My Wannabe Socialist Friends?
Twenty-seven years ago I started a motorcycle club with a few pals. I had gone on a solo motorcycle walkabout through the canyons of Southern Utah in 1994 when I turned 40 and had been inspired to make that an annual ritual. The first year I could only get one guy to go with me. He was a lawyer and a bit of a henpecked husband (his wife didn’t like him riding since he had crashed a few times with her on the back…go figure). The 1995 tour was still a fun ride, so I tried again in 1996 and got four Jamokes to join me. I worked with two of the guys, Andy and Larry. I knew another from the Cornell business school Advisory Committee, Frank. And Andy shared a driveway with his neighbor, Arthur. And we were joined by a crew chief and massage therapist I knew from Park City, a young ex-Mormon lesbian (bit of a contradiction in terms) by the name of Deb. The six of us set off on a five day adventure and had a ball taking a clockwise loop around the entire state, seeing all the beauty God had wrought on those red cliffs and hills that have alternately over the ages been covered in water or scorched by drought. I have come to think of that part of the country as my church, with the Temple of Zion being the main cathedral.
Five of the six of us have stayed in regular touch by virtue of this motorcycle group, to which we formed, named and added a growing and ever-changing roster of other riders. Larry has been the outlier. He was married at the time to a woman who was a cable news anchorwoman and that brought a whole new meaning to the word henpecked. Poor Larry has since moved on in life and in ridership, but I occasionally see him and his Harvard MBA via LinkedIn. The rest of us chose to ride on in our original configuration for the past quarter-century. Each of us begat any number of fellow riders that we added to the club and I actually have kept track of the family tree of the club, so I know who begat whom. The exception to that lineage is that in good American tradition (we are actually called American Flyers Motorcycle Club, a name coined by Frank, a marketing guru par excellence who thought of it while shooting squirrels from his Vermont farmhouse bathtub), is that we have occasionally allowed external addition to our roster. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. That’s right, we represented the motorcycle equivalent of Ellis Island and we held our arms open to all the wretched refuse that needed a group with which to ride the canyons of Utah or the colored leafy hillsides of Vermont. Our logo, a winged beast with Air Corps red stars, a BMW propellor rondel in the middle and the subtle UT/VT, symbolizes our places of heritage and our riding preferences. In good American tradition, one place is Uber-conservative, religious and red right-leaning, and the other is progressive/conservative, likely agnostic at lest and blue left-leaning.
In other words, we had an eclectic group that spanned the political, cultural and social spectrum and took great pride in our diversity. Our motto has been “High Mileage, Low Expectations”, which resonated for unknown reasons with us all. Perhaps more than most of the other members, I seem always to be very aware of our political leanings as a group (something to which some members have taken significant exception) and try at each gathering to determine for my own purposes whether we are swaying right or leaning left at any moment in time. It is perhaps why at the last ride, someone saw fit to buy me a hat that says “HOLD ON…let me overthink this”. I should add that the gift was from a a guy introduced to the group by our one member who is on permanent probation, Kevin. Kevin enjoys shit-stirring and controversy more than any living creature on Earth. The guy he introduced that gave me the hat is an assault rifle manufacturer who is trying (much to the chagrin of Governor Gavin Newsom and all Americans who hate the NRA) to launch a company that makes lower-caliber assault rifles for youngsters. Needless to say, this ranks high on the controversy charts for the club and generally for mankind. I may be overthinking this, but I suspect that Kevin could have brought the club a back-alley uncertified abortionist with less controversy.
Kevin is now the center of my story for a number of reasons that will become clear to my readers. He himself is one of our club’s members who cannot easily trace his ancestry back to one of the founding members. His connection to the club was via a guy we called Chicago Bob, who was the babyback rib-King of Chicago. We had met Chicago Bob on a ride through Provence back in the late 1990’s and he and his wife Hedwig (one of the great names of all time) had briefly been members of the club. So, now Kevin has retired (which he adamantly and proudly claims is an act of NOT working) as the preeminent oats trader of the western world, and he spends his non-working time riding on-road and off-road as well as hunting and horseback riding. Kevin is a man’s man who owns farmland in more than a few states. He plays with the land like the rest of us play with puzzles.
Kevin, the prototypical unaligned club member, is also pals with Bruce, who was the Republican governor of Illinois for four years. While Bruce is a solid Republican (I choose not to characterize him too much further here because he is a public figure and I cannot pretend to have plumbed the depths of his political thinking, much less his moral soul), Kevin is way too idiosyncratic to be called a mainstream Republican even though he is quite the self-described conservative. He is outspokenly anti-Trump, but less for what Trump has done or stands for, and more because he thinks Trump is hurting the conservative cause by being too controversial. That’s pretty ironic when you think of how high Kevin sits on the club controversial spectrum in general.
The other club member that connects into this story is Roger. I can’t recall exactly who begat Roger into the club, so let’s just say for now he is origin-unknown but been in the club for a decade or more. Roger owns a toll bridge in New Jersey. Need I say more? He is more than staunchly conservative. The man went to Fulton County Atlanta on January 5th, 2021 as a poll-watcher during the senatorial run-off. He tells us that he went because he wanted to make sure that there was a fair election. He feels the effort was fruitless because there was no way to monitor what they were doing. It was not clear that they followed a procedure that protected the ballots and made sure that the signatures were valid. That night he called me and said that he did not directly witness any fraud, but he “just knew that there must have been fraud”, given the outcome. That struck me as a pretty clear statement that trust in the government with regard to elections was not high on Roger’s list of considerations, but he does agree that Trump lost the Senate for the Republicans in the Georgia election.
So, Roger, Kevin and I have a text chain that is a daily link between us. I would characterize it as friendly, but pointed banter in all directions, mostly on the topic of politics. I hold down the political left, Roger is certainly well right of me, and Kevin pokes at us both from the middle, and has an ability to piss either of us off by saying things like “Trump needs to be shot, but if he runs against Biden in 2024 he will vote for Trump rather than the dotting old fool that Biden has become”. Roger feels this is just Kevin’s way of saying that no one should do anything to harm his portfolio. You can see why I consider this text chain an invaluable part of my political thought development.
So here’s the funny part. Both Roger and Kevin accuse me of wanting to be a Socialist every time I make a left-leaning point. It is their go-to insult and I choose to just take it. But wait. Kevin now plants 100,000 trees on his farms each year and is paid to do that by a very arcane government program he has tapped and manipulated with great finesse. And yet he is quick to say that the government cannot do anything right. Roger owns a toll bridge to Atlantic City and has tried to sell it to the state of New Jersey, who is too smart to take it, given the costs of maintaining infrastructure (the bascule bridge part, especially) in this day and age, so Roger continues to run it as a business and thinks less about the ROI of the asset than he does about how the community is served.
I just realized this morning that both of my conservative friends could be accused of being Socialists based on their passive ESG-consistent investment strategies (note that Kevin does NOT work). Maybe they want to be Socialists and just don’t know it…but…..HOLD ON, maybe I’m overthinking this…