Houston…we have a media problem!

Very recently, being a life-long enthusiast of two-wheeled transportation (both bicycle and motorcycles), I acquired a copy of a very new and recent (2016) book on motorcycles to add to my two-wheel relevant library. The book, titled Discovering the Motorcycle: The History, the Culture, the Machines and written by Armand Ensanian, is a 600 page tour de force study of the essence of engine-powered two-wheeled vehicles.

Aside from the fact that this splendid and well-illustrated book (published in soft-binding, unfortunately….I much prefer hard-bound editions) is a passion-inspired masterpiece of dedicated, comprehensive study on what it is about motor-driven cycles that so excites and delights the human senses, I happened to stumble once again, whilst reading it, upon that infamous Hollister (California) event of July 1947 that brought the ‘bad boy biker’ image (so persistent, even today) into widespread and definitive public awareness.

For those of you who are not motorcycle enthusiasts, I refer to the American Motorcycle Association (AKA: AMA) ‘Gypsy Tour’ rally held in the tiny town of Hollister which disproportionately grew into a notorious national cultural bellwether event.

Although Hollister, California, located near the Pacific Coast area bordering Monterey, had been hosting motorcyclist events for several years prior to 1947, they were not necessarily eventful as was the 1947 AMA ‘Gypsy Tours’ iteration. AMA ‘Gypsy Tours’ had been a regularly scheduled feature of AMA annual activities since the 30s and consisted of AMA-sanctioned gatherings featuring activities for motorcyclists that included both social and competitive (racing) offerings. Hollister, a small California agricultural town, viewed the event as good business, since it typically brought lots of visitors to the town. With over 21 bars it was also a great venue for the many thirsty motorcyclists who would show up.

Understandably, on that particular date, just two years subsequent to the end of WW2, there were lots of recently discharged US military personnel who had discovered the thrills of powered two-wheel machines, as well as the sense of lowered inhibitions and free-spiritedness that motorcycles convey. Many of these young ex-servicemen had suffered through unspeakable horrors during the war with a large number undoubtedly afflicted by what we now know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and found a sort of refuge in the company of their fellow motorcycle buddies from a civilian world that hadn’t the slightest concept of what they had survived.

When 4000 such motorcyclists showed up at Hollister for the July 4th Hollister ‘Gypsy Tour’, the small town of 2000 or so was literally overwhelmed by a mass of restless young men intent on drinking, ‘styling’, and racing. The local police department were almost completely helpless in the face of all the alcohol-enhanced youthful enthusiasms extant and were certainly under-manned (there were only 7 officers in the department), but the police reacted as best they were able to arrest and jail those few truly wild (and very drunk) cyclists who posed a more obvious danger to themselves and others about them. Most of the arrests were actually undertaken to protect the cyclists themselves, but some were jailed to help protect the townspeople and local property, if and when things started to get out of hand. Despite widespread belief today, it is an established & documented fact that after the whole thing finally ended, none of the townspeople had suffered any significant harm.

With even the 21 bars unable to keep up with the drinking demands, even more sorely taxed were the local motels and hotels, which could provide accommodations for only a small handful of the visitors. This resulted in well-inebriated motorcyclists ‘crashing’ just about anywhere they could find a place to do so and the streets, the park and the neighborhoods filled up with motorcyclists sleeping it off in doorways, sidewalks and side streets. Despite this, the scene could not be truly and accurately described as anything near a ‘riot’. Tumultuous yes, but riotous?...no.

Until, that is, a reporter (Barney Peterson by name) and photographer from the San Francisco Chronicle News Services showed up. Several hours later and yielding to an impetus to drum up some sensational news, these media reporters staged a photograph (a local resident named Gus Desperpa testified to this fact and is in fact shown standing in the background of the photograph) that showed an overweight (and likely very drunk) motorcyclist seated on a Harley-Davidson ‘hog’, clutching two bottles of beer (one in each hand) and surrounded by dozens of glass beer bottles lying all around the bike. The photograph immediately made front page news in the SF Chronicle, attended by a suitably hyped account of events in Hollister. From there it quickly found its way across the nation via the wire services, gaining more in sensational notoriety with each successive iteration. Shortly thereafter, Peterson’s ‘contrived’ photograph made the cover of Life Magazine and the rest is history. The enduring image of the wild and crazy ‘outlaw biker’ had been created.

Of course this image was paradoxically seized upon by the bikers themselves and co-opted into the very exaggerated stereotype of dangerous and lawless rebelliousness that it had been made to be by the media coverage of the event. As far as the church-going, law-abiding and peaceable American public was concerned, motorcycles of any kind, any shape or configuration were instantly and irrevocably cast in the shadow of that antisocial image that persists largely undiluted to this day. America, it seems, has always secretly idolized ‘bad guys’…likely a partial result of the rampant lawlessness of our own ‘Wild West’ frontier era of the 1800s…and ‘bikers’ were the new outlaws.

The point that should emerge from this particular example of media ‘reporting’ is that the news media, instead of soberly reporting information and factual events (as their erstwhile ‘ethics’ charge them to do), had deliberately ‘shaped’ the news to suit their need to titillate the audience (in this case, as in all cases, to increase media ‘market share’…a factor directly related to revenue generation and profitability…since stories involving sensationalism and emotive hyping readily attract the less-astute and/or demanding masses). Ironically, by creating the new ‘biker outlaw’ image they socially condemned, media’s need for sensationalistic news helped enhance and strengthen the stereotype itself as bikers seized upon their image of lawless, rebelliousness and reckless violence to bolster their own assumed identity.

The Hollister event remains today as a primary example of how modern media ‘feeds’ off the common mass-public’s insatiable demand for emotional exaggeration and outrageous audiovisual fodder; its lessons are just as applicable today as they were back then in the immediate post-war years before television and the ‘entertainment industry’ came along to take purpose-driven media hype to unimagined new heights of manipulative public pop-culture excess.

[Note: Despite all the resulting hype, the Hollister motorcycle rally was reinstated in subsequent years on a sporadic basis after much further urban planning was done to accommodate it, with varying success. However the 2017 iteration expects to host nearly 40,000 motorcyclists!...10 times the original number. And Hollister still considers it great business.]

My purpose in dredging the infamous Hollister event up from almost 70 years in the past is to illustrate an invariably obscured or overlooked point that in today’s expertly contrived, molded and media-massaged American culture, our whole society stands in dire peril of being catstrophically manipulated for the chief purpose of generating obscene levels of revenue for wealthy individuals and their profiteering commercial/economic enterprises.

Although news media have (at least in America) always been profoundly involved with and influenced by partisan political dogma and issues, in today’s instantaneous electronic news-media culture this unhealthy influence has been elevated to astoundingly subtle and dangerously sophisticated new highs. All one needs to fully realise the perverse extent of this dynamic process is to scrutinise the impact news-media has had on the recent American presidential election. The biases arrayed against the Republican President-Elect Donald Trump in media coverage of the issues and the race itself have never been clearer or more blatant in their disregard for balance and objectivity.

I suppose I should state here, just for the record, that I am NOT in the Trump camp myself, nor do I espouse or advocate the extremely capitalistic influences and ‘big-money’ philosophies that Trump represents. In my opinion, neither candidate in the recent election was perfectly suited to handle the immense responsibilities incumbent upon ANY successful candidate for the nation’s highest administrative office. A classic ‘choice of the lesser of two evils’, as it were, although there was no really cogent choice in this most recent election. That said, although I am quite charry of Trump, his capitalist regime and all he stands for, the even more ideologically repugnant and stridently intolerant nature of the left’s liberal progressiveness put me off even more.

With the nation being presently held in a politically correct death grip by these LLP Democrats, I reluctantly voted for Trump well aware that he is somewhat of a loose cannon who seems capable of wreaking extreme damage to our country’s most traditional core values. But all this is an expression of my own subjective feelings and largely beside the point I am making here, which is that the powerful ‘4th Estate’ in our nation stands to lose any vestige of respect it may still have if the shamelessly overt socio-political partisan biases demonstrated by all the major networks continue unabated, as they have been.

One of the principal unhealthy tendencies in our present media organisations (and this includes ALL the commercial media networks such as ABC, CBS and NBC) is their institutionalised habit of treating the entire viewing public as one would a nation of low-mentality, uneducated and unreflective individuals. It has been demonstrated in a number of academic studies of modern media organisations (involving electronic audiovisual media, or TV, radio & related forms) that the pre-determined target audience has the collective intellectual capability of an emotionally unstable 6th Grader. When one takes this basic ‘target’ and admixes a philosophy of emotion-laden feminised liberalism, overemphasis on minority issues and a bias towards that incredibly sophomoric distortion of the female nurturing spirit I call ‘Momism’, the end result is truly ‘sappy’ indeed.

However formularized mainstream media has become, certain discernible traits quickly become apparent when any segment of national or local news is scrutinized critically. Among these unspoken news agency policies are a pandering to and disproportionate weighting of anything bearing on minority issues. Instances in which the soft-pedaling of Black crime issues exists concurrently with an instant bias against any incident involving ‘minority’ criminals shot by law enforcement officers (i.e. the so-called ‘Black lives matter’ partisans, etc.) are a good case in point. This PC mind-set categorically makes police out to be the ‘bad guys’ and the minority crime-committers the ‘poor, preyed-upon good guys’ (!?) well before any factual analysis emerges. Viewed another way, the ‘court of public opinion’ decides the matter in favor of the (usually always culpable) minority offender at the onset. Is that racism? On the part of the news media, yes it certainly IS.

Another trait quickly surfacing under even the most superficially critically analytical gaze is a ridiculously bureaucratic media obsession with ending every local (but also national) news broadcast with an ‘Aw gee!’ feel-good story (e.g. a brief but ‘heart-warming’, hope-filled and uplifting segment aimed at the sentimental ‘Mom’-mentality people in the viewing audience, usually about some poor disabled child that has overcome his sad circumstances, or a Black child who has struggled against all odds to become a talented gymnast, or a little White girl who has raised several thousand dollars selling lemonade to benefit the local homeless shelter, etc., etc., et al). While these one-in-a-million throw-away vignettes do indeed demonstrate some small aspects of the human potential for goodness and kind acts, they pale in comparison to the daily actions of the much vaster mean, nasty & violent world of scum-sucking bottom-dwellers out there whose only concerns are making their next drug score, buying stupid material things they’ve been conned into believing are ‘cool’, or beating whatever system may be in place within the socio-economic infrastructure that tries to fairly leaven out the economic benefits of our erstwhile ‘democracy’. In actual fact, ‘hope’ and ‘goodness’ are catastrophically endangered qualities in our morally corrupt, economically manipulated and ethically distorted way of life and yet this is what the media insists on dispensing to counteract the depressing and non-stop recitation of all the bad news.

‘Hope and goodness’ are in fact, on the verge of disappearing entirely in the daily maelstrom of human violence and brutality, and tossing a few minutes of false-hope inspiring media blather into the mix makes absolutely no dent in the process whatsoever (although it may give media execs a few moments of undeserved ‘warm’ self-regard for their altrusim).

Besides, that little White 5th grader who helped the homeless with her lemonade sale didn’t exactly come up with that idea herself, did she? Nope. Behind her are the usual liberal goody-gooder parents with high ambitions who have prompted her to do whatever she did, scripting the scenario and coaching her throughout, knowing full-well that both they and their precious little daughter will likely end up getting their 15 minutes of fame on the local (or even national) news media broadcast (I mean, the media networks positively scour the woods every day for such fantastic ‘Aw gee!’ gems of social positivism) for such shenanigans.

Such are the ‘soft’ (but dangerously duplicitous) manipulations of public sentiment that news media are noted for. It draws viewers, right?...and they’re smart enough to understand all too well that no one wants to be subjected to an unrelenting and unrelieved script of doom, gloom and depravity (no matter how useful those things are for vicariously grabbing the attention of low-mentality viewers). Hence the ‘hope’ message. Largely for the same reasons ‘hope’ is a major selling point for religious faiths of all sizes and shapes. It gives us all a false sense of belief that somehow, somewhere things WILL get better (respite all the ample evidence to the contrary).

Further (and talking about subtle contrivance), there’s a very good reason why so many of the news media ‘anchors’ we see reciting the news on audiovisual media channels are good-looking females. Aside from the fact that great tits & ass quotients are always a big draw, females have a softer, more nurturing nature than do their male counterparts (who’d likely be just as happy reporting on blood & guts in the Middle East than on ‘…sweet little local child, Sarabelle, who donated the contents of her piggy-bank to help the homeless’).

Auuuugh! Talk about choking on ‘cuteness’! Then too there is the fact that women viewers (especially ‘moms’) are more likely than men to take any sort of passing interest in local or national news anyway, hence a counted-upon intrinsic bonding between female news anchors (who could be mothers themselves) and the female ‘mom’ viewing audience. As for the male viewers, few as they may be, they’re provided for with the immensely satisfying pleasure of checking out how well the female anchor person fills out that deliciously tight sweater she’s wearing while she mouths sappy blather about warm puppies and cute kids to the viewers. (Male voiceover: “Dude! Look at that rack!” Blah-blah-blah-blah.”)

Sadly, while all this likely comes across to some of you as the ranting of a socially-dysfunctional misanthrope (moi), all of these dynamics in reference are the subject of quite seriously studied, anticipated, planned-for, contrived and acted-upon investigations carried out at an annual cost of billions of dollars, mostly resulting from endless studies by media marketing people and commercial advertising/marketing agencies that stand to make scads of money exploiting the emotional unstable, anti-intellectual vulnerabilities of the ‘viewing herd’, comprising their viewer audience.

In previous centuries, ‘media’ as it existed prior to the dawning of the modern electronic age, had radically less impact and/or influence on human interactions due to the physical limitations implicit in distribution of printed literature (newspapers, books, et al). In today’s instantaneous socio-cultural milieu, transmittal of information occurs literally at the speed of light (or close to it), hence the effects are exponentially amplified to a potentially dangerous extent. And with all the commercial media organisations now pyramided into colossally unified business holdings with world-wide outreach, they wield HUGE influence on our society.

Further, now that the powers of ‘PC diversity’ have so fragmented and atomized any former sense of pleasurable social connectivity we may have formerly enjoyed in our communities, it has become increasingly more precarious to venture out in search of the prior simple joys of life (such as hikes, outings, bicycle rides or even walks in the local park). Staying home has now almost become an unconscious act of seeking safe refuge, given the violent disregard one encounters everywhere in public on the part of those low-mentality types who feel they aren’t accorded proper ‘respect’ (“Yo, who yo lookin' at? Yo dissing me, mother**ker?”). This unconscious need for ‘socially safe insularity’ has resulted in the rise of televised media being the chief socializing influence in all our lives. In other words, the artfully staged and contrived commercial ‘reality’ (read: fantasy) that comes across on our televisions constitutes nearly our entire understanding of what ‘real’ is in our world. And of course there’s about as much ‘reality’ in televised media as there is perfume in s**t. So-called reality-television programs take this and make an art form out of it (and these days, nearly everything has become ‘reality-based’, as fantastically distorted as that Frankensteinian sense may be).

Social media operates almost congruently with its corporate ‘big media’ role model, resulting in the instantaneous transmittal of anything, no matter how blatantly trivial, untrue, intellectually skewed and/or duplicitously engineered it may be. ‘Fake news’, currently being seized upon as a subject of criticism by intolerant leftist liberals who refuse to accept the results of the recent election (picture it: eyes clinched tight, ears shut, accompanied by ‘lah-lah-lah-lah-lah! I can’t hear you!’), has now been shown to have a disastrously impactful effect on those (i.e. ‘the herd’) who lack the necessary critical resources to exercise intelligent discrimination in daily life.

Consequently, fantasy, always Hollywood’s most important product anyway, has increasingly not only replaced factual reality in American life but become the most powerful attitude-shaping power on earth. And it shows no sign of ever accepting responsibility for its collective actions…a basic tenet of erstwhile duly exercised ‘American freedoms’.

News media (including all entertainment concerns) therefore owes America a powerful obligation to act on the better behalf of all our citizens, instead of furthering a narcissistic agenda of commercially contrived falsities aimed solely at furthering the wealth and power of the richest and most powerful 3% of our nation’s population. Viewed in the same light, Hollywood, with all its pathological dedication to titillating and overstimulating easily excitable low-awareness mentalities (i.e. the ‘herd’), has a similar responsibility to act in our better social & cultural interests.

The fact that neither of these two immensely powerful entities in capitalist America consider these obligations ethically and/or morally binding is simply further evidence that the great ideals and visions of our founding fathers have become so submerged in rampant materialism and capitalistic revenue generating excesses that they are no longer even isolatable and/or identifiable in our daily life. For all these reasons and many more that I have neither the time nor inclination to catalogue and enumerate here, America’s ‘Great Experiment’ (American style democracy) has, for all intents & purposes utterly failed.

And yet the patriotically simple-minded among us continue to mindlessly wave the flag and verbally all but castrate anyone who dares to stand up to criticise this pathologically diseased way of life we have all been forced to accept (by powerful, moneyed capitalistic economic forces). To my way of seeing things, it is a great tragedy with no immediately obvious resolution presenting itself, and that’s a misfortune that is sorry indeed.

As a so-called ‘boomer’, I was raised with an intensely ingrained sense of patriotic pride in my country, the United States of America. I was brought up to believe strongly in the peerless virtues of our democracy and in our perception of being ethically moral and ‘right-minded’. Now well into my seniority (yeah, perhaps ‘senility’ is a better term), I have come about 180 degrees from that former outlook. The ‘admirable’ America of my youth has become far too tainted, corrupted and disfigured by the obscenities of immense wealth and power that pull all the strings behind the scenes to permit me to view that ‘old America’ as still to be admired and regarded unreservedly as the ‘best nation on earth’.

Until such a time as others are willing to stand up and actively criticize the bizarre parodies of moral and political integrity that we have allowed ourselves to become, I’m afraid that our great nation is headed downwards in the very same ‘graveyard spiral’ so many intellectuals have detailed & described in recent studies of American democratic dysfunction. It saddens me tremendously, of course, and after I’m gone I’m absolutely convinced that nothing will change until something catastrophic occurs to bring our ‘great experiment’ (and perhaps the rest of humanity with it) to a final and permanent end.

But I also can’t help but feel that (echoing Schopenhauer’s brilliant prescience once again, and some of Nietzsche’s as well) the world will only be better off, when Homo sapiens (perhaps better described as ‘Homo pestifer mundi’…’Man the destroyer’) finally becomes extinct.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

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PS: As for the book ‘Discovering the Motorcycle’, I heartily recommend it as a fascinating and voluminous compilation of information on motorcycles from their earliest form to the most modern permutations. Its 600 pages are lavishly illustrated as well and well worth the retail cost. The foreword was written, by the way, by the Editor in Chief of Motorcycle Classics Magazine (Richard Baccus), who does a great job with that publication.