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not your main point, but it's worth looking at as a symptom of what (was always there but) seems to be becoming more and more common today, as the illusion and mythology of America folds back onto the real America(s) until it's impossible to pick them out -- and not just in towns like Los Angeles, where illusion and reality have always been inseparable.
Harley Davidson is a motorcycle company. It makes motorcycles. Not, in my opinion, good ones -- they can look pretty but, by any objective measure, are vastly inferior in design and performance to current Japanese and European offerings. It wasn't always this way, but it's been so for a good long time now. They also cost two or three times (or more) 'import' motorcycles of similar capacity. Actually, let me take that back: Harley Davidson used to make motorcycles...now they sell and aggressively promote an image. Motorcycles are incidental to their main business.
Do a Google search on the company and you'll likely stumble across materials on the company's groundbreaking success in the field of marketing -- they're a case study, one included in many business and marketing courses. The story of how the company went from failing motorcycle manufacturer to economic juggernaut is an inspiring one, in a marketing sense, and they did not do it by building better bikes or finally overhauling antiquated engine designs...nope, they did it by selling Harley Davidson as an image, a packaged image. This is no secret and no jab on my part -- it was a conscious move that payed off. Paid off big time. In doing so they played into the whole idea of Americanism, never mind that many of the components on today's Harleys come from Japan, and the widespread xenophobic-racist aspect of many Harley owners (not just in the US) who sneer at 'Jap crap' and 'riceburners' as not being real motorcycles or something that a real American should ride. Hell, that very reference even made it into a 1964 Elvis movie! The anti-Japanese or natiionalist/jingoist sentiment of some Harley riders has been around a long time, even since when the company's offerings were technologically relevant and not mere props for a midlife crisis.
I should point out that the typical Harley owner of today is a lot different than the people who used to ride them. The Harley has become part and parcel of midlife crises, mostly for people who can afford them (hence the proliferation of lawyers and doctors who ride them these days...the RUB, or Rich Urban Biker), and is no longer the province of grimy bikers who knew how to ride and had oil and grease under their fingernails. There're still some of these old archetypes about on Harleys, but they're becoming outnumbered. Many, too, have now abandoned Harley Davidson (as they, themselves, felt abandoned by the company when it underwent its transformation) for big Japanese cruisers. The attitudes of many of the newcomers, to a great extent, sucks. And if you think I'm disdainful of it you should hear what some of the old-school Harley riders and ex-Harley riders think of these people.
Many of these nouveau Harley owners are even more vociferously contemptuous of other brands of motorcycles than the old Harley dudes used to be (and, really, in my experience that was always a rare thing...the real riders tended to respect motorcycles that were clearly capable, no matter their origin or brand, especially out on the open road) and an awful lot of their apparent feelings of superiority is pure snobbishness, related at least in part to the fact that they seem proud to have paid so much (or have been able to afford) for their bikes. Shoot...they should be embarrassed, if anything. Then again, I've seen the same with -- to borrow from my primary field of experience -- many American SCUBA divers who sneer at people wearing gear less expensive than their own, no matter that the diver with the less pricey gear can dive circle around them. It's a human trait, for sure, but it seems very strongly American. Snobbery on the basis of economics happens elsewhere, is what I'm saying, but I think it's reached its full expression in the USA. It's encouraged thusly here, by the media and by marketers. It's probably a big reason why most Harley riders today rarely return a wave -- the motorcyclists' wave is a sacred thing, in any country -- if you're riding a Japanese bike.
Hell, I've had people who don't even ride come up to me and ask me why I don't have a 'real' motorcycle. They're blinded, already by the image of Harley even though they don't ride and in all likelihood couldn't afford (or wouldn't pay) to be a member of the Harley-owners' club. I've come up with a few zingers for the Harley owners who've expressed contempt for my mount, too, or for anything that isn't made in Milwaukee. The next time one of them expresses his unwanted opinion, I'll challenge him to a race...to the New Mexico border. That should take care of it... :D
These days the Japanese (and other, though Japanese marques dominate the market and tend to be less expensive) companies produce cruisers -- like the Honda VTX mentioned upthread -- that are beautiful bikes. They look suitably Harley-ish, they have shaft drive (low, low maintenance), and their engines are just magnificent. I'm not into cruisers, but even I would consider something like the VTX -- it's surprisingly inexpensive (less than comparable sport bikes) and is just a freakin' gorgeous piece of motorcycle. It's Honda, too, and that means it's about as reliable as anything with an engine can be. I ride a Kawasaki now, but my Honda bike gave me zero problems and my impression is that, among even the reliable Japanese brands, Honda is king of reliability (just as Kawasakis tend to be kings of speed and sheer, raw power -- and traditionally characterized by lacking a little or a lot in the braking department!). They're smoother, faster (much), quieter, more reliable, and all together far better engineered than any of the Harleys. They're also available for $10000 or less for a 1300cc powerplant, a third of the price of most of the underpowered Harleys (before customization and additional chroming) that I see. Kinda makes you wonder why anyone who knows anything about motorcycles, or even basic personal economics, would buy a Harley these days.
The fact that Harleys are overpriced and undercapable just makes that disconnect more jarring. It doesn't mean that all Harley riders today are image-obsessed lemmings -- we have some here on DU that decidedly are not and I know some in my own life -- but I submit that perhaps the majority these days are and, further, that they are proud of it. Just like the proud individualists who, in adopting The Look (whatever it is...it changes over time, from punk fashions to piercings and whatever), manage to conform quite handily. All those image-conscious individualists tend to look the same. Look at a gathering of Harley people and all you'll see, on every little thing from bandanas to gloves to boots, is the company's logo. I've seen people on Harleys who very obviously were novice riders, who essentially didn't even know how to ride, but who were decked out in sparkling new HD merchandise from head to toe. Very sad.
Out on the open road you'll see very few Harleys. The further you get from cities, the fewer you'll see. So much for the crossing-America Easy Rider thing. Even the big tour rigs, like the classic Electra Glide, are a rare sight out there. Today's Harley rider (and, as elsewhere here, I am talking about what I perceive as the majority, not every rider) is not really much of a rider at all. Even those who used to ride Japanese bikes in their youth or today keep and ride a Japanese or European bike tend to trailer their Harleys up and drive them to wherever they're going. It's not just that the bikes tend to be mechanically unreliable and uncomfortable (in some ways...in other ways some models are very plush) but they just are not riders. In their heart, they're not motorcyclists. It's not the journey, for them, but the destination...and when they get to their destination they roll the Harley out, break out the biker fancy-dress costumes, and trundle off to pose somewhere, whether Daytona, Sturgis, or wherever. To me, they miss the whole point. I use my bike primarily as utilitarian transport but, still, there is nothing like quickly covering vast distances in a place like the United States, just you and your motorcycle. They go on about freedom, which is presumably why they wear impractical 'safety' clothing and stupid little beanies (or nothing on their head) and rattle on about the wind in their hair, but someone like me, confined in Darth-Vader-like leather and fiberglass safety gear, is experiencing a lot more freedom when I rip past their car and bike trailer out there in the boonies.
These days, in the course of my job on the Las Vegas Strip, I see and get to know a lot of Harley people. Some of those bikes are works of art, no doubt. But until I started this work I had no idea just how fully the poseur label applies. Seriously -- these people ride to a place, park their bikes (all together -- they tend to be herd animals) and will literally sit there and pose for hours on end. I'm talking four or five hours, easily. I don't know if they're hoping to attract women -- some are, I know -- or just anybody who'll admire their spotlessly shiny bikes, but I have to wonder about all of this. Really...are their lives that empty or boring that they have to come and pose --literally pose -- for hours each night, several nights a week (some of them, anyway, appear that often but other just pose on the weekend nights), like that? Some of the sportbike brats are just as bad...they have their own spots where they pose by or on their bikes for hours, the only real action being to loudly rev their engines every now and then or take off, en masse, for a noisy blast into traffic (usually displaying just how bad and stupid they are as riders, with much unnecessary revving) before returning five minutes later. It makes me sick, kind of, because I actually ride my bike. Call me crazy, but where I come from motorcycles are things you ride, not just fashion accessories. So when I say 'posers,' I mean it quite literally...more literally than I thought before, even.
I pose for a living. These people pose for some other reason. In fact, some of them put in more hours each night than I do in my job.
I mentioned "where I come from" above. I think that's perhaps important. In other countries the motorcycle is a practical means of getting around. For many, as it is for me again now, it's the only form of motorized transport that the person has. In those countries, though some people do still ride for the joy of it, motorcycles are seen as serious and legitimate means of transport and the attitudes about them tend to reflect that fact. There are plenty of American-born-and-raised riders who feel the same way, but apparently they don't ride Harleys...or, if they do, they actually ride them and put some miles on the odometer rather than use them as props or some kind of Viagra substitute. Talk about a 'male-enhancement' device.
Not that it's just males (and their 'old ladies'): the other night I saw a Harley babe pull up on a magnificent beast (I don't know what model...I can't tell most Harleys apart) and parked it after turning on the little LED lights around the engine that some Harley people lately seem to have installed to, presumably, show off some of that expensive chrome. She was dressed in leather from head to toe but it was tailored, not armored or otherwise unseemly in its bulk. Still, it gave her abrasion advantage over her male peers, most of whom wore the Hells-Angel-style leather vests with variations on the HD logo and American flag thereon. Her jacket had 'Harley Davidson" spelled out on the back with rhinestones. Her beanie was covered completely in clear rhinestones...it looked like a disco ball (in fact, at first I thought it was a male rider approaching and I got all excited that he was secure enough in his manliness to wear such a thing, or perhaps was the leader of some militant gay biker gang). And she wore high heels. Not sandals, at least, but boots with two or three inches of spiky heel...anyone who actually rides a motorcycle knows that high heels are not only not suited to riding but are very, very dangerous. So stupid. Oh, yeah: among the men who were there that night were some chopper owners (talk about impractical and dangerous...extreme choppers with their high apehangers and extra-long forks are a handling disaster), one of which, when he left, slipped on -- under his pseudo-WWII-German helmet -- a black and white death's-head mask. Yeah, really. I suppose he thought he looked cool, but all I could think when I saw him was "what a monumental f***ing doofus."
And then there's the whole issue of those pathetic f***ing beanies that Harley riders favor. Riders of other cruisers often do, too, and even a few sportbike riders share the same illness. It doesn't take a brain surgeon (whose services may well be required by anyone who crashes while wearing these stupid things) to realize that these fiberglass skullcaps would be absolutely useless as protection in an accident. I don't want to digress any more than I may have already but, speaking as one who would definitely be dead if not for wearing proper helmets, anyone who'd wear such a device (or nothing) is a fool. Even more so if they're wearing helmets that are loosely modeled after WWII German infantry helmets (always the height of irony to see a black man on a Harley, wearing a 'Nazi'-style helmet) or Viking helmets (not that the real Vikings wore the ones with the big horns) that, if anything, would only increase risk of injury. So not only are they totally ineffective as protection but they look f***ing stupid. Who ever said that beanies, of any kind, look cool? Does it make the wearers feel cool, to be sneaking under the legal radar by sporting fiberglass headgear (fiberglass yarmulkes, is more like it)? It damn sure looks stupid to me. I mean, the whole wind-in-the-hair thing is largely thwarted by these pathetic pieces of crap, anyway, so why not go all the way to a real helmet, at least a three-quarters style if not a full-face helmet?
If we can unravel the mystery of how something so ineffectual and, as a bonus, stupid-looking came to be 'cooler' than helmets that are both streamlined and protective, perhaps we will have solved the question posed in the original post. After all, we see victories of style over substance all the time in this country, but in this case there isn't even any style. I can only assume that, in their groupthink mentality, these rugged individualists are denying the inherent geekiness of their beanies and redefining it as 'cool'...after all, everyone else has one, and we all ride Harleys, so we're cool and, therefore, so are our beanies!
If I had my way, not only would helmet use by motorcyclists be mandatory for all ages at a Federal level but the helmets would have to be effective protection (bye-bye, beanies and wannabe-SS helmets) and worn properly (unlike the stupid sportbike 'squid' I saw a couple of nights ago, his $400 graphic-intense full-face helmet perched atop his empty head).
Someone close to me used to harp on about my protective gear, and how I looked like 'an alien' in it and how it wasn't 'cool.' She'd go on and on, pointing out that everyone else riding motorcycles out there was doing it in T-shirts and sandals to the point where I got tired of reasoning with her (first because plenty of riders were tooling about with leather gear on, at least on sport bikes hereabouts, and second because, regardless, I don't care what others are doing) and just told her the unvarnished truth, that many of those people were f***wits. I've crashed before...I know what it's like, and I know what to wear to avoid unnecessary injury. She finally relented but would still get a dig in, even passively-agressively by admitting that she was out driving and saw what I meant about many motorcycle riders wearing leather jackets and gloves but "why don't you just wear jeans, then, instead of the leather pants?" Drove me crazy. She defines herself by what others do and think -- she's unabashedly conscious of it, too -- whereas I am her polar opposite in that respect. For her, her dress, her demeanor, and even much of her expressed belief and opinion comes directly from what is trendy. It's like she has people running focus groups and polls to determine how she should think and how she should look and act. To her, it was important -- and shameful -- that I stood out from most motorcyclists here in Vegas (heavily infested by posers) whereas to me it was totally irrelevant. Actually, more recently another woman close to me started to give me a little grief (just a taste, thank goodness) about the same thing...not that she's anything like this other person (for all I know, she was speaking metaphorically and telling me I should take more risks in my life), but it did make me wonder if there was some gender thing going on here, because I've never received that kind of opinion from a male (other than the universal "you must be hot!"). More likely, men see my armored leatherclad person approaching them and -- especially as tall and broad as I am -- think "cool: it's the Terminator." Either way, image trumps function.
For the record, she's said that she might get a motorcycle one day, a Harley. She's got no interest in riding and has never done it, but is ready to walk into a Harley dealership and (if she can get the sales people to talk to her...many dealerships have a terrible reputation for service and attitude because their products are in such demand and the sales staff don't seem to feel the need to be civil or helpful...this new attitude's helped drive many an old-time Harley dude to a Japanese bike) plonk down a ton of money, even wait several months for delivery, because she wants her Harley. I explained to her why Harleys are a poor choice -- inherently and because they're too big for a learner -- but she doesn't care. She is, unabashedly, all about image. And it's not just because she grew up in Beverly Hills -- I think this attitude is a widespread one in this country (not endemic, but certainly more ingrained and extreme than in other countries) and the clever marketing people who resurrected Harley Davidson damn well knew that.
By the way, more recently she's expressed a desire to get a scooter -- I guess they're now more trendy and, besides, as she says, they're 'cute' -- and she won't listen to my concerns for her safety. She won't, for example, countenance any talk of her wearing a helmet...she wants the wind in her hair, she wants her face to be visible, and she wants her hair not to be compressed by a helmet when she gets to where she's going. She needs to just stick to her car. Scooters tend to be inherently more dangerous than traditional motorcycles and the only thing more dangerous than viewing such vehicles as toys is viewing them as fashion accessories.
I ride a high-performance Japanese motorcycle and I wear leather. Leather is functional. My jacket, my pants, my boots, and my gloves are all armored. I wear it all the time, no matter the temperature...full leathers from head to toe and fingertip. It's not a poseur thing. But, on the other hand, why do I wear black leather? Why not pink? There's a reason I don't wear the multicolored one-piece racing leathers -- they're just not practical when you're running around doing errands and on and off the bike as you use it for commuting (I was not in a hurry to look like a Grand Prix rider, either, to tell the truth) -- so there's undoubtedly a degree of consciousness regarding appearance in my motorcycling sartorial choices, though it's a matter of degree and no way can someone dressed like me be equated to the pseudo-gang stylings of the Harley mainstream. Besides, I like black clothing and black leather. And I'm a traditionalist in matters of leather -- my collection of wetsuits, too, is uniformly black or blue, harkening back to the dominant neoprene colors available when I started diving. I wear leather because it's still the best material for the job and I wear black because it's my choice. It should be noted that leather vests, with bare arms -- as is the standard Harley warm-weather uniform (and you see orders of magnitude more Harleys on the road during warm weather than you ever will in cooler temperatures) -- are not functional safety garb.
My brother owns an Italian cruiser, a beautiful Moto-Guzzi. It's in a class of motorcycles probably even more oriented toward promoting posing: whether a Harley or a Japanese or Italian design, cruisers tend to be bikes ridden around town, posed on heavily, and the riders usually wear three-quarter helmets at best. But he wears plain black leathers and a full-face helmet just as he did when riding the Hondas and BMWs he used to ride for pleasure, for transport, and (for a while) as a motorcycle courier.
Posing is, however, almost inevitable when you've got a motorcycle, at least to some degree. Sort of comes with the territory -- always has. But posing is the whole point of motorcycle ownership for most of today's Harley 'riders.' They're not the only ones, though -- I've long been disturbed by the American mindset that motorcycles are toys, not to be taken seriously. It's a dangerous mindset and is why you see sport-bike riders zipping along in just shorts and (where it's mandatory) a helmet. And it's often a very expensive helmet. Again, although some of the élite full-face helmets are overpriced for a reason, in the sport-bike community helmets are seen by some as status symbols, as much as the motorcycles themselves, and that is also very much in line with the premise of the original post in this thread.
The American view of motorcycles as toys is also why so many young men can't wait to jump on to a 1000-cc Suzuki right at the outset, the big superbike being a far more prestigious learner's mount than an 'unsexy' 250-cc bike -- these people are idiots, uninformed, or swayed by peer-group pressure but, either way, it's another clear-case victory of image over sense. In the US, nowadays, such morons who ride like idiots in traffic, usually toting little in the way of protective gear and whether capable riders or out-of-their-league novices, are called 'squids' by other riders. To make matters worse, some unethical sales associates at motorcycle dealers allegedly try to push higher-capacity bikes on to these people...shoot, what acne-ridden, voice-cracking adolescent isn't going to want the big Ninja so they can be like Tom Cruise in Top Gun and reel in the chicks and get respect from their wingmen? Sorry, dudes....it's my experience that having a big sport bike will only get you admiring looks and comments from other males, of all ages, because chicks seem to mostly dig Harleys and other cruisers. Yeah, it was a disappointment to me, too. Small comfort when some 20-year-old's just smeared his outer layer of unprotected skin and flesh down the road like a trail of strawberry jam while trying to pull a wheelie in traffic on a bike he had no business riding.
In the end, it's not about Harleys because these sport-bike poseurs are the same people, just usually 20 years younger. They both rev their engines when they shouldn't (the difference being that some Harleys' exhaust notes will rattle your teeth and actually hurt the ears, and when they first start off it can sound like a gun going off), like when they're in neutral or even when they're doing something like backing the bike up. There's no reason to rev a motorcycle engine unless it's accelerating. Anyone who sits there revving their engine is an idiot. Some of the sport-bike types I encounter will sit there, in neutral, revving their engines to what sounds like redline...I guess they like the scream of the engine, but all I hear is the pained shriek of a doomed engine, complete with misfires. Stupid.
Sure, the sport-bike posers may own bikes that are technically superior, but they don't own them for any constructive reason. They, like many or most of today's Harley types, are playing dress-up.
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