AMERICAS BEST VALUE INN MAINGATE https://blog.dnevnik.hr/americas-best-value-inn-mainga

To refresh your memory----in the summer of 1969, with the Shriners coming to town for their national convention, the maid's went on strike at the hotel. The maids were making, I think, $1.80 an hour and they were striking for $2.00 an hour. Since I was making probably $1.50 or less per hour, I was not filled with a great deal of sympathy.
The first day of the strike, management brought in scads and scads of college and high school students. I remember little about that day other than that the honchos neglected to lock-up the sodas, and at the end of the day, the hotel was completely wiped out of sodas of every description. The did, fortunately, have the liquor locked up. I remember that I had never tasted Schweppes bitter lemon, and that first day of the strike, I had two or three. No doubt because of their forbidden aura, they tasted delicious.
The hotel was swarming with high school and college age girls, and it was like working in a paradise. No one knew what they were doing, and it was easy to slide around in an undisciplined way (I'm guessing), act important, and expend little energy. I think (again I'm guessing) that the employee cafeteria was abolished. All the cooks were unionized, and so were unwilling to cross the picket lines. That left the chefs to do all the cooking. If I remember correctly (my dealer friend had bragged to me that he had "turned on all twenty cooks in the kitchen, and half of the chefs"), there were ten chefs. The Golden Lion restaurant was shut down, and all the food in the hotel was served in the coffee shop. A buffet was laid out, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the chef and his sous did all the cooking.
I only remember three things from that time. There was a banquet one night, and I was called in to the kitchen and helped plate. That was the first time I ever did a job that I have done most probably many thousands of times since, and if I'm lucky, will never do again.
The food that went out for breakfast was better than the food that we got down in the employee cafeteria. I remember the desserts in the employee cafeteria especially---they were the desserts that came down after they had gone unused in the restaurant and the coffee shop, three or four days old, relatively unappealing. I remember that one of the steam table breakfast items was apples crepes, and they were really fairly decent.
And I remember one of the customers who came in to the coffee shop during the strike. She was a young woman, twenty-five or thirty or so, very attractive, and traveling by herself. Perhaps I was charming in my way, or perhaps I merely imagined that I was charming. When she got up and left her table, after she had paid her bill, she left her room key lying on the table.
My mind went in to overdrive. No doubt she had left the key for me to find. No doubt, if I went up and knocked on her door, she would be waiting for me. If I gave her enough time, she would have changed in to a negligee, lit the candles, turned the covers back, and prepared a welcome fit for Dionysius himself. My mind flew out, spun circles around Jupiter and Saturn and rocketed off in the direction of Neptune and Pluto.
On the other hand, she most probably had just forgotten her key. If I took it upstairs and knocked on her door to return it, she would undoubtedly call security. I would be fired on the spot, and frog-marched out of the hotel.
Cowardice won out---I took the key to the front desk, turned it in, and never heard another word about it.
Oh, and one other thing. You say that that was the summer when man first walked on the moon? I didn't pay it a bit of attention. I didn't have a television in my apartment, and I guess I had gotten out of the habit of reading the newspaper, other than the alternative paper, and Rolling Stone. I remember, the day after the first moonwalk, passing a newspaper in a news rack. "Man Walks On Moon!" it said, or something like that. That was the first I'd heard about it.

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
May 24, 2011

The culture of the United States is said to be a youth culture, which is defined in terms of entertainment: sex, rock music or its current equivalent, violent video games, sports, and TV reality shows. This culture has transformed the country and appears on the verge of transforming the rest of the world. There are even indications that secularized Arab and Iranian youth can’t wait to be liberated and to partake of this culture of porn-rock.

America’s former culture–accountable government, rule of law and presumption of innocence, respect for others and for principles, and manners–has gone by the wayside. Many Americans, especially younger ones, are not aware of what they have lost, because they don’t know what they had.

This was brought home to me yet again by some reader responses to my recent columns in which I pointed out that Strauss-Kahn, the IMF director (now former) accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, was denied the presumption of innocence. I pointed out that the legal principle of innocent until proven guilty was violated by the police and media, and that Strauss-Kahn was convicted in the media not only prior to trial but also prior to his indictment.

From readers’ responses I learned that there are people who do not know that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty by evidence in a public trial. As one wrote, “if he wasn’t guilty, he wouldn’t be charged.” Some thought that by “presumption of innocence” I was saying that Strauss-Kahn was innocent. I was accused of being a woman-hater and received feminist lectures. Some American women are more familiar with feminist mantras than they are with the legal principles that are the foundation of our society.

Many males also confused my defense of the presumption of innocence with a defense of Strauss-Kahn, or if they knew about “innocent until proven guilty,” didn’t care. Right-wingers wanted Strauss-Kahn out of the picture because he was the socialist party candidate likely to defeat the American puppet, Sarkozy, in the French presidential election. With Sarkozy, Washington finally has a French president who has abandoned all interest in an independent or semi-independent French foreign policy. Didn’t I realize that if we lost Sarkozy, the French might revert to not going along with our invasions, as they refused to do when we had to get Saddam Hussein? With Sarkozy, the French are doing our bidding in Libya. Why in the world did I think Strauss-Kahn and some silly doctrine like the presumption of innocence were more important than French support for our wars?

* A d v e r t i s e m e n t
* Buy 3 Get 1 FREE!

Many left-wingers were just as indifferent to a legal principle that protects the innocent. They wanted Strauss-Kahn’s blood, because he is a rich member of the establishment and as IMF director had made the poor in Greece, Ireland, and Spain pay for the mistakes of the rich. What did I mean, “presumption of innocence”? How could any member of the ruling establishment be innocent? One left-winger even wrote that I had “reverted to type,” and that my babbling about presumption of innocence proved that I was still a Reaganite defending the rich from the consequences of their crimes.

It evidently did not cause the feminist, the right-wing or the left-wing to wonder that if such a powerful member of the establishment, as they regard Strauss-Kahn to be, can be denied the presumption of innocence, what would be their fate?

Independent thought is not a concept with which very many Americans are familiar or comfortable. Most want to have their emotions stroked, to be told what they want to hear. They already know what they think. A writer’s job is to validate it, and if the writer doesn’t, he is, depending on the ideology of the reader, a misogynist, a pinko-liberal commie, or an operative for the fascist establishment. All will agree that he is a no good SOB.

<< Arhiva >>