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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

So Many Rebels but a Shortage of Causes

OFF THE WIRE


The Devils Ride,” a new show on the Discovery Channel, follows a motorcycle club.

What is this, National Outlaw Month? The Discovery Channel seems to think so. It has rolled out two new series about people who are lawless or want to create the impression that they are. If nothing else, the shows reveal the differences between real outlaws and mere poseurs.
Of the two shows the one that’s worth watching is “Kurt Sutter’s Outlaw Empires.” In this six-part series Mr. Sutter, who created “Sons of Anarchy,” the FX drama about a motorcycle gang with an illegal arms business, examines real-life criminal organizations, beginning in the premiere on Monday with the Crips.
The other show, “The Devils Ride,” which made its debut last Tuesday, is a standard reality-show treatment of a motorcycle club based in San Diego called the Laffing Devils. Compared with the serious outlaws of Mr. Sutter’s show, these guys come off mostly as laughable, which, despite their club’s name, isn’t what they’re going for.
First a word about that word. “Outlaw,” of course, has always meant someone who has committed crimes or is sought by the authorities. But there is also “outlaw” in the Willie Nelson/Waylon Jennings sense: people who appropriate the image without, necessarily, the criminal behavior.
Mr. Sutter’s program gives us the real thing, and though the premiere doesn’t include much that is new about the Crips, the fearsome gang that originated more than four decades ago in Los Angeles, it’s an illuminating case study of organizational growth and change. Several men who were part of the gang’s formative years tell the story.
The gang started small, then as it grew, it developed factions that went to war against one another. The 1980s brought the crack cocaine boom, with the Crips filling the drug-dealing void and becoming big business.
“It changed the game in terms of the weapons,” Kershaun Scott, who was part of the Eight Trey Gangster Crips, says of crack. Gang members now had plenty of money for serious arms. “Of course,” he adds, “that raised the death rate.”
Mr. Sutter takes a passive approach in the series, turning up occasionally to summarize but not passing judgment or pressing his subjects about their behavior. Sometimes you may wish he were more aggressive — for instance when the Crips history lesson reaches the Rodney King verdict of 1992. Is there a certain amount of incongruity in hearing members of a blatantly criminal organization say how outraged they were by the perceived miscarriage of justice? Yes, but the men featured here are not asked to speak to that point.
The Crips record may be deplorable, but at least the gang’s existence is understandable, given the poverty and lack of opportunity that characterized the neighborhoods where it originated. As Mr. Scott says early in the program, explaining why he fell in with the group, “You were part of something that meant that you were no longer going to be a victim.”
The Laffing Devils, in contrast, seem to have no founding grievance, no formative caldron (though some are military veterans). They are just a bunch of guys — mostly white, mostly middle aged, from what we see on “The Devils Ride” — with loud bikes and an excess of belligerence who spout platitudes about brotherhood and bonding that are more appropriate to soldiers in a foxhole.
“We have the mentality of knowing that I know he’s going to be there beside me, and I’m going to be there beside him,” a founder known as Danny Boy says. Be there for what? Mostly for support in trouble of their own making, it appears.
Club members, still thinking it’s the 1950s and motorcycles are a symbol of something other than eardrum damage, ride around seemingly waiting for anyone to look crosswise at them. At one point a member in training punches and kicks someone who he decided was taking too many photographs near a table full of club members’ female companions.
Later the same fellows who endorse that kind of behavior are seen trying to portray themselves as providing security for a liquor store owner. They’re also seen admiring one another’s many firearms.
Guns, testosterone, an aggressive posture toward the world and a chip on the collective shoulder. What could go wrong?
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/neil_genzlinger/index.html?inline=nyt-per