#title Bikes for Peace
#author Gregg Williard
#SORTauthors Gregg Williard;
#date 2019
#source [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/402-winter-2019/bikes-for-peace]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2018-12-28
#notes Fifth Estate #402, Winter 2019
Bikes have no power until bodily given
and given, give back at higher gear.
Being mounted, being ridden
without armor plating, they’re
light in their taking
and being taken where.
Not that bikes can’t be taken, and take
to war: the U.S. in Havana, the British
against Boers, the Japanese in Shanghai,
and Germans in France, the V.C. and
Viet Minh, all pedaling down some
variety of Ho Chi Minh Trail.
And the Paratrooper TM U.S. Military Bike
folds 3x3x1 foot small, without the use
of tools and weighs
a mere 29 pounds of F.I.T.
(Folding Integrated Technology). Today on
the modern battlefield, with thermal and acoustic
signatures read, the stealth and efficiency
of the military bike is an advantage lost
on no command.
And yet.
In historical accounts of these bicycle brigades
again and again soldiers on bikes
have been greeted with Laughs.
There’s something about enlisting the bike to kill
that seems fundamentally wacked.
The Paratrooper TM folds 3x3x1 ft small,
but most bikes go to peaces better
(there’s endless kinds of peaces, see,
and some might even turn Clausewitz
upside down on Kaiser-spiked head to
quip, Peace is the Continuation of War
by Other Means, best waged Light-weight
and quick, by bike).
I’m not so sure. When it’s war it’s only
war you ride and are ridden by:
square wheels de rigueur, and
derailleurs that shift smooth
from nothing to nothing
to less than naught.