Donald Charles Davis
2011
247 pages
Out Bad is the other self-published (via CreateSpace) book by The Aging Rebel blogger and journalist Donald Charles Davis. The book The Aging Rebel was a collection of Davis’ better blogposts, each one a brief critique of something gnawing at the biker world. Out Bad is an in depth critique of the media discourse surrounding Operation Black Rain, a major ATF undercover operation that ultimately dismantled what was then theleadership of the Mongols Motorcycle Club.
Davis' blog is great for its sharply intelligent analysis of the issues that press against a subculture widely viewed as dumb, but Out Bad is his great contribution thus far, a book which I consider to be a major addition to the literature on outlaw bikers. It responds to media accounts of outlaw biker affairs, often taking journalists to task for simply repeating law enforcement statements on MC-related crime scenes. Also Davis’ critique expands the picture of those scenes, giving the fuller perspective on biker issues that he suggests are absent from media representations of the subculture. Furthermore, Davis is an interesting commentary on these issues because he A) writes from an insider’s perspective, the cover of this book features a photo of him riding with the Mongols and B) he writes at an intellectual level that equals that of the academics of biker culture, Daniel R. Wolf and Arthur Veno. Davis’ prose shows his talents as a seasoned journalist who can make information engaging, but his writing is also laced with literary and philosophical references as well. Out Bad is certainly a retort to every true crime text that paints the biker scene as an engine for lurid crime-scene imagery and brute stupidity.
Out Bad is not simply a reply to journalist accounts of bike-gang warfare and meth cookery, and the base repetition of police press releases. It also criticizes many of the books published by biker-world figures over the last ten years such as Under and Alone by Mongols ATF infiltrator William Queen, No Angel by Hells Angels ATF infiltrator Jay Dobyns, and especially, Honor Few Fear None, the memoir by short-term Mongols national president, Ruben Cavazos. In his criticism of Cavazos book, Davis presents a much different view of the club, which is more racially mixed (while Cavazos constructed it as a means for retired LA street gang members) with many members disappointed with Cavazos leadership and the changes he instituted. As a sustained work of argument against another book, Davis produced for the biker world the kind of book-length works of criticism that readers find in the more traditionally intellectual fields of political theory, philosophy, and literature.
Out Bad's relevance is three-fold: it is an intelligent piece of media criticism aimed against those lazy journalists for whom newswriting is transcribing a brief and trite witness statement into a cut and pasted law enforcement press-release, it is a work of criticism against Ruben "Doc" Cavazos book and other appearance in mass media as well as his leadership of the Mongols Motorcycle Club, and it is in itself a work of journalism that investigates and examines the events of the ATF's Operation Black Rain from the perspectives of participants in the subculture.
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