Travels with Harley in Search of America: Motorcycles, War, Deracination, Consumer Identity

As we sat in a Class C motorhome, the 21st century version of the Conestoga wagon, and watched America roll by at the stately Conestoga pace of 50 miles per hour, the topic of discussion was what do you do when you have ruined your life. America has various answers, and most have to do with the West, where you go when your past becomes too complicated.

The RV, a home on wheels for the deracinated, entered the canon of American literature when John Steinbeck wrote Travels with Charley In Search of America, the story of Steinbeck's 10,000 mile long RV trip from Maine to California and back again.

If the RV is the modern version of the Conestoga wagon, then the motorcycle is the modern equivalent of the horse. The biker is the modern day equivalent of the cowboy. The cowboys were Civil War veterans who never made it back home to the America that war destroyed. So, too, biker culture is a reaction to war. Cowboys were the disaffected veterans of the Civil War, bikers were the disaffected veterans of World War II and Vietnam, the boys who never made it back to the world those wars destroyed.

As the average American came to see social engineering as repugnant, Hell's Angels took on the aura of outlaw heroes. Burdened by increasingly onerous social control, the socially engineered citizen became increasingly fascinated by deviance, which he incorrectly saw as the antithesis of and antidote to social control. Eventually the dominant culture exploited this fascination as it developed even more sophisticated controls based on the arousal of sexual passion.

Travels with Harley in Search of America: Motorcycles, War, Deracination, Consumer Identity: searing cultural and literary analysis by E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars magazine.