Over in a corner of Twitter that most of white America doesn't visit (because apparently our social media networks are about as segregated as they are in real life), snark took over. Many tweeted ironically about the corrosive influence of biker culture on weekend warriors and the imperative need for white leaders to denounce the broader scourge of “white on white crime” in front of hashtags like, “#stuffthemedianeversays." Pictures of Sarah Palin and in leather biker gear popped up along below tweets about “radical white politicians, who “coddle,” and commune with, “thugs.” The subtext of all of it was clear: This is what the world’s paid and volunteer shouter corps say when the tragedies involve black people, not white.Well, here's a picture of Sarah Palin being cozy with some bikers. Tough guys, too, the kind who look like they know their way around an automatic weapon. You'd have to think twice before giving one them a gun, right?
"9 killed in Waco biker gang shootout - where are the white leaders decrying this white-on-white violence?" #stuffthemedianeversays
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) May 18, 2015
Twitter-space may be segregated, but military/veteran motorcycle clubs are not. Those are the ones you usually see with political figures. Whatever is wrong with race in America, this kind of biker isn't it.
UPDATE: Among what is mostly a critique of media tone:
It started as a fist fight in the bathroom of the restaurant. The fight spread. People used clubs and chains and knives and guns. By one estimate, there were 30 people shooting. At least five gangs took part – six, if you count the police.I often criticize the police if I think they have over-deployed power against Americans. I think this person's argument is highly uncharitable given the performance of the police in Waco. It's also not justified by what follows in the article. A lot of ink is spilled on the difference in the way the media talks and thinks about Baltimore versus Waco, but there's nothing to justify the claim that the police acted in a "different" way.
Amazingly, no bystanders were hurt or killed, even though it took place at a shopping centre on a Sunday afternoon where people were shopping and celebrating graduations.
This comes when the riots in Baltimore on April 27th over the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of police is still fresh in everyone’s mind. The difference in how the police and the press acted is striking.
Before the brawl -- let's call it a "riot" to avoid treating the cases as essentially 'different' in the way the article hates -- police tried to get the bar to refuse service to the clubs. When that failed, they deployed officers in overwatch positions around the gathering. They fired on the club members who were involved, and may well have killed some of the "rioters" (as they did not do in Baltimore). They mass-arrested nearly two hundred people, just as in Baltimore, and appear poised to charge nearly all of them with at least some crime. At least some of the charges look to be capital murder. If so, unlike in Baltimore, the government is planning to put people to death for participating in this riot.
Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but that's how you stop a riot. Shooting the rioters used to be the ordinary standard for dangerous rioting. It was clearly justified here.
You will notice they don't add up the actual numbers nationwide.
ReplyDeleteAnecdote and narrative matter. That is all.
True point. The press keeps saying the Bandidos have 2,500 members. The Legion Riders have 106,000.
ReplyDeleteNice to get some perspective on the numbers. This is the first I've seen of it, although I have read a lot about alleged 1%ers.
ReplyDeleteI have read some irredeemably ignorant remarks about how this incident proves that the police treat white perps better than minorities -- never mind that the police actually opened fire on them and killed several, and that the entire incident was over in extremely short order.
Apparently the sight of people at a crime scene acting calm and co-operative with police is beyond their imagination.
Valerie
A little follow-up: this is why the restaurant has been closed, and its franchise jerked.
ReplyDeletehttp://news.yahoo.com/twin-peaks-waitresses-chronicle-texas-biker-bloodshed--uncertain-futures-013656110.html
“There are always fights on bike nights, so we expected the usual,” commented Sara, a waitress who according to her Facebook page is also a college student and mother."
The management of the restaurant IS at fault. I grew up in Texas, and my parents ran an ice station for a couple of years, to pay for college for us. They had a fight (between a couple of women, no less) there one time, and in the aftermath, my dad told me that the owner of the business selects its clientele and sets the standards of behavior.
He said there were ice houses that had fights once or twice a week. His business did not tolerate that kind of thing, and the incident was ended quickly. The participants were no longer made welcome.
I've seen the pictures from the restaurant, and there does not appear to be any sign that says something like "No colors, no attitude." Then, too, there are all of those people showing up with their colors, and the obvious signs of advance warning to the police.
Looks like the restaurant may have catered to the 1%ers.
Valerie
That's in line with what police have said. You're probably right. I imagine they thought it was romantic and cool, in much the same way that Frank Sinatra liked to hang out with gangsters.
ReplyDeleteThat's not at all unusual, actually. American culture makes a lot out of gangsters, and has since the early days of Hollywood. The reason is that gangster stories make excellent tragedies, because you can have a protagonist who is destroyed by his own virtues. Strength, honor, loyalty to family (or club), courage: the tragic thing is that, because the organized criminal directs these toward bad ends, these very virtues are what will end up destroying the protagonist. Other men who are courageous, loyal, strong, and honorable will end up killing him or bringing him down.
The gangster movie is the American form that is most like Greek tragedy. Everyone is doing their duty, but instead of that meaning that things work out, it means that things end horribly. The protagonist is admirable in certain ways, so we can identify with him. It underlines the importance of aligning ethics with morality, so that we point our virtues in the right direction.
Some people watch the same movies and just come off thinking gangsters are pretty cool, though. :) They admire the virtues, and miss the tragic aspect.
I wonder if it isn't possible to do the same thing in a non-tragic way. It really should be. In principle there's no reason why the courage, strength, honor and loyalty can't be pointed at moral and righteous purposes. And you see some guys understanding a part of that, such as when the Hells Angels will do a toy drive or a charity run. These things can be used in good ways.
I think the military (and police) clubs do that. But I think a 1%er club could do it too. They also choose their membership, though, and lately they seem to be choosing people who want to be involved in drugs and petty crime. They're looking for people who are interested in easy money instead of honor for its own sake, and that's how you get tragic outcomes.
"American culture makes a lot out of gangsters, and has since the early days of Hollywood."
ReplyDeleteUhm, before that. Since :dime novels" (In the U.S.) and "penny dreadfuls" (in the U.K.) Billy the Kid and Sweeny Todd ... Outlaws in general.
Arguably Robin Hood, before that.
Grim said
ReplyDelete"They also choose their membership, though, and lately they seem to be choosing people who want to be involved in drugs and petty crime. They're looking for people who are interested in easy money instead of honor for its own sake, and that's how you get tragic outcomes."
If they choose based on loyalty to the club above all else, the only way to prove such loyalty is to act in a way that is anathema to the general population, and at the direction or approval of the club. An initiation process that self selects for those willing to operate outside normal civil boundaries.
Yeah, but a lot of that stuff wasn't tragedy of the type that we've seen in American gangster movies. It's an older strain of rich-versus-poor or anti-corruption sentiment. Jesse James was a hero to a lot of people because he had been a Confederate guerrilla, and was seen as striking a blow against the people who were getting rich off exploiting the losers of the war. Billy the Kid's story was about the alignment of corrupt officials with entrenched business interests, and his story's popularity coincided with the early progressive movement. It's an interesting twist of fate that Wyatt Earp ended up the hero in the story we tell about Tombstone, because of his personal friendships with early Hollywood stars. The story is more readily told in this classic pattern of poor farmers being pushed out by rich Republicans -- of old Confederate families who had to leave the South and go west to escape the destruction of their homes, only to have the carpetbaggers follow them in the wake of the silver rush and try to change the laws there too. (Successfully, and bloodily). But Earp knew the early Hollywood filmmakers, so the story instead became one of 'bringing law and order to a savage wasteland.' :)
ReplyDeleteRobin Hood is about the exploitation of the poor by corrupt nobility and churchmen, etc. That story is universal, but it's a different story.
I have read some irredeemably ignorant remarks about how this incident proves that the police treat white perps better than minorities -- never mind that the police actually opened fire on them and killed several, and that the entire incident was over in extremely short order.
ReplyDeleteYeah, according to the NYT, America is just winking and looking the other way just because the "perps" are white:
Up to 170 Face Murder-Related Charges in Biker Melee
I tell ya - it's the same old white privilege, all over again :p
An initiation process that self selects for those willing to operate outside normal civil boundaries.
ReplyDeleteRight. But our 'normal civil boundaries' are increasingly easy to violate. You could violate them just by sewing a Confederate flag patch on your vest (as the earlier generation wore Nazi symbols, which of course had captured from the war). You could violate them, for that matter, by sewing a cross to your vest and preaching the word.
The question, I think, is really what you do with all that loyalty. Honor is the realization of loyalty. So we're going to show honor by being loyal to each other, and we'll be loyal to people we've chosen for good reasons -- because they're the right kind of people. We'll stand up for them no matter what, and that is going to give our group a real autonomy from the broader society.
But now what? That's the real question. Are we going to run drugs and commit petty crime? Or are we going to fight corruption for real? Are we going to raise funds for the poor? Are we going to guard communities against criminal gangs?
That's the question that ends up mattering most.
I tell ya - it's the same old white privilege, all over again :p
ReplyDeleteEarly word is that many may be capital murder charges -- Texas' version of felony murder, I expect, where the murder is committed while in the process of another felony. Filing those charges on a large scale would send a huge signal by Texas authorities.
That kind of attention is not a privilege I'd suggest chasing.
...we're going to show honor by being loyal to each other, and we'll be loyal to people we've chosen for good reasons -- because they're the right kind of people. We'll stand up for them no matter what, and that is going to give our group a real autonomy from the broader society.
ReplyDeleteBut people demonstrably *aren't* loyal only to those they've chosen for good reasons. We're mistakenly (and sometimes, illogically) loyal to people we care about or have a history with (who don't deserve our loyalty), or to people who have done bad things (and don't deserve unconditional loyalty or support for those acts).
Loyalty is far from an obvious good! Wrongly applied, it compounds evil.
Loyalty is far from an obvious good! Wrongly applied, it compounds evil.
ReplyDeleteMy point. Loyalty -- and therefore honor -- can be tragic if it is not guided by moral truth.
This is the hard problem, though not a unique one. We recognize that strength is a virtue, because strength can be used to do more than weakness. But if it is guided not by goodness but evil, the virtue proves to enhance wickedness. Courage is a virtue. Loyalty is a virtue. Honor is a virtue. The same is true for all of them.
So we need something besides virtue, something to guide the virtues. We need morality as well as ethics, if you like. Or we need a higher-order virtue, something like Justice, that correctly orders the others.
Yet we don't wisely dispose of strength, courage, loyalty, or the others just because they can enhance evil in the world. We need those things, and structures or institutions that create them are in principle good -- provided that they can be ordered to the moral structure or the structure of Justice.
Which, of course, brings us back to a very hard problem. What moral truths can we be sure of to guide us? What is Justice? What should we be doing with these virtues, once we have them? Those are very hard questions, but they're the right questions.
I think I misunderstood your prior comment, though this latest one is what I *thought* you believed ;p
ReplyDeleteThanks for the clarification.
It's terrible, isn't it, how the police expect white-on-white crime to stop instantly, how they take effective steps to stop it, and how they get the community's support in all their efforts? That just shows how prejudiced the greater society is against black culture. If it were otherwise, we'd hold black communities to the same standard. I guess it's time for that national conversation about race. The next time this happens, I demand that the police respond difficently, that there be massive riots to protest whatever white bikers are shot by police, and that we obsess for months about white-on-white crime while somehow blaming the police or other ethnic groups for creating the circumstances that fostered the violence.
ReplyDelete"diffidently"
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, the defense of the police here is the same as my defense of the Hells Angels at Altamont. Having taken on the duty of preventing serious violence like this, they used lethal force when lethal force was appropriate. In doing so, they seem to have been discrete and successful at preventing much greater potential harm from being realized.
ReplyDeleteThat's what we expect.