Open Roads and Liberty

I got into motorcycles later in life. I bought a used 95 Kawasaki back in 2001 and after years with it, I upgraded. I purchased a 07 HD Road King in 2009. Combination of Army Reserve retirement present to myself and mid-life crisis mobile. I've road in 15 states in the last two years and love it. You really see this country from the saddle of a motorcycle.

From the latest issue of National Review, a look at who rides a two wheeler. Not exactly Brando from The Wild Ones or Sons of Anarchy.

Right Turn on the Open Road

Daytona Beach, Fla. — ‘Bikers welcome here!” read the signs at almost every establishment, and given that over half a million of them arrive each March for the city’s annual Bike Week, it is a sensible policy. They come from all 50 states — even Alaska and Hawaii — and have gathered almost every year since 1937. The Second World War caused a brief hiatus (in lieu, those not overseas held an informal rally), but when the fighting ended, the tradition was resumed, and it has now grown to be the joint biggest motorcycle convocation in the United States — an honor it shares with South Dakota’s more famous meeting in Sturgis.

For one kaleidoscopic fortnight, Daytona’s warm air is filled with engine noise and rock music and its streets are marked out in fast-moving chrome and brightly colored lights. Bike Week’s habitués more or less take over their host city, changing its character from slightly run down Floridian beach town to hot mess. Theirs is the America of Hotel California — of dark desert highways, flickering neon signs, the wind in your hair, and the ineffable, perhaps apocryphal, “spirit of ’69.” America is deemed the Great Satan by the modern era’s neo-puritans, primarily because it is the greatest tempter on earth; and its glittering charms are nowhere more plainly on offer than on its roads. It is a land of contradictions, in which churches stand next to strip clubs — and in Daytona there are cars and bikes parked outside both.

Motorcycles have long been associated both with America’s harder edge and with liberty itself. It is no accident that, in The Great Escape, Steve McQueen rides away from tyranny and toward freedom on the back of a Triumph two-wheeler, but one also gets the impression that if Satan were to use earthly forms of transport to deliver his seductions, he, too, would be carried along the highways and byways on the back of a chopper. (Indeed, hellfire — and the underworld more generally — is a favorite decorative theme among those who ride, and bats, skulls, and the Grim Reaper are among the most popular decals.) Bikers thus inspire mixed reactions in the public’s imagination, and it is maybe inevitable that even those who feel positive toward them tend also to perceive their culture as being emblematic of an unfortunate American tendency to metamorphose liberty into license and make fiends of the free.

On my helmet I get have stickers saying "Does not play well with others" and "I would have gone to work but the voices told me to stay home and clean the guns!"

In a seminal 1965 essay for The Nation, a young Hunter S. Thompson noted that the bad reputation bikers enjoyed was largely undeserved, but that there was no smoke without fire. Cataloguing both the true and the false accusations, Thompson argued that, while a few on the fringe exhibited dangerous — even criminal — tendencies, most were in fact just “harmless weekend types . . . no more dangerous than skiers or skin divers.” This has most likely been true from the outset, but truth does not always reign in the court of public opinion, and the bad-boy image has stuck, tarnishing all with the transgressions of a few. This stubborn perception does a disservice to what is actually a remarkably conservative and deeply patriotic group.

They’re religious, too. Daytona Beach is filled with churches, and on weekends during the rally the churches are filled with bikers. Here too — giant signs make it abundantly clear — they are “welcome.” The city’s Catholic Church of the Basilica of St. Paul does not just invite riders to attend services but also holds a “Blessing of the Bikes” on the festival’s opening Sunday. Farther down, opposite the beach itself, there is a rudimentary “Drive-In Christian Church,” which offers space to thousands of motorcycles in front of a bare wooden stage. Despite their menacing appearances, bikers are a surprisingly pious bunch, and Christian clubs proliferate among them. There are the Bikers for Jesus, the Bikers for Christ, the Bikers for Life, Christ’s Cruisers, and a whole host more, all operating under the aegis of a prominent Evangelical group, the Christian Motorcyclists Association. The CMA’s 1,116 American chapters comprise 125,000 members, and their organization is thriving: In 2010, CMA affiliates were active in over 30 countries, donated $806,841.65 to partner ministries, and preached to over 170,000 people — most of them motorcyclists — around the United States. In Daytona Beach, they have come to the right place — there are 246 churches in a city of only 60,000 people, and while the festival is on, attendance rises dramatically.

In a local Five Guys burger joint at lunchtime, I stop and talk with three big and burly mn, each with a shaved head, a de rigueur salt-and-pepper horseshoe mustache, and a vaguely mean image. They are all members of the Chariots of Light club, and have come down from Pennsylvania for the festival, stopping on the way to preach the Gospel and to pray against abortion. I ask what they are about, and the biggest man in the group points to his expansive right bicep, on which a faded tattoo of a cross with a motorcycle leaning against it is sandwiched between the words, “I ride for Him because He died for me.” The word “LOVE” is inked in capital letters across the knuckles of his left hand. All three wear identical leather jackets, identifying them as members of their club and advertising quotations from Philippians and the Gospel of John.

Hey, my Blue Knights were heavily involved in the Nun Run.

...bikers tend to take positions rather than endorse candidates and, more than anything, seem fed up with the little things: with mandatory-helmet laws, interference with gun rights, and incessant nannying about food and drink and light bulbs. They are weary of being lectured about the environment and burdened with endless mandates and taxes. One festival-goer describes the current climate as being like “having your mother constantly calling you to check whether you’ve eaten your f***ing vegetables.” 

I ask a leather-clad woman how she feels about the contraception mandate. “It has got nothing to do with the government,” she scoffs. “I don’t want it banned and I don’t want it forced. I run my own business and nobody’s sex life ain’t no one’s but their own.” Then she pauses and looks me up and down, perhaps mistaking me for someone who might wish to force or ban contraception. “What am I, twelve years old?” she asks. (It is abundantly clear from the way she is dressed that she is not.) Her attitude is typical. Bikers exhibit much that is consonant with individual liberty and with its most enduring icons. They mistrust rules and reject the supposedly superior wisdom of others. Ruggedly individual, they are the new cowboys — the tattooed pastors of America’s iron horses in an era in which trains have lost their romance and cars all look the same, and theirs is a simple refrain: Leave Me Alone....

Says it all. Rugged individualism. Live and let live. Definitely not liberal (the current American version) but more conservative with libertarian streaks. Live and let live, you don't bother me, I don't bother you.

...By and large, bikers such as the Wisconsin nine are more likely to take part in groups such as the Patriot Guard Riders, which was formed in 2005 in response to the execrable Westboro Baptist Church’s picketing of the funerals of fallen soldiers. The Patriot Guard comprises various existing clubs, including military groups such as the In Country Vets Motorcycle Club, the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association, the American Legion Riders, and Rolling Thunder, in addition to a 20,000-strong law-enforcement group called the Blue Knights, and the stalwart Christian Motorcycle Association. Its stated mission is to “show . . . sincere respect for our fallen heroes, their families, and their communities” and to “shield the mourning family and their friends from interruptions created by any protestor or group of protestors,” and the group’s members, its website notes, have “one thing in common besides motorcycles,” that being “an unwavering respect for those who risk their very lives for America’s freedom and security.”

Indeed, if there is one unifying sentiment among the people I have come across, it is love of country. It is profoundly important to most that Harley-Davidson is an American brand, and rare to see a biker without at least one American flag on his clothes or his bikes — often on both. They constitute a legion of volunteers on wheels, representing — in sundry ways, and in the pursuit of various good ends — the “vast number of voluntary associations” of which Tocqueville spoke so warmly. They make their cases in rough language, and they go about their business ostentatiously; but their unifying cause is freedom and their sworn allegiance is to America — and, with this in mind, we might well agree with the ubiquitous signs around Daytona Beach: Bikers Welcome Here.

One of my favorite singers is Bob Seger and from his classic Roll Me Away he sings on a classic appeal of the motorcycle, getting away from it all.

Took a look down a westbound road,

Right away I made my choice

Headed out to my big two-wheeler,

I was tired of my own voice

Took a bead on the northern plains

And just rolled that power on...

...Roll, roll me away,

Won't you roll me away tonight

I too am lost, I feel double-crossed

And I'm sick of what's wrong and what's right

We never even said a word,

We just walked out and got on that bike

And we rolled

And we rolled clean out of sight

We rolled across the high plains

Deep into the mountains

Felt so good to me

Finally feelin' free...

...Stood alone on a mountain top,

Starin' out at the great divide

I could go east, I could go west,

It was all up to me to decide

Just then I saw a young hawk flyin'

And my soul began to rise

And pretty soon

My heart was singin'

Roll, roll me away,

I'm gonna roll me away tonight

Gotta keep rollin, gotta keep ridin',

Keep searchin' till I find what's right

And as the sunset faded

I spoke to the faintest first starlight

And I said next time

Next time

We'll get it right

 Get it right!.....and get on your two wheeler!