So You Didn't Marry The Girl Or Guy Next Door? Thank Your Bike!

If the love of your life is of a different race, ethnicity, national origin from your own, you have the bicycle to thank.  I might say the same if your significant other is the same gender as you, or identifies in a way you never heard of until you left home.

That's more or less what University of Arizona historian David Ortiz says.  As I've mentioned in several posts, no less than Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more than anything to emancipate women.  Cycling would change the clothing women wore, allowing more freedom of movement.  The bicycle also allowed women to travel unchaperoned by males for the first time.

And, says Ortiz, it also allowed men to travel greater distances.  At the time the "safety" bicycle was introduced, most people never got further than about 50 kilometers from where they were born or raised.  For a young man, then, "the girl next door" wasn't a Hollywood stereotype (well, ok, Hollywood didn't exist then): If she wasn't the one he married, she didn't come from much further afield.

Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with marrying the girl (or guy) next door, if that is what you want.  I just think it's nice to know that it's not the only choice.  And, of course, having two parents of very different backgrounds can be a great thing for their kids:  What could give them a better education?

As a transgender woman, I can't help but to think that such heterogeneity, along with women's liberation, helped to bring about, however slowly, greater acceptance of LGBTQ people. It's no coincidence, really, that the first and most vibrant queer communities have been found in cosmopolitan neighborhoods and cities.

So, if I ever find myself hooking up with an Afro-Japanese Brazilian bisexual whose pronoun is "they", I know the bicycle is responsible!  

Seriously, though:  From what David Ortiz says, the bicycle made us freer.  Certainly, I feel freer when I ride!

Technology And Propaganda: The Bicycle In World War I

If our only hope of survival is halting climate change, then the only way the human race will truly advance is if we get rid of war.  That's what I believe, anyway.

That said, I also understand that you can't ignore war if you study history. So, because I am interested in history, and the roles the bicycle has played in it, I've written a few posts about how bicycles have been used by the military.

World War I may have been the conflict in which the bicycle played the most pivotal roles.  It raged at exactly the moment when technologies spawned directly and indirectly by the bicycle were starting to take forms we recognize today.  In all of the nations involved, with the exception of the United States, millions of people rode to work and school, and for fun.  Even in the States, many of adults were still riding, as affordable, reliable automobiles (think Model T) were still a decade in the future.

Doran Cart is one person who recognizes the importance of bicycles in the so-called "Great War".  He is the senior curator of the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City.  When the US entered the war in 1917, military leaders "realized bicycles could make a difference in certain situations," according to Cart.

French military folding bicycle

Although they weren't particularly useful in the trenches and weren't particularly safe on open roads, bicycles could reach areas inaccessible to motor vehicles, and were more reliable.  These factors also made the bicycle, in many situations, the quickest way to convey messages. Bikes also were used, interestingly, on airbases.

What might have been as important as the bicycle's utility was its familiarity.  Unlike other technologies deployed during the war, almost everyone was familiar with the bicycle, as most rode them as civilians.  This meant that soldiers didn't have to learn how to use them, as they did with, say, trucks or planes.  Because so many men and women in uniform had been riding bicycles for all or most of their lives, at least some knew how to repair and maintain them.  How many people knew how to fix a plane or tank before the war?

That familiarity, according to Cart, also made bicycles useful in another way:  they were "a humanizing aspect to the war."  Because bicycles "represented something that every person could use" and were (and are) "available to everyone regardless of social class", they turned out to be rather effective propaganda tools.  Countless illustrations from that time depict young soldiers on or with their bicycles.  I mean, if you see this "Avanti Savoia" ("Onward Savoy"), you might think the 26th Bersaglieri Battalion was embarking on a bike tour.

Bike-Outs: Super-Predators Wilding? Oh, The Menace!

They ride bikes together.

Oh, and those bikes are s-s-scary:  They’ve got fat wheels and look like Hell’s Angels motorcycles without the motors.

And the kids who ride them—T-they ride in packs and make a lot of noise.  A-and, you know, they pop wheelies and stuff.

They’re-they’re teenagers.  And they’re...

If you were in New York thirty years ago, you can fill in that last ellipsis.  Let’s just say they’re, um, darker than I am—and use words I didn’t learn in Spanish 101.

It seems that every generation or so, some j-school grads with too much time on their hands find new ways to whip up hysteria about groups of urban teenage boys being, well, groups of urban teenage boys.  The latest, it seems, is something that’s been dubbed the “bike-out.”

A Bike-Out?! Oh, my!

Indignation over boys riding modern versions of “Choppers” or “Stingrays” has been ignited by a 74-year-old man who was out for a stroll when, he says, he was attacked by a group of “lawless” teenagers on bikes.

My purpose is not to doubt the man.  One attack, however, does not a phenomenon make.  I am reminded about the hysteria about “wilding” generated by the Central Park Jogger case.

That assault was indeed brutal.  But a certain entrepreneur took it upon himself to take out full-page ads in which he demanded the death penalty for the alleged attackers:  teenagers whose confessions, as it turned out, were coerced and who were finally released from prison on the cusp of middle age.

I am, of course, referring to Donald Trump.  In his ad, he famously bellowed, "I hate them. I want to hate them."  

One thing you have got to say for El Cheeto Grande:  He knows how to play the media.  Or, at least, he shows what one can do with the media if one has, say, a couple of billion lying around.

The "bike-outs" are as much a phantom phenomenon as "wilding" was, and their perpetrators were just as mythical as Hilary Clinton's "super predators."  Those ghost stories (pun intended) involve urban teenage boys and young men who are black and Latino. The only difference between them, as far as I can tell, is that in one legend, the bogeyman show up on bicycles.

(Thanks to Eben Weiss for writing about the "Bike-Out" hysteria in Outside magazine.)