Another Look at the Denny’s Shootings
by Jeff Davis
I have a confession to make. I actually LIKE Denny’s food. As far as Basic American Grease goes, Denny’s is probably the best. Good basic home cooking and good breakfasts and sandwiches, and although the price has gone up in recent years Denny’s is still sufficiently cheap so ordinary Americans can eat there. Sure, there’s enough cholesterol and salt in the food to kill you dead on the spot if you’ve got a weak heart, but this is America, after all, and it’s the poison that tastes so good we can’t stop stuffing it in our faces. Denny’s affordability however has become a handicap in the big cities of southern California, where its diverse customers have taken to shooting up the place.
For a while it seemed anytime a black walked into a Denny’s he walked out hollering for Jesse Jackson and the NAACP. Then he was on the evening news with an attorney filing a lawsuit because his waitress was too slow or his coffee was cold or his eggs were scrambled too soft. Denny’s caved in to black extortionists the first couple of times. But then Denny’s got smart and installed closed circuit cameras, which sunk the last attempt to shake down Denny’s for making blacks wait “too long” (as if the courts or government should even care about this sort of thing).
The latest Denny’s-related fad seems to be shooting up the place. There has been a spate of three fatal shootings in Denny’s restaurants in southern California; customers are starting to need Kevlar vests as well as Rolaids to eat there. The latest shooting happened on March 10th outside a Denny’s near Angel Stadium in Anaheim, after “a fight broke out between two large groups of people who had been in the restaurant,” according to a police statement. One man was killed. Another 37 year-old man had already been killed a day earlier when a fight broke out in the parking lot of a Denny’s in Ontario. And the day before THAT, a “transient” (read a lunatic released onto the streets because there is no money left to care for the mentally ill anymore) walked into a Denny’s in Pismo Beach, shot two men dead and wounded a husband and wife before blowing his own brains out.
In a weird sort of way I can understand why these things are happening in Denny’s. Denny’s is the quintessential American experience: garish, standardized restaurants of glass and plastic serving food which is very tasty because it’s loaded up with everything that’s bad for you. The philosophy at Denny’s is clearly Ray Kroc’s “Move ‘em in, take their money, and move ‘em out.” Denny’s is a symbol of everything that is AMERICA today–flashy, phony, shallow, money-grubbing, and in the long run poisonous. Much like the real America, there was resistance and resentment toward Black customers. Our courts stepped in and demanded that Denny’s should crush the “waitress rebellion” or pay millions in shake down lawsuits. Now it seems we are seeing the “benefits” of the new black-friendly Denny’s. Just remember to duck.