Rev up the Harleys and ride

Get your motor runnin’

Head out on the highway

Lookin’ for adventure

In whatever comes our way.

— Born to Be Wild, Steppenwolf

Earl Fowler

In her terrific 1979 essay collection The White Album, Joan Didion recounts a phase she had gone through in which she watched nine low-budget movies about motorcycle gangs geared for teens and young adults.

“Programmers,” as these exploitation pictures were known in the trade, generally had budgets of $200,000 or less and were given such obvious and banal titles as Hell’s Angels on Wheels, The Glory Stompers and The Cycle Savages. (Sadly, my pitch for Sons of Apathy, about an emotionally numb, insufficiently motivated outlaw motorcycle club that tries halfheartedly to sell reverse mortgages and hair-loss products to skeptical seniors, never made it past the concept phase. Same old problem. Born to be mild. Too bad, really, because the picture would have starred Kurt Browning as the menacing “Chino” and Elvis Stojko as the affable “Britches,” sort of a Walter Brennan or Gabby Hayes sidekick to the troubled juvenile delinquent played by Kurt before his hair fell out.)

Didion started with Roger Corman’s 1966 flick The Wild Angels, “which was the first and in many ways the classic exploitation bike movie. Here it is: the Angels, led by Peter Fonda, are about to bury one of their number. They have already torn up the chapel, beaten and gagged the preacher, and held a wake, during which the dead man’s girl was raped on the altar and the corpse itself, propped up on a bench in full biker colours, dark goggles over the eyes and a marijuana cigarette between the lips, was made an object of necrophilia. Now they stand at the grave, and, uncertain how to mark the moment, Peter Fonda shrugs. ‘Nothing to say,’ he says.”

To have seen one bike movie, Didion testifies after her ordeal, is to have seen them all. “There is always the ‘perverse’ sequence in which the bikers batter at some psychic sound barrier, degrade the widow, violate the virgin, defile the rose and the cross alike, break on through to the other side and find, once more, ‘nothing to say.’ The brutal images glaze the eye. The senseless insouciance of all the characters in a world of routine stompings and casual death takes on a logic better left unplumbed:

I suppose I kept going to these movies because there on the screen was some news I was not getting from The New York Times. I began to think I was seeing ideograms of the future. To watch a bike movie is to finally apprehend the extent to which the toleration of small irritations is no longer a trait much admired in America, the extent to which a nonexistent frustration threshold is not seen as psychopathic but as a ‘right.’ … Anything less than instant service in a restaurant constitutes intolerable provocation, or ‘hassling’: tear the place apart, leave the owner for dead, gangbang the waitress. Rev up the Harleys and ride.

To imagine the audience for whom these sentiments are tailored, maybe you have to have sat in a lot of drive-ins yourself, to have gone to school with boys who majored in shop and worked in gas stations and later held them up. Bike movies are made for all these children of vague ‘hill’ stock who grow up absurd in the West and Southwest, children whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made. These children are, increasingly, everywhere, and their style is that of an entire generation.

Now fast forward half a century.

Yeah, darlin’, go and make it happen. Take the world in a love embrace. Fire all of your guns at once and explode into space …

The boys who majored in shop and later held up gas stations are now absurd old poops who watch Fox News and put MAGA signs on their lawns and continue to nurture an obscure grudge against a world they never made.

But they’re remaking it now, by God. (I sensed this coming back in 1969 while enduring the catcalls and goofball barbs of the shop majors, who smoked and loitered outside the metal-and-machine toolroom with all the machismo they could muster as I struggled with the big bass fiddle I was obliged to carry twice a week to my high school’s music room next door. That was when I learned the word “dweeb.”)

What Didion was perhaps the first to understand was that the biker movie was never really about motorcycles. The motorcycles were only the delivery system, chrome mythology wrapped around a simpler appetite: the fantasy of exempting oneself from restraint. The fantasy of arriving in a town where all obligations are temporary and every slight justifies retaliation.

The men in those movies were not rebels in the romantic sense. They were not outlaws in the frontier sense either, not even particularly criminal in the modern organized sense.

They were consumers of grievance. The grievance itself was often inchoate, impossible to locate with any precision. Somebody looked at them wrong. Somebody made them wait for a hamburger. Somebody had a college degree. Somebody talked too carefully. Somebody laughed. The point was never the insult but the permission the insult conferred. Once insulted, they could do anything.

What has changed in America is not the mentality but the scale on which it is now indulged.

The boys who once thrilled to Peter Fonda shrugging at Bruce Dern’s grave now watch cable hosts shrug at dead schoolchildren, dead migrants, dead women denied abortions in emergency rooms.

“Nothing to say.”

The phrase survives because the posture survives. Cruelty detached from consequence. Violence abstracted into atmosphere. The conviction that empathy itself is a kind of hustle perpetrated by weaker people. People who look different. Talk different. Worship different.

One notices in contemporary America — and Canada puts in a cameo as the 51st state of the Union in this respect — how often tantrum is redescribed as authenticity. The inability to tolerate inconvenience becomes evidence of moral clarity.

A customer asked to wear a mask in a Costco screams at a 17-year-old cashier because freedom is apparently imperilled by cotton fabric. A man delayed 20 minutes at an airport records himself berating a gate agent and uploads the footage as proof of courage.

Members of the U.S. Congress interrupt proceedings not because interruption advances legislation but because the interruption itself has become the point. The biker barroom brawl has migrated into governance.

This is not accidental. The biker mentality depends upon a perpetual confusion between liberty and impulse. Freedom means never encountering friction. Freedom means never being corrected. Freedom means every appetite ratified immediately by the surrounding culture.

If denied, then the denial itself becomes tyranny.

One saw this logic distilled during the pandemic, when a considerable portion of the North American public interpreted minor public-health measures as an intolerable humiliation. The language was revealing. They spoke not of inconvenience but of domination.

“Nobody tells me what to do.”

It was the vocabulary of drunken men overturning a table in a roadside diner because the waitress refused to serve them after closing. It was the incessant honking of the “Freedom Convoy” during the weeks-long protest early in 2022, when thousands of truckers and demonstrators converged on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to protest COVID 19 restrictions and federal powers generally.

Cut to Marlon Brando’s brooding leader-of-the-pack Johnny Strabler in 1953’s The Wild One, when a dancing girl asks him: “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”

“Whaddya got?”

Because America in particular remains a country uniquely susceptible to converting emotional disorder into commercial style, the biker ethos acquired branding. The grievance became merchandised.

One could buy it screen-printed on flags, molded into protein supplements, packaged into podcasts, encrypted into country songs about “real America.” The old exploitation films at least possessed a certain candour about their own cheapness. Contemporary grievance arrives sponsored by mattress companies and gold dealers.

Fox News understood earlier than most institutions that the audience did not actually want information. They wanted dramaturgy. They wanted the psychic experience of rolling into town with the engine growling.

Every night the network recreates the emotional architecture of the biker movie: a pure tribe under siege by contemptible outsiders; a world thick with insult; the constant promise of imminent retaliation.

The barbarians are at the gate. The cities are burning. The professors are laughing at you. The waitress has been disrespectful.

Donald Trump succeeded because he grasped this intuitively. His genius was not ideological but tonal. He recognized that millions of Americans no longer wished to be governed; they wished to feel avenged.

His rallies resembled less political events than parking lots outside speedways in 1971: the same atmosphere of anticipatory aggression, the same ecstatic permission to abandon inhibition. He offered absolution from the exhausting labour of self-command.

“I am your retribution,” he vowed to aggrieved supporters.

Against what?

“Whaddya got?”

What Didion perceived in those dingy drive-ins with the tinny soundboxes and necking neighbours of yesteryear was the emergence of a society increasingly hostile to adulthood itself.

Adulthood requires the management of disappointment. It requires accepting procedural delay, ambiguity, compromise, the possibility that one’s desires are neither sacred nor central.

The biker mentality rejects all this as weakness. The self becomes the only admissible unit of moral measurement.

One sees the consequences everywhere now. In the collapse of public trust. In the inability to sustain institutions. In the suspicion that every expertise masks conspiracy. In road rage shootings and school board threats and airline meltdowns filmed vertically on phones.

The Great Republic to the South becomes a giant parking lot at dusk, everyone idling angrily with headlights on high beam.

To me, the strange thing is how exhausted the culture of perpetual outrage finally appears. The biker movies Didion watched always contained, beneath the violence, an unmistakable vacancy. The characters smashed bottles, raped women, desecrated churches, fought police, tore through desert towns, but eventually arrived at the same emotional destination: emptiness.

“Nothing to say.”

This might be the most prophetic part of Didion’s observation. The grievance culture consuming America promises transcendence through aggression but can produce only repetition. Every outrage demands a larger outrage tomorrow. Every humiliation requires another performance of dominance. The engine must keep revving because motion itself disguises the absence of destination.

I like smoke and lightnin’. Heavy metal thunder. Racing with the wind and that feeling that I’m under ...

And so the country circles endlessly through the neon dark, older now, fatter now, armed more heavily than before, but animated by the same obscure grudge against a world it believes it never made, unable to imagine citizenship except as retaliation, freedom except as refusal, community except as tribe.

The motorcycles have disappeared into SUVs and Facebook groups and cable-news studios.

The mentality remains exactly where Didion left it: standing at Bruce Dern’s grave, uncertain how to mark the moment, shrugging into the American night.

Rev up the Harleys and ride.

Like a true nature’s child we were born, born to be wild. We can climb so high. I never wanna die. Born to be wild. Born to be wild ...