Expect No Mercy

This is a story about deluded mythmakers; clueless judges; morally bankrupt prosecutors; bad lawyers; daydream believers; and crooked cops. This is a story about police propaganda and gutless reporting. This is a story about outlaws in America, particularly motorcycle outlaws, at the moment when the America that once was - the America of revolutionaries, moonshiners, pioneers, runaways, backyard inventers, shade tree mechanics, humble heroes, tailfins and great novelists; that America; the America that never lost a war - gasps, thins, grows blind, wraps itself up in its blanket and wanes. This is a story about justice. Everybody already knows the story of the menace on motorcycles - the raids on defenseless hamlets; the defiance of convention and law; the unabashed devotion to lawlessness; the horrible growling as the packs of motorcycles approach; the disheveled brutes who take what they want; the wrecked bars; streets become rivers of beer bottles; the frightened and humiliated cops; the maid debauched on a pool table; her savagely beaten boyfriend begging for mercy for himself. Abandoning her. And she loves it. And she loves it. You can see it in your mind's eye can't you? She loves it. She will never be the same. Afterward, one of the thugs hands her his calling card. A beat poet sings their praises. A beat novelist feeds them psychotropic drugs which makes them all psychopaths "What are you rebelling against, Johnny," a black and white girl asks a black and white outlaw. "Whadda ya got," Marlon Brando replies. They kill a nice boy with a gun at a rock concert. They corrupt America with drugs. "He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good." They bully everybody. Don't make eye contact with them. They are the mafia on wheels. It is such a perfectly delicious story that it never needs to be revised. All it needs is a new name for Billy Jack every time it is told. Its roots are in America's id. It is the same now as it was just yesterday, in 1965 - a mere lifetime ago. Ask any prosecutor with some bikers to convict.