Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

The outlaw stance is patently antisocial, although most Angels, as individuals, are naturally social creatures. The contradiction is deep-rooted and has parallels on every level of American society. Sociol­ogists call it alienation, or anomie. It is a sense of being cut off, or left out of whatever society one was presumably meant to be a part of. In a strongly motivated society the victims of anomie are usually extreme cases, isolated from each other by differing view­points or personal quirks too private for any broad explanation.

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular — especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they’re supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.

In the terms of our Great Society the Hell’s Angels and their ilk are losers — dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem. The Hell’s Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of any­thing it is not the moral revolution in vogue on college cam­puses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same 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.

It goes without saying that some of the student radicals, in Berkeley and on dozens of other campuses, are as wild and aggres­sive as any Hell’s Angels — and that not all the Angels are cruel thugs and potential Nazis. This was especially true before the Angels got all their publicity. As recently as early 1965 there were less than a half dozen Angels who gave a hoot in hell what was happening on the Berkeley campus. If they’d been seriously inter­ested in Red-baiting, they would have made an appearance at some of the free-speech rallies. But they didn’t show up. Not even to swagger through the crowds and get their pictures in the papers. Nor — at about the same time — did they harass CORE’s picket lines in Jack London Square, in the middle of downtown Oakland. Even in the spring and early summer of 1965, when they were beginning to realize the extent of their infamy, they ignored several golden opportunities to tangle with both civil rights and Get Out of Vietnam demonstrators. They simply didn’t care. Or at least not enough of them cared. . . and not all of them care even now.

But the burden of fame made the Hell’s Angels very conscious of their image; they began reading the newspapers like politi­cians, looking for mention of things they had said or done. And as they dealt more and more with the press, they were inevitably asked to comment on the issues of the day. ( Tell me, Sonny, do the Hell’s Angels have any position on the war in Vietnam? . . . How do you feel about the civil rights movement, Tiny? ) The answers made good copy and it wasn’t long before the Angels dis­covered they could call a press conference,* complete with TV cameras, for the purpose of delivering various screeds and pronouncements. The news media loved it, and although many of the items on the Angels were rendered with considerable humor, the outlaws never noticed.