Schnick Schnack Schnuck

Zur ersten Staffel von Sons of Anarchy habe ich mir das Buch Hell`s Angels von Hunter S. Thompson nochmal vorgeknöpft und stelle hieraus einige Zitate vor:

The concept of the „motorcycle outlaw“ was uniquely American as jazz. Nothing like them had ever existed. In some ways they appeared to be a kind of half-breed anachronism, a human hangover from the era of the Wild West. Yet in other ways they are new as television

„Whadde you mean by the word „right“? The only thing we`re concerned about is what`s right for us. We got our own definition of „right“!“ A Hell`s Angel sunk in Philosophy

The Angel`s collective viewpoint has always been fascistic. They insist and seem to believe that the swastika fetish is no more than an anti-social joke, a garanteed gimmick to bug the squares, the tax-payers – all these they spitefully refer to as „citizens“. What they really mean is the Middle Class, the Bourgeoisie, the Burghers – but the Angels don`t know these terms and they`re suspicious of anyone who tries to explain them.

The Angels, like all other motorcycle outlaws, are rigidly anti-Communist. Their political views are limited to the same kind of retrogate patriotism that motivates the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. They are blind for the irony of their role … knight errants of a faith from which they have already been excommunicated. The Angels will be among the first to be locked up for crooked if the politicians they think they agree with ever come to power.

In terms of our Great Society the Hell`s Angels and their ilk are losers – dropouts, failures and malcontestants. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with the world in which they are only a problem. The Hell`s Angels are no visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners of the vanguard of anything it is not the „moral revolution“ in vogue on college campuses, but a fast growing legion of young employables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the kind of destructive outlet that „outlaws“ like the Hell`s Angels have been finding for years. The difference between the student radicals and the Hell`s Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.

Their image of themselves derives mainly from celluloid, from the western movies and two-fisted TV shows that have taught them most of what they know about the society they live in. Very few read books, and in most cases their formal education ended at fifteen or sixteen. What little they knew of history has come from mass media, beginning with comics…

They assume, on good evidence, that the people who run the social machinery have little use for outlaw motorcyclists, and they are reconciled as losers. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill.

There is an important difference between the word „loser“ and „outlaw“. One ist passive and the other is active, and the main reasons the Angels are such good copy is that they are acting out the day-dreams of millions of losers who don`t wear any defiant insignia and who don`t know how to be outlaws.