A Different Perspective: The Bikeriders

 I saw the Bikeriders today and my reaction to the movie was a bit different than Grim’s. As Grim pointed out, the movie is based on Danny Lyon’s photobook, The Bikeriders and you have to understand it in that context. The movie provides a pretty fair dramatization of the book.  

The movie tells the story of the founding, and dark metamorphosis, of the Vandals Motorcycle Club, a fictional representation of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club that was the focus of the book. The movie tells the story through the experiences of Johnny (the club president), Benny (Johnny’s right-hand man), and Kathy (Benny's wife). These characters were actually in Danny Lyon’s book and provided some of the recollections he included. Consequently, I didn’t find it odd that the Kathy character narrated some, by no means all, of the plot. That is not inconsistent with the book.     

Kathy is the perfect character to provide the narration she does at different times throughout the movie. While she is closely associated with the club, she is not a member. She is not an outsider but neither is she an insider. She shares the values and aspirations of mainstream society (a stable family life and respectability) while simultaneously being immersed in the biker culture (riding and hard partying) due to her marriage to Benny.  Consequently, her character provides a both a contrast to, and a bridge between, biker culture and mainstream American society.

In many ways, the male lead of the movie is actually Johnny, played by Tom Hardy. At least he was my favorite character. He represents the original biker culture and ethos while providing the order, discipline, and leadership necessary to forge a group of outcasts into a functioning organization. His story illustrates the fall of the original, post WWII, 1% motorcycle club culture and its replacement with the much darker variant that emerged in the 60’s. Anyone interested in learning about the original motorcycle club culture should read The Original Wild Ones: Tales of the Boozefighters Motorcycle Club

I don’t agree with Grim’s assessment of the Benny character played by Austin Butler. His character doesn’t lack agency, in fact, his refusal to surrender it is the central theme of his story. Benny represents the contradiction at the heart of motorcycle club life. On one hand he seeks the total freedom the motorcycle club sells itself as representing. On the other hand, the club is making increased demands on him that will strip that freedom away. Johnny wants Benny to take over leadership of the club but Benny refuses because doing so will replace his freedom with responsibility. Kathy wants him to leave the club as it becomes more violent and drug influenced but he also rejects her demands because doing so would also surrender his freedom.

Grim said that “In the movie the ending of that story is very sad, even though (or partly because) the lovebirds escape to a 'happy' life without motorcycles, brotherhood, honor or valor.” I didn’t see it that way. Benny didn’t leave the club until after the club abandons brotherhood, honor, and valor.  Once the club became a criminal organization that had no issue with killing its own members it ceased to be the club Benny joined and Johnny founded.  When the club chose a new darker path that Benny was unwilling to follow, honor demanded that he leave.   

Grim claims the script writer denied the characters agency due to the choices they made. Once again, I disagree. The story told through the characters of Johnny, Benny, and Kathy track the experience of Danny Lyon as recounted in his book. He actually became a patched member of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club but eventually left the club due to the very dark and violent direction the club eventually followed. As I said at the beginning of this review, you have to understand the movie in the context of the book upon which it is based.

I do agree with Grim’s statement that the movie is a “Strong drama, and a good study of an earlier set of generations.” I highly recommend the movie.  

Another Federal Victory

Dad29 sends this news of an FBI victory over a Nazi motorcycle club — one that they themselves founded. 

Apparently, someone in the FBI had the idea of merging a domestic terrorism case with a biker case. Killian planted the idea in Kreis’s head to start a neo-Nazi motorcycle club, the 1st SS Kavallerie Brigade Motorcycle Division—named after a horse-mounted unit of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS….

So they couldn’t get the Outlaws MC to have anything to do with this. They clearly want there to be Nazi MCs. I guess they watch old movies where the bikers wear Nazi emblems, without grasping that they meant something different by them. They had these things as war trophies, either their own or from friends who passed them down. They weren’t declaring allegiance to the enemy, they were counting coup and showing brotherhood with their own. Since that generation, the usage has fallen away. There is no longing for Nazi-themed clubs, which is why they had to build one.

But they want the American right to be Nazis, so they just keep believing. They convinced dude to set one up, in partnership with him, and then they had a state attorney knock it down.

“We decided to strike against the Kavallerie Brigade by bringing these heavy-duty drug charges to shut the active members down,” Foster reportedly said, bragging about shutting down an FBI front group.

Emphasis added both times. 

So just remember that anyone who wants you to join them in celebrating Nazis is a Fed. Anyone who wants to talk even in theory about the potential need for bombs is a Fed. Anyone who wants to speculate about using guns to stage attacks is a Fed. 

This is basically the same story as several other stories we’ve seen lately. The secret police are working hard, which may not be obvious from all the Hamas-friendly groups running around. 

Tangled web

It's no picnic keeping straight the ostensible reasons for denying Kamala Harris a shot at the top position in the White House. Sure, there's the obvious problem that she's an unpleasant fool. But then how to explain how she ended up as VP in the first place? No one wants to admit explicitly that she has literally zero redeeming qualities beyond checking intersection boxes, still less that her appeal (like that of her boss before her, to a lesser extent) was the in terrorem effect of imagining the impact of the sitting president's exit. And yet that seems to be the exact corner they're backed into.

OK, say Harris is great but doesn't appeal to the foolish masses, though party leaders assert their sophisticated ability to appreciate her privately. So how come no one thinks it would be a good idea to put her on a new ticket under Newson or Whitmer as VP? She's so unelectable that she'd drag down the newly anointed candidate for the top position?

Knock her leadership experience? True, she was an undistinguished senator, but she has been VP for four years. The problem there is that she has been sidelined as VP even more, perhaps, than the usual hapless possessor of that office. "Groomed for the top seat" she is not, even in the context of a top spot that for several years has been filled by various unelected flacks, in short anyone or everyone but the technical holder to that position. But calling attention to Harris's hollow title doesn't do much to pander to the black or female vote, or the lack of seriousness of an administration or a party who couldn't face up to the real danger that an unusually elderly president might not make it even through his first term.

Black Turlogh

Here are a pair of articles about one of Robert E. Howard’s lesser-known heroes, Turlogh Dubh O’Brien. “Dubh” is Gaelic for “black”; with reference to the previous post, the name “Douglas” is an anglicized version of “Dubhglas,” which translates literally as “Blackwater.”

Modern readers usually forget that the Cimmerians were supposed to have been the ancestors of the Scottish Highlanders and Irish Gaels. The movies often use the term “Northman,” which was originally used for the Norse of Norway. Even when Howard wants to write about the Vikings, he usually introduces a Gaelic leader, more often Cormac Mac Art. (The Vikings, meanwhile, were Danes in those stories).

Privateers

There’s no ‘constitutional right’ at work here, in spite of the headline, but you can get Congress’ permission.

It may not get much publicity, but there it is, smack-dab in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution: Congress has the power to grant citizens “letters of marque and reprisal.” Meaning that, with Congress’s permission, private citizens can load weapons onto their fishing boats, head out to the high seas, capture enemy vessels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patriotic pirates were known as “privateers.” At the start of the Revolutionary War, America had a meager navy, so we had to rely on these privateers, who captured nearly two thousand British vessels and confiscated vast amounts of food, uniforms, weapons, and barrels of sherry....

The Founding Fathers were big fans of privateers. Late in life, John Adams wrote glowingly about the 1775 Massachusetts law that first legalized them, calling it “one of the most important documents in history. The Declaration of Independence is a brimborion in comparison with it.”

The author is playing this for laughs, while trying to make the point that originalist thinking is foolish. 

For several minutes, we spoke about originalism and the Constitution. Though it’s obscure, the privateering clause highlights that this document—for all its brilliance and prescience—was written in a vastly different time. Some passages—such as those about the “blessings of liberty” and “equal protection”—are timeless. But others are clearly the product of the eighteenth century.

He would not know this, but there has been quite a lot of recent thought given to restoring privateering. During the early phases of the Global War on Terror, it was regularly discussed as a way of making the market work against the problem. Not just at sea, either: just as land-based forms were used in the 19th century, known as ‘filibusters,’ so too there was considerable thought given to licensing private armies with similar privileges to seize prizes to fight terrorist forces in Africa and elsewhere. 

Probably the best known example is Erik Prince of Blackwater fame, who proposed doing exactly that in Africa and in Ukraine. In the end the government decided that it preferred to keep direct control over armed forces, but consider how poorly that strategy ultimately fared. Really the Russian government did what Prince wanted with the Wagner group, fairly successfully. Those forces proved unreliable against American-backed irregulars in Syria, and haven’t been effective in Ukraine, but they were pretty effective against Islamist irregulars across Africa. 

China, meanwhile, is effectively using a ’gray zone fleet’ of fishing privateers to war against the Philippines over control of the sea lanes and fishing areas. It’s proving quite difficult to contest effectively. Privateers are in play right now. 

Less piratical but still more on the side of militia forces, several US States maintain naval militia to this day. 

It may be that walking around in a tricorn hat and writing petitions with a quill pen s carrying a lot of the weight of making this originalist idea seem dated. With a little more attention, like other constitutional matters it too proves to be of continuing interest. 

Spangled

 

Red, White, and Blue breakfast with huckleberry jam. 

Independence Day

The wife and I rode over to the unincorporated village of Cashiers for their fireworks show. Cashiers is an interesting little mountain town. It has no government, but somehow has a fully-funded independent rescue service, fire department, and ambulance service. It only has seven hundred residents, but this time of year there's about twenty-five thousand people there on vacation in condos or second homes. It's a very pleasant little town, which enjoys its anarchy so much that it turned down an invitation from the state legislature to formally re-incorporate. 

Fireworks were pleasant and plentiful, and then we rode home. It's a promising start to the Independence Day holiday, which we will be celebrating intensely as always. It's the most wonderful time of the year.

Brought to you from the other half of the Range 15 team, the ones who don't sell coffee these days.

Like a Fox

I was introduced to this song at a very young age by Banks & Shane, the band from Atlanta. For many years I didn’t understand it at all. My limited understanding of women forbade it. 

In a way it is really only now that I understand the song. I suppose it is amazing that I maintained such a naive view of women until my 50th year. Maybe I have mostly just known good and virtuous women. 

Fist-Fighting

There's probably something healthy about fighting that our society refuses to accept. At a recent concert out Texas way a young singer named Miranda Lambert broke up a fight between some female fans (verbally), and then had the wisdom to set terms for when fighting was allowed during her set. Like G. K. Chesterton said about Christianity, it has the wisdom to divide the world in recognition of human nature: "Here you can swagger, there you can grovel." 

Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy—that was a discovery in psychology. Any one might say, “Neither swagger nor grovel”; and it would have been a limit. But to say, “Here you can swagger and there you can grovel”—that was an emancipation.

One of the thing about The Bikeriders movie that is striking is how little violence is in it -- and the worst of that either from those completely outside motorcycle culture, or those from the younger generation who had been explicitly rejected as unworthy for the culture and who found a way to worm their way in anyway. Early in the film Johnny faces a challenge, and asks if it should be answered with fists or knives. "Well, I don't want to kill you," the other man says, so they just fight with fists. Likewise in a later brawl, Johnny spends his time either trying to avoid it or breaking it up, and all the sides drink beer and become friends afterwards. There's another scene of drunken brawling, but it's just for fun. Nobody is really trying to hurt anybody.

In my generation, the great film was Fight Club. That film (and its earlier book) supposed that the way the culture had changed to forbid fighting had caused a kind of real psychic damage to young men. The earlier age depicted in the newer film allowed younger men to brawl on the weekends, under the eyes and guidance of older men who didn't anymore wish to, then go back to work on Monday. 

Fight Club suggests that the popularity of the fight, once released, will ennoble the men so that they can overthrow the whole world and end a civilization that hates them. The Bikeriders thinks they'll keep steady jobs if you just let them be themselves and don't make a big thing about the occasional fistfight. They're just blue collar guys, working things out for themselves. They'll be back on Monday to drive the truck or turn the wrench or whatever.

Maybe we shouldn't make such a big deal about it. The law says it's all 'simple assault' and subject to arrest and court intervention, but it really shouldn't be. No harm, no foul: and mostly, there's not really any harm. We're probably better off if we make room for it, especially for those who choose fists over knives, and leave the guns alone.

A Moment of Equality

For one brief shining moment, the Democratic Party treats its own just as shabbily as it treats everyone else. 

Multiple committee members on the call, most granted anonymity to talk about the private discussion, described feeling like they were being gaslighted.... Harrison offered what they described as a rosy assessment of Biden’s path forward. The chat function was disabled and there were no questions allowed.

Even the Inner Party eventually isn’t trusted.  

UPDATE: The first Democratic Congressman calls on Biden to withdraw.  

"Chevron deference" primer

Glen Reynolds sorts out some of the ignorant raving about the recent "power grab" that reversed the Chevron deference doctrine. What the Supreme Court ruled is that Congress passes laws, the executive branch enforces them as written, and courts kick them back to Congress if they're ambiguous and need to be amended. If executive-branch bureaucrats find a statute's actual words ill-suited to whatever their newest enforcement crusade is in any particular year, the cure is to get Congress to use better words.

The way statists are squawking, you'd think the only question worth asking is whether a particular crop of bureaucrats is pursuing a good policy. To the contrary, it's equally important how policy is set and who has the Constitutional power to contest it.

This is much like the caterwauling over whether Supreme Court decisions promote good policy in a particular area of controversy. Unless the policy is enshrined in the Constitution or a law properly enacted by Congress, it's not the point in a Supreme Court decision. That Court is charged with ensuring that, if the Constitution or a statute is at fault, it must be amended legally. Not overturned by mobs in the street or jackbooted bureaucrats, but voted on by elected officials according to well-understood rules and precedents. That's the "rule of law," no matter how unhappy it makes the New York Times.

Immune-ish

Ed Morrissey has a pretty good summary of today's Supreme Court's ruling on Trump's immunity claims. Much of what is alleged against him fails before an immunity defense, such as anything in his core Constitutional duties, and most of what could conceivably be called his official duties, subject to a certain amount of potential rebuttal. Some of the allegations, however, could be considered outside his official duties, depending on how the evidence works out.

Justice Thomas would have thrown out the entire prosecution on the ground that the special counsel appointment was unauthorized, but he appears to have no allies on this issue.

Good plan

From Holly MathNerd's Substack:

If Trump has the sense to refuse another debate and simply run ads from this one, he will probably win decisively. He should release a statement referring to the Axios report in which Biden staffers describe Biden as only cognizant from 10am to 4pm and stating simply: “President Trump’s commitment to fair play precludes him from debating President Biden after sundown. If President Biden’s team would like to schedule a daytime debate to permit him to participate during his hours of best cognizance, we are amenable to that.” It would have the predictable seismic effect without risking any need to actually have a second debate.

More hot takes: Politico cited this "research" as concluding that

President Biden was hurt badly by the debate, but Donald Trump didn’t benefit on any measure, except the vote.

This after roughly 100% of the MSM reported the debate as a kind of bad night for the incumbent, but one marked primarily by a million unidentified lies from the ex-President. To be fair, it was hard to tell whether most of the gibberish emitted from the incumbent could be fairly described as a lie, or even an opinion, but it would have been reassuring if the MSM had been capable of criticizing the startling claims that no servicemen had died under the incumbent's watch, and that the Border Patrol supports his policies. Luckily, however, his poor debate performance affected nothing but the "vote"--apparently to be distinguished from "the official ballot count we plan to announce later."

Movie Review: The Bikeriders

Today my wife and son and I all went to see The Bikeriders. It's loosely based on a photo-book of the same name, which was an older locution for what we call "bikers." The movie has some interesting qualities. 

One of them is that the two leads have almost nothing to do with the plot. The male lead is almost inconsequential to the movie; he's there to serve as the love interest for the female lead, whose role is to narrate the plot rather than to much participate in it. That's a very strange structure for a movie; at one point I realized that the male lead was just sitting around watching things happen, and not actually participating in the action in any meaningful way.

That said, the movie offers a helpful study of how motorcycle culture evolved in America. I thought a particularly insightful note was about how the club split, not formally but informally, into the beer-drinkers and the pot-smokers. This was roughly generational: the World War II era bikers were rowdy beer-drinking men, but the Vietnam-era veterans had often experienced psychedelic drugs. They also had two very different experiences of their society's embrace of them and what they'd done, and you can see how the older generation finds the newer one wilder and increasingly impossible to control. 

The trick the movie plays on audiences of young people is that the 'young people' who are impossible to control are the Baby Boomers; this device is a way of helping today's young see how wild the Boomer generation was when it was young. These days Boomers are in the minds of the young stereotypically hidebound and devoted to the older America, but in 1969 the story was rather different. The eroticism of the male and female leads is really doing nothing but drawing the young audience members into the plot, which is about how two older Americas interacted with each other as much as it is about the evolution of motorcycle clubs. 

In the movie the ending of that story is very sad, even though (or partly because) the lovebirds escape to a 'happy' life without motorcycles, brotherhood, honor or valor. Partly that is why the ending is sad; partly it is a measure of the lack of agency the lead characters actually have. A character devoted to honor, who defended brotherhood with valor, would have had the agency the author of the script decided to deny to his characters. Yet the club ends up losing those qualities too, as the older generation fails to enforce or explain them and the younger one doesn’t understand them. In the broader world outside the movie also, the older generation was not able to convey its values to the younger generation in a way that would defend those values. This is the tragedy.

A consequence of having the female lead serve as the narrator is to make an essentially masculine story -- all the club members are male -- be told in a way that is accessible to women. It also points up how bad the earlier generation is at expressing their feelings: the president of the club, Johnny, is incapable of saying what he means much of the time, and only under great duress can admit his needs and limitations. When the time comes to say goodbye, he can't do that at all. Asked a second time by the female narrator why he's come by to see her for no reason that is apparent to her, he just reiterates that he doesn't need anything. 

Strong drama, and a good study of an earlier set of generations. Watch everyone except for the two people you're being led to believe are the core of the story and you'll find there is a lot to learn.