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July
19, 2002 10:30 a.m. EDITOR'S NOTE: This week is the 100th anniversary of Harley-Davidson. Here is a syndicated column I wrote a few months back about motorcycling, something with which I have very little personal experience, but appreciate from afar. — Rich Lowry |
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he
fatal brawl between the Mongols and the Hells Angels at a Laughlin, Nev.,
Harrah's casino recently is just the kind of thing that gives motorcycle
gangs a bad name: the shootings, the knifings, the bar stools broken over
people's heads.
The rival gangs had gathered at the annual River Run motorcycle rally, held for the past 20 years, and might well have been enticed into Harrah's by a neon sign outside: "Welcome Bikers — 25 cent craps." Reports say "tensions had been brewing" between the two groups over a "territorial dispute."
Surely if Colin Powell had been dispatched to Nevada to "keep the two sides talking" (even if in monosyllables and grunts) and implemented a series of "confidence-building measures," a just solution could have been worked out sometime before the end of President Bush's second term. But forget the administration's lack of "engagement" in Laughlin for a moment.
Instead, focus on avoiding the conclusion immediately suggested by such an awful, bloody incident: that all bikers are thugs. Gangs like the Mongols are indeed criminal enterprises on two wheels, but that shouldn't spoil an appreciation of the wonderful Americaness of the motorcycle, and the people who ride them.
National Review founder William F. Buckley famously said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard University. I would rather be governed by 2,000 motorcycles riders than all the Volvo drivers in the United States (especially if they are on the Harvard faculty — and there is probably considerable overlap there).
Quintessentially, American qualities seem wired into the motorcycle: There is the individuality of the lone rider, there is the speed, there is the risk taking and there is the open road, suggestive of freedom and possibility, and the kind of distances possible only in a great continental nation.
It is appropriate that the post-World War II cult of the motorcycle largely grew up in California, that big, open, sunny home of free-living and innovation. The first wave of hard-core bikers were apparently World War II veterans who couldn't do without the thrill of their days in the military.
The connection between veterans and biking makes sense: Motorcyclists tap into a spirit that is more robust, rugged and masculine than the "tall-skim-double-mocha latte, please" culture of contemporary America.
Political scientist Walter Russell Mead has written of the Jacksonian tradition in America — a holdover from the old frontier ethic, featuring a slew of attitudes including an off-our-backs suspicion of government and a fierce patriotism.
It is a tradition that lives on most purely in the South, in the American military and in bikers.
When the rest of the country is buckling up in cars equipped with front-seat and side-impact air bags, and arguing about whether to outlaw talking on a cell phone while driving, motorcyclists in Florida successfully agitated two years ago to repeal mandatory helmet laws.
You don't have to endorse helmet-less riding (which produces gruesome injuries) to admire the free spirit of Florida motorcyclists.
This rugged individuality is naturally associated with a "love it or leave it" patriotism.
In the 1960s, left-wing activists romanticized the Hells Angels and assumed they would be political allies simply because they were drug-addled, lived outside the law and rarely bathed. Instead, the Angels beat up anti-Vietnam-war protesters for their "despicable anti-American activity."
A more respectable expression of biker patriotism is evident every Memorial Day in Washington, D.C., when hundreds of thousands of bikers converge at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to commemorate those lost and missing in Vietnam and other wars.
So, the latest brawl shouldn't lead us to think a biker's most important accessory is brass knuckles. Instead, it's that tiny American flag that, more likely than not, is fluttering from the back of the Harley that passes you on the interstate, a tiny symbol of self-reliance and freedom and, hence, of the American spirit.
© 2002 by King Features Syndicate