When I was young, I was taught without ambiguity that bikers are bad people. They were all murderers, gang members, drug dealers, and other types of undesirables. Whenever we went on a road trip, we would stay well away from the bikers. If we stopped at a campground, we wouldn’t take a campsite next to any bikers. If we saw a bunch of motorcycles parked in front of a restraunt, we wouldn’t stop there.
Yet later when I worked at a roadsie restraunt in Wyoming, I actually had a chance to meet real bikers. They were totally different from the stereotype. In fact, it seems that the typical bikers are a couple from Ohio in their mid-fifties, traveling to Oregon to be present at birth of their grandchild, or something of that nature. Most of them were unfailingly polite and pleasant. A few were rude and agressive, but none of them seemed criminal.
So where all the bad bikers? Where are the ones responsible for giving bikers a bad reputation?
Have you looked at outlaw bikers lately? Most of them are pushing 60. It’s hard to be an intimidating badass when you’re wheezing at the far end of a hard life.
Why, they’re all in Hollywood; haven’t you seen The Wild One? :dubious:
Seriously, even the Hell’s Angels types were more interested in just living outside “the system”; they kind of took over from the hippies in the late Sixties and Seventies. There might have been some pretty vicious inter-gang rivalries, but everything I’ve ever heard about personal interaction with bikers is that they were unfailingly polite, if often at odds with the law regarding drug manufacture/distribution/use, taxation, and noise abatement. Most seem to lean more toward the anarcho-libertarian model rather than predatory criminality. And since the Eighties, they’ve kind of been subverted by yuppie types who buy into the Harley-Davidson weekend warrior “lifestyle”, including the annual Sturgess runs, et cetera, just as “gangsta” culture has been amalgamated by frat boys and suburbanite teenieboppers.
I think the “bad biker” films like The Wild Ones or Mad Max are about as representative of biker culture as Reefer Madness is of the stoner lifestyle. It’s good for a laugh, though:
The motion picture ou are about to witness may startle you. It would not have been possible, otherwise, to sufficently emphasize the frightful toll of the new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers. Marihuana is that drug - a violent narcotic - an unspeakable scourge - The Real Public Enemy Number One!
Way back in the late '40s, at the beginning of the furor over outlaw motorcyclists, the American Motorcycle Association declared that 1% of bike riders were bad guys. However, as with just about everything, the notorious gets more press. So, the outlaw guys, despite being a teensy minority of bike enthusiasts, got lots of coverage and publicity. Oftentimes exaggerated coverage and publicity – for example, the Hollister ‘riot’ that supposedly started all the kafuffle was actually no more than a street party that got slightly out of hand, but was reported as if it was a 3 day debauch of murder, rape and property destruction. And that bad reputation has continued into the present day. Sure, criminal bikers do exist, but so do criminal stockbrokers – and, probably, in about the same percentage.
Yeah, outside the superiority complex some [del]Harley[/del] er, um… bike riders have; they’ve always seem to be rather polite to me as well.
-And I should know, I’m one myself!
We have two major motorcycle gangs in our city, the Coffin Cheaters and the Gypsy Jokers. Every now and then there is a story about them dealing drugs, or blowing up police officers’ cars, or just trying to kill each other. I guess that’s pretty bad.
They also seem kinda old, or maybe that’s just the beards.
To contribute a serious answer, we have bad bikers (bosozoku, or simply bozos) here, but they’re pretty easy to distinguish from the good ones. Basically, if you haven’t altered your bike to be ten times louder than a normal bike so you can race it up and down the street at 3am, you’re not a bozo.
They’re mostly teens and early 20’s who try to act like badasses but still live with their mothers. It’s hard to even find any in Tokyo anymore, they’re mainly found out in the sticks nowadays.
And hang all kinds of weird fibreglass paraphenalia on said bikes, then race them pointlessly round and round suburban apartment blocks at 3am: I used to dream of being able to teleport those little buggers to NZ, where bike gangs consist of giant tattooed drug-dealing sawn-off owning Maoris riding hogs {we have a few white supremacist bikie gangs here, but they bravely live down the bottom of the South Island where there are no bros to speak of: they’d be beaten to death with pool cues here in Auckland, which has more big brown brothers than the whole rest of the Pacific}.
There are still hard core bikers out there, but as a previous post said, they’re about 1% of the total biker population. I used to work for the president of a bike club. There were drugs (which you’ll find in any stripe of American culture) and other “bad boy” indicators, but nothing like you’d figure with the Hell’s Angels or the Outlaws. They weren’t an organized crime outfit.
Even with the The Wild One it amuses me that the outer jackets of the tapes and DVRs mention Brando’s character, Johnny, and his “vicious gang of bikers”, but in reality they were more a rowdy bunch of guys who liked to party. They were contemptuous of “squares” and disrespectful of everyone, but they weren’t vicious and predatory. Johnny even makes it clear that they’re really just honest working class guys when at one point he implies they only go out on runs during the weekends (they must have jobs during the week).
The other gang in the movie, led by Chino, Lee Marvin’s character, does come across to me as more dangerous and aggressive. Oddly enough, the number one outlaw biker of the nation, Sonny Barger, says in his memoir that to him, Johnny always came across as the bully.
