 20 years ago. I’ll always have the fondness memories of that time. Thanks for the article.
You’re a little late with this one. Pizza Huts have been trending in that direction for decades. With the downfall of the dine-ins so came the decline in the quality of their product.
Great essay, Mr. Houck.
Peter Whittle is an Englishman who has been doing great work in trying to build support for salvaging our history. He has conducted a lot of interesting interviews, and he sometimes asks the subject, “Do you feel nostalgic?” More than once he has gotten a response like, “Well, there were good and bad things about the past, but while things aren’t perfect today, we have the Internet!” This is true, but I think his subjects are often on their guard, as if nostalgia is a bad thing.
I’m old enough to remember how so much in our cultural and social life really WAS better than today. I believe Whittle has admitted that he does feel nostalgic for the times when he was a child. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Not only have many of us collected a trove of good memories from our personal lives, but many of us can testify, as in this essay, how things once were better overall.
Sometimes all one needs to do for evidence of this is look at art that was done before “the Arts” became a closed community of degenerates. Or just compare a popular TV show from 50 years ago to today. Or read a book that was promoted in Book-of-the-Month Club. Or watch those videos of people strolling through cities of 100 or 120 years ago, amidst architecture that actually incorporated beauty.
Very sound observations. Things were better in the past, at least morally and sociologically (and of course, racially). But generally this refers to the pre-1960s past. They were mostly not better economically, however; those who think otherwise are usually early Boomers who were raised at a time of American economic dominance and super-abundance that was unique to the postwar era, and unlikely ever to be repeated, even absent ‘diversity’. America has declined continuously and in every aspect across my entire life. Things were not very wonderful, however, in the 1970-80s-90s, as seen by those of us, especially the Awakened ones, living through those periods – though at that time I intuited that at some point in the future, they would come to be more appreciated, if only in comparison to a predictably ever shittier present. I have not the slightest doubt that in 25 years, the relatively low crime era of the mid-90s to mid/late-2010s will be viewed with tremendous nostalgia.
Indeed, Revilo Oliver, in one of his essays collected under the title America’s Decline, wonders aloud who could not possibly pine for the “beautifully stable and European-dominated world before 1914”, and he is surely correct in this (as any reader of, say. Henry James can attest). The white man was degenerating long before he idiotically saddled himself with ‘diversity’.
Our task is to contemplate our own “Benedict Option” – to start forming little communities of racial virtue among ourselves, ethnic networks of and for our people. As Greg Johnson says, “Those of us who work for the ethnostate already live there.”
I forgot to add that, increasingly, nostalgia (on the part of whites) is indeed considered somewhat ‘suspect’. I am not kidding or exaggerating. It makes sense, however: feeling nostalgic can make one question whether the past was not preferable to the present, which in obvious turn leads to inconvenient questions about how the present differs from the past – and we all know the biggest way in which it differs …
Very good points, Lord S. Those of us who experienced the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s benefitted from living off the fumes, so-to-speak, of the better social and cultural traditions that had developed organically long before 1914, even though they had been under attack for a long time. In America, combined with that unusual post-WWII economic prosperity that you mentioned, this helped create an optimism that undergirds what’s called American Exceptionalism today, I think. I remember, though, in the 70’s, feeling sick because I could see, even as a boy, much more degeneracy spreading quickly through popular culture, and not meeting much serious resistance from the grown-ups. These cultural shifts had big effects, for the worse, in my own schools.
On a related note, Simon Webb, who presents the “History Debunked” channel on Youtube, grew up in poorer, working class areas in England, and he told Peter Whittle that in his schools at that time, “the idea was to draw children up,” by offering them higher culture. Today, though, “the emphasis seems to be on going down; the emphasis seems to be on catering to the lowest thing.” That puts it mildly.
Forming those communities and networks that you mentioned certainly is vital.
I should have noted that Simon Webb seems to have been in school in the 1950’s or so.
The white man was degenerating long before he idiotically saddled himself with ‘diversity’.
Exactly! The dissident right sees cultural decline simply as racial decline. They mark a decline from the 1980s to the present because the 1980s was numerically whiter, but the wheels were in motion back then. If life was so great in the 1980s, how did we wind up at this low point in history? Something was wrong with the culture if it took us here.
Who can look at the divorce rate of the 1980s and say that it wasn’t a civilization heading for disaster? The kids from those broken homes grew up to be millennials.
Tony Robbins has a saying, “See things as they are but not worse than they are.” I have my own saying: see things as they were but not better than they were. The 1980s were one stage of decline, like having a less advanced stage of cancer.
In fairness, commentators such as Millennial Woes and Frodi Mitjord make this point.
It legally started in 1965 with the hart cellar act which overturned the 1929 immigration restriction act. Objectively speaking.
OMC,
I have commented on this on other posts, too. I grew up as a child in the 70s and as a teenager in the 80s and no, things were not terrific. I don’t mean to paint my memories through rose colored glass when I look back fondly. We knew things were going wrong. We kind of made fun of the “Politically Correct” crap that was rearing its ugly head in the 80s. But there was still enough of our culture (white, all-American culture) to hold onto, to treasure, to enjoy. And we did.
One thing I gripe about now, in reflection, is that my generation (the so-called “Gen-Xr’s) didn’t do enough to push back on this b.s. And it was primarily with our generation that this crap flowered into mainstream culture. Yes, the seeds were already there, but even so, I think we should have pushed back hard on it. Instead, we passed it along to the so-called Millennials (our younger brothers and sisters) and now they, and the so-called Zoomers, have to deal with it all. And they are going crazy. They don’t know who they are because it’s not ok to be white and American. I really don’t think foreigners from 1965 (and the Jewish elite from the turn of the last century) would have been as successful in destroying and stealing from us, had there been more of a fight from recent generations.
I deeply regret that I did not have the courage or clarity to really stand my ground in my young adulthood about my desire to live among heritage and cultural Americans (=European whites), instead of going along with it all, as if the take over were inevitable.
Yes, there were problems back then. Yes, we saw them. The Gen-Xr’s went from partying hard as teenagers in the 80s (with our MTV) to complaining about injustice as young adults in the 90s (with our middle class grunge genre). Still love all the music but, boy ‘o boy, I scratch my head sometimes when I think of my generation.
I really don’t have time to edit or correct my comments here. Please excuse the errors in grammar and inconsistencies in thought. I just wanted to note that my nostalgia is not missing a dose of reality when looking back. My humanity can handle it all (I think).
Richard Houck has a way of looking back and pointing out the beauty that was always there. I appreciate that.
I want to eat pizza tonight. I think everyone experiences this sort of nostalgia for the places of their younger days. I miss video game arcades and mall hangouts, and all the other paraphernalia of 1970 through 1995. I think it was the last beautiful flowering of white america. Judging from the culture—movies, music, books—it really was objectively better. However, I do believe there is a systematic effort to destroy the public sphere and limit public meetings between people. I think that’s why Covid was released. They don’t want us communicating. That’s why they deleted the comments at Amazon. Charlottesville and the alt right, as pathetic and banal as it was, really frightened our elites.
Agreed–even though the Pizza Hut in Sanford, N. C. didn’t have a solarium (this was the late 70s/early 80s), and it didn’t snow very often there–another piece of white Americana shuffles quietly into history. It was quite a treat for me, my brother and parents to get a pizza on Friday night; maybe you really “had to be there.” Incidentally, that same iconic building now houses, and has for probably twenty years now, a Mexican restaurant.
One of my cities oldest Pizza Hut’s is now a Mexican restaurant as well.
This article was a big ‘member berry for me. Reading about the Book It! program took me back to zealously reading “Trumpet of the Swan” so my class could all go out for lunch at pizza hut. I didn’t want to be the kid who ruined it for everyone else because I didn’t read the book. We could have gotten delivery, but there’s something about going out, especially at Pizza Hut with its iconic booths, decor, and of course concentrated pizza smell. I wonder if this is how boomers felt noticing the local root beer stands going under.
A beautiful piece, Mr. Houck, and one I have filed away for future rereading. Some of you might also like Keith Pandolfi’s “A Case for Bad Coffee,” which similarly exalts the ostensibly mundane. The latter was written by a left-leaning normie, but the parts about his conservative stepdad spoke to me.
I read this article last night and really enjoyed it! thank you
I pine for the old Family Restaurants that had Mini-Juke boxes at the table, a bread-basket with Melba toast – complimentary, and an annual visit from Santa while you ate at Christmas time.
There was a Kid’s menu and the parents could have a beer with the meal.
And only the local-owned ones.
But, I get the Pizza Hut nostalgia. Mine just had a different form.
Sure, maybe waxing poetic about a fast-food chain is lame to some out there.
Not at all. At least not to me. That was a beautiful and eloquent article, and hit home for me in a way few articles ever do. I can’t tell you how many childhood, teenage, and even adult memories of mine involve dine-in pizza places like Pizza Hut. That awesome jukebox, the nice cute white waitresses, the way it was all a big adventure when a crowd of you went. When I was in college and I met the girl who was later to become my wife, there was still a dine-in Pizza Hut in town and it was one of our regular hang-outs.
The town I live in now actually had one right up until a year ago. It’s a vacant building now. The only place you can get Pizza Hut pizza around here is to have it delivered, and as you intimated, it just isn’t the same.
Wonderfully said, Mr. Houck. Will be on the lookout for your articles now in the future.
Not sure if you read this one below from a couple of years ago, but this was a great essay from Richard Houck also.
7-11 Nationalism
That was a powerful essay. But there’s a problem. Until very recently (post-Floyd), crime was way down in the 00s-10s compared to the 80s. That’s not PC propaganda; it’s true. The comments there and here make it sound as though crime and public safety is much worse. Maybe it is in 2021 compared to 1987 (maybe; I’d like to see Justice Dept data on that). But not 2019. Violent crime in all categories was much lower in 2019 than 1987, and wrt the most sensational crime – murder – much of that nowadays is black on black.
Perhaps the perception of criminal menace has become worse in some formerly white places due to the alienation which the mere fact of diversity itself causes. But violent crime was worse in the period 1965-1995 than it was 1995-2019.
No argument there. I guess I wasn’t looking it so much in terms of criminal activity as in just a general positive cultural phenomenon that’s been stomped out due to globohomo and divershitty.
This is an interesting criticism or “problem” with 7-11 Nationalism that has been brought up before, but I never really addressed it formally.
The idea of the criticism is that there is some inherent flaw in the overall argument that things were better then, than they are now. The “flaw” is that certain crime statistics show that in the 1980s crime was higher than it is now. In my view, simply looking at the murder rate per 100,000 citizens in 1987 which was ~8.3 and comparing that to 2018 or 2019 where it was ~5.0, is simply too narrow to capture the experience of White Americans in the current year compared to a few decades earlier.
For one, the murder rate “dropping” on a per capita basis, while the total population in the USA has grown by incredible rates, does not necessarily mean your chances of being victimized are lower.
Two, in the 1980s, crime was more concentrated to inner-cities where few Whites lived. What this means as I view things is that while the victimization rate of a black in a major US city may have declined, as diversity increased and spread, which it has, the odds of a White person being victimized who does not live in the inner-city actually grew, despite the overall rate of crime having declined.
Third, it is true that social capital has declined on the whole, even if the crime rate were near zero, increased racial diversity would and does destroy social capital. Things could be safe, yet atomized. So even if the 7-11 were crime-free, it would still feel foreign and would be difficult to foster relationships in a very diverse society. The crux of the article and series is not so much about crime, it is more about social capital. So granting the crime rate dropped in absolute terms from its precipice in the 1980s, the White percent of the population declined by 20% or more, leading to the destruction of social capital in all corners of the nation.
Forth, related to the per capita issue again, total crimes are still very high. The total US population since 1987 has increased by about 100 million people, around one-third of a population increase. Most of the new “Americans” are not Whites, and interracial violent crime statistics show that Whites are disproportionally attacked by non-whites in violent crimes. Taken together, what this means to me is that although the per capital violent crime rate may appear to be declining on the whole, due to increased neighborhood diversity and increased non-white citizenry, the odds of a White person being victimized has likely increased since the 1980s. If it hasn’t increased, that still does not undercut the fact that we pay more of the “diversity tax” than ever before.
I do not believe the mere perception of crime against Whites has become worse, I think in absolute terms, there are fewer “safe spaces” for our people in the modern society than in the 1980s and 1990s. Diversity has increased everywhere, the non-white population has increased everywhere in absolute and relative terms, social capital has cratered. Looking at the drop in crime from its peak is too narrow of a metric to capture what is happening, in my view.
Finally, the series is about social capital, not crime. Again, crime could drop to near zero, yet social capital could also drop. Consider if the nation was flooded with low-crime Japanese peoples, it would still harm social capital even if crime was lower. Another interesting bit of information is that the immigrant crime rate is “technically” lower than that of Americans only because the black American crime rate is so high, which factors into the overall analysis.
With all of that said, thank you for reading and paying close enough attention to have a criticism because “wow Rich just loves fast food and gas stations” (that is however, very true).
Thank you for the thorough reply. There is little I disagree with. I certainly agree that social capital has cratered, and that diversity has played the predominant role in this (that was even an unwelcome finding of a study by Prof. Robert “Bowling Alone” Putnam). I agree that life overall is worse today than in the 1970s/80s/90s/00s (remember, I was an adult from 1979, so I experienced all of this firsthand; or, “I was there”). America was better overall because it was more ours. It’s that simple.
My only comment on your 7-11 Nationalism article was to disagree wrt crime rates in the 80s vs. today. Absent much more extensive empirical evidence to the contrary, I will continue to disagree with much of what you just asserted about past vs present crime rates and how they have affected whites.
in the 1980s, crime was more concentrated to inner-cities where few Whites lived. What this means as I view things is that while the victimization rate of a black in a major US city may have declined, as diversity increased and spread, which it has, the odds of a White person being victimized who does not live in the inner-city actually grew, despite the overall rate of crime having declined.
Is this actually true? Are whites being more victimized today than in the 1970s-90s? I have never read anything to this effect. Nor am I aware that black on black crime has declined much over the past half century.
interracial violent crime statistics show that Whites are disproportionally attacked by non-whites in violent crimes.
Is that true? My understanding is that most violent crimes are committed against members of the same race. Might you mean that, in interracial crimes, whites are overwhelmingly the victims and nonwhites the perps?
Taken together, what this means to me is that although the per capital violent crime rate may appear to be declining on the whole, due to increased neighborhood diversity and increased non-white citizenry, the odds of a White person being victimized has likely increased since the 1980s.
Again, I’d like to see the data. There have been countervailing factors, like the unfortunate phenomenon of “white flight”. I think the heyday of “diversity criminality” was in the 1970s. Whites are more residentially segregated from blacks today than they were fifty years ago.
Anyway, my comment only pertained to the issue of crime then and now. Considering society overall, life has gotten mostly worse for whites over the past 50 years.
It doesn’t necesssarily have to be crime. There are cultural diffrences as well. If you have ever been in a restraunt when a lot of blacks come in as a group to dine, quite often they are loud, or as some would say expressive. I would like to hear a white waitress give some commentary on this.
at least a dozen cities in the US set murder records this year. dozens more, many large cities, saw murder rates at 30+ year highs. Things are getting more violent again. I don’t think it’s all in our heads.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/08/a-dozen-us-cities-set-annual-murder-records/
Another touching and eloquent article by Richard Houck, which I have enjoyed as much as his Mall Rat article. For me and my family, it was Shakey’s Pizza Parlor (not Pizza Hut) because my brother’s baseball and soccer teams always went to Shakey’s. There’s a couple of Pizza Huts in my area and no, they are not what they used to be. At all.
What I gather when I read Richard’s lovely articles is that it isn’t about nostalgia just for nostalgia’s sake (as we get older and see how things naturally change), but it’s about feelings of sadness and longing, feelings which are enveloped in the distressing knowledge that what is replacing our culture is something much worse (for everybody, really). I avoid going out as much as possible now because I live in a multicultural area and I really want to limit my interactions with non-whites as much as possible. And yet I don’t want to live like this. I even avoid going into the bank because my local branch (in a very nice neighborhood) is staffed entirely by Hispanics now (not Mexicans, but Hispanics) and with black security guards. They are all nice enough, but I don’t care about that. I resent them.
There is a clothing store nearby in a very good area that, back in the 90s, was staffed entirely of girls my age who worked there after class (college) and that same shop today (less than a generation later) is now entirely staffed by non-whites (and a lot of gay non whites). And on the weekends I’ve popped in for socks and there’s always a line of Mexicans (not Hispanics) at all registers. I can count the number of whites, including myself, on one hand. It’s just….bizarre. It’s hard to wrap my head around how quickly this country flipped to non-white demographics, even in nicer areas, traditionally white areas.
Friends will not take their kids to Disneyland anymore because it’s all Mexicans and blacks and polite but annoying East Asians. It doesn’t feel like an American family park any longer. It doesn’t feel like it is ours.
It’s those little things, as Richardnotes–the mundane, the intimate, the precious- that are disappearing and I know we at CC are not the only ones that have noticed it. “Normies” around me do, too.
What is going to have to happen to stop this? To change things to our benefit?
The link to your brother’s baseball team is really worth developing. In my hometown, our baseball teams were all sponsored by local merchants — the local auto body shop, hardware store, pizzeria, and, to the endless mirth of 12-year-old boys, the Peoples Natural Gas utility. Drivers Ed was made possible thanks to a donated car from the local Chevy dealer. And the Fourth of July parade was sponsored by the Jaycees, local merchants, and various fraternal organizations. Social organizations — famously remarked upon by de Tocqueville — were essential to the fabric of our communities. Obviously, big box chains and the internet have wiped out the benefits of local commerce. But our social organizations have also been eradicated, and not just by Facebook and its ilk. Litigation and “woke” politics have been used — purposely and strategically, in my opinion — to gut just about every one of the myriad organizations that created deep social bonds within our communities. As I drove one of my kids to school this morning, it really struck me (as it often does) how much has been lost for her. Just gone.
I have long argued for the possibility of restarting white social clubs and organizations, networking places for implicit pro-whites. I belonged to an upper class one for nearly a decade. It basically did not exist per any radar – except that it did exist. It consisted of around 120 youngish white men. We paid dues, we did things (mainly going out collectively to fine restaurants and sponsoring parties). But we didn’t earn money, and didn’t own any property, and thus there was no way we could be ‘diversified’, even if the Powers That Be had discovered us.
We need to start forming these types of groups, and similar others. There is too much diversity + Diversity (ie, race + ideology)-driven social atomization and disconnectedness, especially among whites, and especially in progressive/diverse places. How can I connect with other “right-thinkers” in my “blue city” area? How do we find each other in the real world? There needs to be some trustworthy central clearing house.
“Social organizations — famously remarked upon by de Tocqueville — were essential to the fabric of our communities.”
Yes, very true. People today don’t understand how important and pervasive these organizations used to be.
Today, when you drive through small towns and the countryside in North America, you can often see abandoned buildings that were once thriving homes of groups like the Grange, the Odd Fellows (which was a fraternal organization), etc. America was individualistic, yes, but this was very well-balanced by widespread participation in these kinds of organizations. It was one important way in which people looked out for each other.
I’ll echo Lord Shang’s plaintive question, “How do we find each other in the real world?” It’s always important, and especially now.
Yes indeed, the relic of the Pizza Hut restaurant reminds me of all of my family’s cross-country vacations in the 1970s and ‘80s, from Chicago to the W. Coast, on interstates 80 and 90, on which Pizza Hut was well-represented. We never ate out except for special occasions, including our month-long vacations, union-negotiated and seniority-earned by my dad, another relic of a lost time. I have a lasting sensory impression of when you opened the door-the smell of the pizza (or the Italian sausage maybe), the brick walls, the red plastic cups and crushed ice, the jukebox, etc., all of which carry powerful memories of the best times of my childhood and adolescence with the people who love you the most. Pizza Hut for me is associated with hiking in Yellowstone and Devil’s Tower and shopping for souvenirs at Wall Drug with my parents, sister, and grandmother as much as it is with pizza. Many places that were ours are being erased. It makes the heart sink.
i know exactly how you feel :/
Excellent essay by Houck. What’s sad is that this could not now appear in National Review or First Things; it might possibly be greenlit for Chronicles. This is a deeply conservative, as well as factually unexceptionable, piece. What’s “extremist” about it?
Remember those “family-fun” places in the 90s that combined video game arcades, batting cages, go carts and mini golf? Those are gone too. Kids used to have birthday parties there. There’s a scene in Good Will Hunting that takes place in one.
The families that had those kids were boomers. They had them in the 70s and 80s when the birth rate (not the fertility rate) was higher. The average white family wasn’t much bigger than it is now, but there were more white families. Today there are fewer people having kids all around, whites included.
My issue with the author is that he sees this as purely the outcome of increased racial diversity. Birth and fertility rates have been falling everywhere for decades, even in countries with little or no racial diversity like Iceland and Finland.
It’s not an economic problem either. Ireland has gotten richer – incomes have risen – while their birth and fertility rates have simultaneously fallen. Eastern Europe has gotten richer too, but the same phenomenon persists there.
This is a cultural problem.
Like many of the commenters above, Pizza Hut had a certain presence in my growing-up years. I hadn’t quite thought if it, until reading this excellent essay by Richard Houck, but many of the commercial aspects of life — pre 1990’s, in my opinion — were White-friendly places where you didn’t have to feel on high-alert for a potential encounter with diversity. I really feel the full-force of the siege mentality we now live under when I watch commercials, or consume any other media from the 1980’s. A person could just relax while being unapologetically White in public.
I’ve started reading beautiful old books from the early 1900’s. What really strikes me now, is that even in my 1970’s and 1980’s childhood and young adulthood, there was still a sense of that earlier culture and all its markers. Every year, more and more of the fragile spiderweb of threads that connected us to the sane world of White primacy disappear.
thank you for reading and the nice comment.
Honest, I really do get your points and you’re a good writer. However, I wonder if the loss of superficial bonhomie at the ol’ Pizza Huts (and family fun places in general) is really such a calamity. All that easily-available, industrial-quality pizza and Pepsi, in a cozy restaurant, with its veneer of togetherness and happiness, got to be a bad habit with our folks. The unquestioned right to scarf down cheap, easily available food at restaurants is no loss; this was never our culture, but just a blip on the screen, a segment of the pasted-on postwar shiny new life.
How did our grandparents and further back ancestors manage without restaurants? I can recall (and I’m not all that ancient but do come from a “deprived” background) a regular houseful of (or just a few) guests (neighbors, friends, relatives, social organization members, etc). It was wonderful for us kids to be around all those adults yakking, we were not told to get out of the way or “stay in your room”.
How you can socialize today or meet people casually without proof of having gotten multiple killshots and/or covering your face – well, I don’t know.
Lots of interesting comments here, anyway.
It’s really about the loss of third spaces in American life. Not so much the pizza.
Our ancestors had a lot of third spaces. Town centers, taverns, beer halls, public gardens, courtyards, on and on. Those are gone. Ours are gone. Now what? sit in the pod with netflix streaming, alone.
I really did understand what you were trying to say, it was certainly clear. I was just sorry you chose the loss of pizza joints as the base to make this point.
The loss of those nice third spaces is nothing compared to the requirement to hide our faces like muslim women + get the kill shots and the neverending boosters. So, we have bigger fish to fry at this point.
The loss of those nice third spaces is nothing compared to the requirement to hide our faces like muslim women + get the kill shots and the neverending boosters. So, we have bigger fish to fry at this point.
You make it sound like Richard blew an opportunity to change public opinion on covid restrictions. Hate to break it to you, but we don’t have that kind of reach.
Besides, does anyone have anything new to say about covid and how it ties into the Great Reset? Saying what has already been said by others in a slightly different way is pointless.
If Richard had written an anti-covid article big pharma would still be changing what it means to be vaccinated and we’d still be wearing masks.
You do make a good point, I can’t totally disagree with you. I should not have made this into an either/or thing. I guess I was looking for someone else to say that the loss of the old style Pizza huts is not a calamity inasmuch as they were never a part of our tradition. I saw an emotional, childlike attachment to a fake gemutlichkeit which was superficial and unimportant. I’ll let it go now.
Man, this hit a lot harder than I expected it to. Lots of good times had at the local Pizza Hut growing up in the 90’s. That world feels so far gone now that I sometimes question if it was even real.
This is off topic a little bit, but still focusing on nostalgia for lost American culture.
When I get really sad about how things have gone, I look over these videos (from generations prior to mine) just to see how it used to be. Even in the 80s, we weren’t as wholesome or “All-American” as these ladies were. Too bad.
Please note: not a single person of color in either video.
Prom! It’s a Pleasure (1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3ZLgbNbzxY&list=PLxpzKm9MA41HMDIW-wh35cdY_LCT0C7Fp&index=27
Junior Prom (1946)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrG1qH0LR_o&list=PLxpzKm9MA41HMDIW-wh35cdY_LCT0C7Fp&index=28
It seems this is quite a popular subject among those who are of a more contemplative mindset on this site.
For me in my childhood it was a local drugstore with an ice cream bar, in the next town about thirty minutes away, whenever we would go to the small town, we would stop by the drugstore.
This was one of the biggest highlights of my younger childhood. You would sit either at the counter (it was a long twenty feet!) which had the silver chrome stools with bright red cushions, or sit in one of the six booths adjacent to the shop entrance (also red seats!). With our large family, Mom and Dad would sit down in one of the booths with the youngest (usually a baby) and us older kids would sit on the stools (me being the eldest). Dad would spend three dollars on the whole treat (plus a 75 cent coffee); five cents a scoop with cones, and ten cents a scoop for bowls.
The wall behind the bar and above the rinsing sinks had classic 1950’s and 60’s Coca-Cola paraphernalia and framed newspaper articles. The atmosphere in the place was always enjoyable and the servers were all white and friendly, Mom and Dad were happy to see us enjoy the place and it brought back memories of their childhood, which endeared the place even closer to me, having a connection with a piece of the past.
I have thought often of starting one of these kinds of businesses and am seriously considering it (though not where I currently reside), moving to a place out west and building something that Whites can flock to and where families can form new memories–to create a third space for our culture once again!
I recently found the place on google maps and wondered what it looked like now on the inside–if the rot of civilization had finally gotten to that ice cream bar/drugstore. I won’t know for a long time, but I suspect that when I finally do, it’ll have been closed down and the building up for sale.
This galvanizes me to build my own, with my whole life ahead of me, having definite goals today will leave a legacy for my descendants!
Oftentimes the Right is accused of “idealizing a golden era that never actually existed”.
This coming from the same crowd that considers “lived experience” (as if there’s any other kind) to be the paramount source of authority.
Sorry, but I remember how cozy Pizza Hut was. Jam packed on a Friday or Saturday night, the salad bar, the Indiana Jones arcade game and so on.
Like the Brian Williams meme says, “I was there”. And I won’t be told I wasn’t.
“I was there” is perhaps the most powerful rebuttal to people telling us we are idealizing a past that never existed.
A lot of restraunts have taken a similar path to Pizza Hut. These younger generations have never known life without the internet or social media. Some commentators are saying this has effected the restraunt industry. People grow up looking at a menu online, then order online. As was stated, you don’t have to pay for a tip or drinks. These same people do most of there socializing online as well.
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