MIDNIGHTRIDER

From:        "Midnight Rider"
To:              blackecho
Date:          11 Apr 2005
Subject:     fucking nigger

i got news for you pal. i think it is funny how you, so seemingly eloquently try to degrade the idea and the mindset of harley davidson motorcycles. lemme ask you something jack. are you a motorcycle technician. do you have the first inclination of how motorcycles are built or how they developed. according to you harley is nothing more than smoke and mirrors and lots of chrome. my bike performs quite well, the number one reason why is because of its simplicity. fuck eric buell by the way. his bikes are ugly and if you paid attention they are powered by none other than harley davidson motors. now i am not writing this to beseach your likings or desires in what a motorcycle offers. i dont give a shit. but obviously you do so ill give you some pointers. me being a factory hd technician and all. honda was the first jap bike introduced on american soil. they were started by harley davidson with american money, betcha didnt know that did you. the harley davidson motor is not meant to produce high rpm. it is not a high horsepower motorcycle the way it is built delivers 100% of what its buyers expect. just because it doesnt go 180 mph doesnt mean it is a shitty product. christ the first harley carbureter was a spent tomato can. it was a few american guys with an idea. the same idea that holds true to this day. through adversity and waning market spikes they sustained their status with new ideas and fresh technology. when norton, bsa, and indian were putting out the same technology they had used for twenty years harley was moving forward. the first sport bike appeared on the scene in 1958 when the sportster was born. nothing could touch that bike in its time. i am sure that you probably ride a crotch rocket rice burner of some kind and that is fine and dandy. more power to you but that bike began as a harley. the technolgy in your motorcycle as well as in your car and other areas is all a direct result of a fundemental idea. how dare you deface the ideals that harley stands for. it is an american icon. harley riders buy their bikes because they love them, not to be a badass though many of us are, and, that being said, i would like to meet you sir just to slap the taste out of you mouth. we ride out motorcycles for the feeling that we get on the back of those things. they have crazy low end torque and even though they dont slolom, or rev to 15k rpms, or pull fucking wheelies out of the shop they do what they are supposed to do, and that is the bottom line. i would like to see you go to a bike rally and talk the shit that you talk on your pussy fucking website. i hope you wrap that piece of shit ride around a tree but even that is too good for you and besides it is not the fault of the bike you ride that its owner is an ass hole. i am sure that it would be much happier in the hands of someone who appreciates the heritage of it. maybe you should research the facts and the community before you start making shallow comments and unwarrented slandor about a true american unlike yourself. and maybe you should go tell the next group of bikers you see that they are all pussies and only think they are badasses because they ride a harley. but i know that you wont because you hide behind your fucking computer. i live in orlando florida by the way so if you are ever here please look me up i would love to meet you. so fuck off. “ - "Midnight Rider"
 

I have to admit having some guilty pleasure in receiving and posting this particular email because it goes so far in proving everything that I’ve said all along about Harley owners that it almost doesn’t seem fair to post this.

Almost.

I think that the only thing that could be any more tedious than reading this guy’s email all the way through the first time would have been trying to glue diarrhea back together. This skuzzy dirt-fuck hillbilly, in one fell swoop, has not only single-handedly dry humped the entire English language (without offering so much as the God given decency of a courtesy reach-around in the process) but he’s also managed to lower, yes, actually lower even further the collective intellectual bar and IQ score for every single Harley owner out there. The fact that he did both feats at the same time is quite an accomplishment though certainly not one to be envied by the more erudite individuals of the species! Oh, I’m afraid that the intellectual debt that this guy has incurred on behalf of the ranks of The Faithful is a rather monumental one that may never be able to be repaid in this lifetime, or for several lifetimes to come for that matter, at least by this guy working all alone.

Bear with me now as I show you that this guy here really has worked rather diligently to put the “rant” back into “ignorant.” This email in and of itself has to be one of the greatest examples yet of why I truly despise Harley owners and their ilk.  -Black Echo

“fucking nigger. i got news for you pal.”

Ah! I have some news as well, you ignorant, bald headed, Nazi flag waving, militia joining, mud people hating, swastika tattooed, uneducated Aryan reject. I am not black nor am I of African descent, rather, I’m more of what you would call a bright white in color; a highly intelligent and well educated, yet elegant mixture of Russian nobility and German bourgeoisie with just a hint of Gypsy thrown in for a dash of spice along the way. As a formally educated human being, I find your detestable racist attitude as intellectually disturbing as it is socially unbecoming, especially since you are displaying it in such a naïve yet proud manner here at the dawn of the 21st century. Your attitude is very similar to your choice in motorcycles in that both are a product of the early part of the previous century (when the world was a whole lot more ignorant) and that neither really have a place at all in these contemporary, forward looking times.

I sincerely apologize if the “black” in my handle thoroughly confused you as it is used as a noun, not an adjective. My handle / call sign is composed of two simple nouns, a color and an event, and should not be taken in any way to represent my physical description. Only a totally uneducated moron would ASS-ume that because my online handle was “Black Echo” that my skin color must therefore be black and only an even bigger moron than that would begin an email under said assumption while trying to use a tired old racial slur as well.

Hell, if you weren’t a Harley owner, I might take personal offense at your languid presence in the collective gene pool. However, since you are a Harley owner then I can easily understand why you act like you do. After all, you’re obviously the misshapen end product of a drunken, one night stand between your mono-brow sporting, overall wearing, moonshine guzzling step-brother and your no panties worn ever, bow-legged, buck tooth, tobacco dipping, bury-me-in-a-Y-shaped-coffin, tangle-eyed sister so I can fully understand that you got your racist heritage honest. It’s called poor quality DNA, the high speed head-on collision of two cheap white trash blood lines in a genetic train wreck of full-up drunken ugliness. After reading your insipid email, I’m more than convinced that “DNA” in your case obviously stands for “Dumb, Negro-hating Ass-pansy.”

“i think it is funny how you, so seemingly eloquently try to degrade the idea and the mindset of harley davidson motorcycles.”

It is my philosophy that if the mindset fits then you should wear it. As for ideas, well … I really don’t think that Harley Davidson, its dimwitted leaders or its weak minded followers have had an original idea in several decades now. At least not from what I and the rest of the world can tell.

“lemme ask you something jack. are you a motorcycle technician.”

No, but I rebuilt a lawnmower engine once when I was thirteen years old and it ran for about three and a half years until it gave up the ghost again for good. Having done that way back in 1982, I think my mechanical skills at that time were at least on par with yours today, probably a little better truth be known, and I’ve only gotten smarter since.

“do you have the first inclination of how motorcycles are built or how they developed.”

The reason why I so easily and solemnly choose to ride import motorcycles is because I do understand how motorcycles are built as well as how they have developed over the years (or in the case of Harley Davidson, how they have not developed over the years). Maybe you should be asking Willie G. this question instead. My thoughts on the matter are that while he won’t give you an honest answer you deserve, he’ll certainly give you the answer that you’re looking for.

“according to you harley is nothing more than smoke and mirrors and lots of chrome.”

No.

“Smoke and mirrors” describes Harley Davidson’s marketing practices, it does not describe the makeup or the core operation of the company itself. Harley Davidson used to be a motorcycle manufacturer, a real motorcycle manufacturer, but that ended several decades ago (sometime around the time that the imports first appeared and sent Harley running for the hills with their tail tucked between their legs). Now HD comes off as a high end, flashy lifestyle provider, a poser fashion empire firmly ensconced in the indolent realm of pop culture, catering to the money rich and the mind poor. However, looks are deceiving and if you look deeper, you will discover that HD isn’t so much a business company as it has a religious cult practiced in trailer parks across this great nation.

Harley Davidson’s officially licensed and endorsed clothing is like “Garanimals,” only it’s designed and marketed to poor white trash (or those who just want to dress like poor white trash and spend a lot of money while they are doing so). Harley Davidson markets its products to people who feel the very real need to anoint their selves in the vestal raiment of their chosen pagan religion. The most humorous aspect of this arrangement is that you sheep are so eager and willing to submit your selves to being enslaved by the magic spells of the hillbilly sorcerers in Milwaukee that you’ll gladly donate your time, your lives, the names of your children and even whole areas of the surface of your body just so you can act as mindless, mantra chanting, walking living billboards for a company that actually charges you to advertise its product!

What an arrangement that must be!

“my bike performs quite well, the number one reason why is because of its simplicity.”

So does my Briggs and Stratton powered push lawn mower, for the very same reason. However, unlike you, I don’t worship it or base my entire life around owning it.

“fuck eric buell by the way.”

Fuck Eric Buell?

Why stop there? How about fuck forward thinking! Fuck research and design! Fuck high technology! Fuck contemporary design! Fuck change! Fuck advancement! Fuck imagination! Fuck performance! Fuck competition! Fuck actually having to put your money where your mouth is! Fuck everything that changed in the motorcycle world since the Knucklehead! Hell, fuck the world! Just fuck it all!

Ned Ludd would be so very proud of you. He really would.

“his bikes are ugly and if you paid attention they are powered by none other than harley davidson motors.”

Ah, good! I’m afraid that you’ve totally misunderstood everything that I have ever said, if indeed you ever did read any of my work at all but then that is to be expected from someone who has a brain the size of an atrophied squirrel testicle. For your information and to catch you up on the current debate, my main argument with Eric Buell is that his bikes are powered by none other than those ridiculously underwhelming Harley Davidson engines.

The reason I admire Eric Buell is because he isn’t afraid to go against the norm, to challenge the status quo of the trailer park and to think outside the double-wide. Yep, ole Eric really shook up those hillbillies in Milwaukee when his American sport bikes first went into production and hit the market. I bet half of them were suffering from complete brain lock and the other half were wanting to burn him at the stake for heresy. The confusion was as great as it was comical, Harley owners were suddenly faced with a (gasp!) sport bike with a Harley engine and they didn’t know if they should wave or not, if it was an official Harley or not. The schism in the belief system was immense and caused ripples throughout the flock that are still being felt today (hence your attitude). I like Eric Buell because he’s doing what I want to see someone do; build an American sport bike. The reason why I chastise Eric Buell is because when it comes to choosing engines for his advanced designs, he has chosen very poorly indeed. Putting that tired old Sportster engine in one of his cutting edge frames is like putting a trawling motor in a speed boat.

Maybe one day Mr. Buell will realize the critical mistake in all of his beautiful designs, I mean, after all, the rest of the world knew immediately what the main problem was with his bikes when Buell first introduced them all those many years ago now. There is an old adage in design and engineering, it states “garbage in, garbage out.” It’s too bad that Eric Buell didn’t learn this lesson earlier.

Buell: Beautiful contemporary designs, shitty outdated motors.

“now i am not writing this to beseach (sp) your likings or desires in what a motorcycle offers. i dont give a shit. but obviously you do so ill give you some pointers. me being a factory hd technician and all.”

Wow.

Not only are you an uneducated, ignorant racist with the intellectual prowess of a stale Pop-Tart and a command of the English language bordering on the same level as a mentally retarded NASCAR fan, but you also go and claim to be a “factory HD technician” as well?! Oh, I am laughing at you now! You do realize, of course, that claiming to be a “factory HD technician” is not saying very much if its saying anything at all. Indeed, given the overall build quality of the typical Milwaukee finished product, anyone who actually buys a Harley Davidson (and expects to ride it for any length of time) is going to have to, by default, become a “factory HD technician” in very short order (just to be able to work on their bike when it breaks down and leaves them stranded in an overgrown cornfield in Bumfuck, Iowa).

I oh so sincerely hope that you don’t go around telling anyone outside that trailer park closed microcosm where you live that you’re a “factory HD technician” because the educated people will laugh at you and hurt your feelings in unkind ways with their poignant, scathing comments. If you’re really, really lucky, maybe they’ll just take pity on your stupid and ignorant ass while deigning to drop some spare change in your raggedy old HD cap as they pass you on the sidewalk. With any luck, by the end of the day, you may have earned just enough money through their heart-felt pity to buy you something warm to eat, a bottle of cheap booze and perhaps a new pack of smokes.

Ah!  Being a “factory HD technician” is two steps below obtaining a GED in regards to total educational advancement. I would be more proud of you if you told me that you were seventeen years old and had just completed the fifth grade after just two tries than if you told me you were a “factory HD technician.” Congratulations on becoming a “factory HD technician.” I mean, it’s rather obvious from your email that you didn’t have the brains or mental capacity to ever work on something as technologically advanced as any of the latest designs of world class engines from the big four import companies so I understand if you had to cut your dreams a little short and settle for what you could get. Let’s face it, when it comes to the brain trust it’s easy to see that you got short changed if not outright gypped.

However, given your apparent lack of education, your abuse of punctuation and your atrocious misuse of grammar and spelling, I find it hard to believe that you’re certified in anything other than pure stupidity and your email goes far in proving this fact. Now, if you are smart enough to be a “factory HD technician” but you aren’t smart enough to pass elementary school English and grammar, then that tells me a lot about what it takes, brain-wise, to be a “factory HD technician” which, apparently, isn’t very much.

Lets be brutally honest here; “factory HD technician” isn’t a profession, it’s an oxymoron.

“honda was the first jap bike introduced on american soil. they were started by harley davidson with american money, betcha didnt know that did you.”

No, you tiny minded, knee walking cock nogger, Honda was not started by Harley Davidson (nor was any money borrowed from Harley Davidson to be used by Honda to start a subsidiary here on American soil). Honda was doing quite well in Japan and I seriously doubt it needed to borrow any money from Harley Davidson in order to buy or rent a start up building here in America, especially the small building that Honda started out in to begin with. Why would Harley Davidson lend money to a rival or a competitor and help them get started here on American soil when at the time HD was itself facing stiff competition from the likes of Triumph? Honda has, in a few short decades, done what Harley Davidson could not which is start from a humble beginning and rise, through hard work and effort, to the number one position in this country.

The Honda Motor Company was started in Japan by Sochiro Honda, a man of some noted brilliance and a man far smarter than anyone who can claim to be direct descendents of either the Davidson or Harley bloodlines, to be sure. Mr. Honda was known to be quite a colorful man in character and clothing, insisting that nonconformity was essential to an artist or innovator (non-conformity, remember, is something that HD preaches as one of their selling points but somehow just never seems to practice).

Sochiro Honda started the Honda Technical Research Institute (HTRI) in 1945 and just two short years later, the HTRI became the Honda Motor Company. Here is an excerpt from a short piece on his life:

“He was extremely proud of his plant's industrial relations which, he claimed, worked as a 'meritocracy'. The prosperity of his company was 'based on trust of youth and the promotion of creative people'. These high ideals aside, he was known to visit the shop floor with spanner in hand for a noisy tirade on poor performance or shoddy workmanship. The tirade would often end with a well aimed throw!”

Sochiro opened the American Honda Motor Company in 1959 in Los Angeles, California. It was established as a subsidiary of the Honda Motor Company of Japan (in no way at all affiliated with Harley Davidson). It was not started by Harley Davidson nor did Harley Davidson loan Honda one red cent to start up its American business. The first American Honda dealership was a small shop with just six employees located in Los Angeles, California but that tiny shop would grow into a branch of the Honda Motor Company and would soon be the largest manufacturer and seller of motorcycles in America by the end of the century, beating out Harley Davidson on its own turf.

Sochiro Honda personally tested his company’s various models until he was 65 years old. Mr. Honda, like his peer, Ferry Porsche, barred family members from occupying senior positions (something unknown in Milwaukee, which apparently firmly believes in nepotism). In short, the Honda Motor Company was not started by Harley Davidson… it was started by an extremely hard working Japanese man who had far more character, imagination, education and ingenuity than has ever graced the likes of Harley Davidson in its entire lackluster history.

“the harley davidson motor is not meant to produce high rpm.”

No, the Harley Davidson “motor” was originally intended to drain farm ponds and rural wetlands in order to allow farmers to have more land to farm on and to be able to raise cattle and sheep. Running at peak operating speed, the HD “motor” could probably move about a hundred gallons of liquid per hour, through a large rubber hose from one point to another (and it worked a lot better if you had one end of the hose running down hill).

Now one day, shortly after the turn of the 20th century, a couple of barefoot, moonshine guzzling, straw hat wearing, hayseed chewing rednecks finished draining a pond for their uncle and found a rusty old bicycle at the bottom of the mud. Well, these two amateurs got a wild hair up their bowlegged asses to mount that old irrigation pump to the rusty old bicycle and see if they could make it go. Their collective brain trust barely managed to allow them to screw / nail / tie / weld that old irrigation pump to the beat up old rusty bicycle frame then they threw on a leather belt, a drive sprocket and started it running. Quickly mastering the intricate basics of both hanging on for dear life and using the heels of their hairy bare feet dragging along the ground to slow them down, the two would-be entrepreneurs then proceeded to go for a drunken, sputtering joy ride through the pasture (and in the process scared the ever living crap out of the herd of bovines grazing peacefully there). I think that was not only the first Harley Davidson “motorcycle” ever produced, but also the first off-road rally sponsored by what would (unfortunately) soon come to be known as The Motor Company.

No. Irrigation pumps, industrial paint shakers and riding lawn mower engines don’t really need to generate a lot of horsepower or need to operate at high RPMs to effectively do their job, but then you, as a proud, certified, self proclaimed small engine and lawn mower repairman, excuse me, a “factory HD technician,” should already have known that.

“it is not a high horsepower motorcycle the way it is built delivers 100% of what its buyers expect.”

Considering that your average Harley Davidson doesn’t deliver a whole hell of a lot to begin with (which is why there is such a thriving aftermarket for these bikes, you have to rebuild them from the ground up once you buy them just to get any kind of performance out of them), then its buyers must have pretty low expectations of what you call a “motorcycle” if it is exactly what they expect. What do you really get for all of that money? Do you get cutting edge technology? No. Do you get contemporary designs? No. Do you get special alloys and materials? No. You get a name and you pay dearly for that name. What you don’t pay for in name, you get in noise and vibration and you get plenty of both of those commodities.

HD buyers expect noise and a lot of flash to go with that noise. They want to look the part without having to go through the motions of actually earning the image. What I find so amusing is that Harley Davidson specifically tunes their motors for sound, not power, because that is what the buyer wants (and the only thing that Harley can tune for). The Harley owner wants a specific, easily recognizable type of noise which they wrongfully equate with producing huge amounts of raw power. Sound is a byproduct of power whereas power is not a byproduct of sound. If you tune for power, sound will naturally follow, if you tune for sound, it does nothing for power (and may actually decrease power in the process).

Face it. As a “factory HD technician,” you of all people should know that a Harley doesn’t really have a throttle (mounted on the handle bars) so much as it has a volume control knob and that rednecks like you just love to roll that volume control knob up and down every chance you get, at every red light, every stop sign and every long street. “The louder the pipes, the badder the bike!” or so you all like to think. Oh, and we can’t forget that tough, authoritative, almost trademarked and almost copyrighted Harley sound that is laughingly said to be reminiscent of “potato-potato-potato.” That is, unless, of course, you get your outdated irrigation pump out of tune in which case it sounds more like “inbred-inbred-inbred.”

“just because it doesnt go 180 mph doesnt mean it is a shitty product. christ the first harley carbureter was a spent tomato can.”

Was it a spent tomato can? I had heard that their first carburetor was the battered old brass spittoon that had belonged to Mr. Harley’s mother and that she was righteously pissed that the two boys had taken it from her bedside without asking her permission. No, Harley Davidson is a shitty product because it is built using outdated technology yet it is sold to ignorant, fanatical zealots such as yourself for several times the price of contemporary, even cutting edge technology.

Harley Davidson is to motorcycles what cubic zirconia is to fine jewelry.

“it was a few american guys with an idea.”

It was two hillbillies rebuilding old bicycles in what amounted to a wooden outhouse with a lean-to tacked on because they needed the extra room to work. If they didn’t need the extra room to work, they figured they might could rent the extra space out as an early prototype for an efficiency apartment and make some money on the side to support their moonshine habit. Davidson and Harley were damn lucky that they didn’t burn the outhouse down while they were furtively trying to discover how to cast the arcane magic spells required to produce internal combustion. However, in a fit of rare drunken enlightenment, these two hayseeds slapped an old irrigation pump on a bicycle frame and made their first motorcycle. Not THE first motorcycle, mind you, but rather their first motorcycle and thus Harley Davidson and The Motor Company was born!

Yee-the-fuck-haw.

I tell you what, though! Orville and Wilbur Wright had nothing at all on Davidson and Harley as entrepreneurs! No, sir! Davidson and Harley were genuine pioneers in the advancement of redneck personal transportation technology! As amateur engineers, they were decades ahead of those silly Wright brothers!

Why, in hindsight, it is truly a-fucking-ah-mazing what Davidson and Harley had slapped together in their little wood shack over a century ago. Why, these two hillbillies had produced one of the most easily recognized and most popular status symbol icons for an entire subculture that didn’t even exist yet! Yes, when the first Harley Davidson motorcycle was produced all those many years ago, there were no double wide mobile homes and no trailer parks, let alone NASCAR, honky-tonks and line dancing! Talk about taking a leap of faith! Davidson and Harley had created a product for a market that wouldn’t appear for several more decades!

That’s probably why HD had such a slow start for the first five decades; they truly were ahead of their time!

“the same idea that holds true to this day.”

No, you’re wrong and I’m going to call you on this one. The original founders of Harley Davidson did not envision their young company becoming the pagan religion that it is today. Mr. Davidson and Mr. Harley are rolling over in their graves at the poser fashion empire that is what their once cherished company has now become. Yes, Big Daddy Davidson is wringing his fists in hell right now and cursing Willie Jr. and his twelve disciples for what they have done to a once proud, once promising motorcycle manufacturer.

The Harley Davidson of today may be financially successful as a business, but it is not financially successful because it builds motorcycles. Harley Davidson sells relatively few motorcycles compared to the other motorcycle companies. Hell, Harley is the number two retailer in the United States of America, its own country of origin. Who is the number one retailer of motorcycles in America? Honda. Honda is the number one motorcycle retailer in America and that’s got to hurt really bad, you know, to get your ass kicked on your own home turf… not once but twice in the same decade! Embarrassing, to say the least but then Harley has always demonstrated that it is a follower, never a leader.

Harley Davidson is successful not in the same way that Honda or Kawasaki is, rather it is successful in the same way that companies like Avon or Amway are. Honda and Kawasaki sell motorcycles, of all types, shapes and sizes. Harley Davidson sells only a few types of motorcycles and only a few models but it sells a whole lot of other, non-motorcycle related junk and trinkets with its name and logo on them. Harley Davidson does not sell motorcycles, they sell a lifestyle and all the accessories to go with that lifestyle. Harley Davidson sells a fantasy to people who don’t know the first thing about motorcycles (but who like to think that they do and loudly brag about it as well). Harley Davidson is successful not because every red blooded American male in the United States rides a Harley, but because every three tooth, knuckle dragging redneck in America wants to own one of their bikes and has the T-shirt, the tattoo and the bumper sticker on their beat up old pickup truck to prove it.

“through adversity and waning market spikes they sustained their status with new ideas and fresh technology.”

What are these new ideas and this fresh technology that you are talking about? If you’re referring to the introduction of the Evolution (hahahahaha) or the Twin Cam motors, or even the new Revolution motor, then I hate to tell you that the Japanese were not only building motors like that decades ago, but they were doing a better job back then than Harley is doing today. Harley hasn’t had a fresh mechanical idea in decades now. I personally don’t consider tweaking the same tired old motor or throwing a set of cams on top of it to qualify as a “new idea” or “fresh technology” any more than me putting a new aftermarket intake on my tired old L98 engine somehow magically moves it into the same category and league of engineering advancement as the LS1 engine.

When Harley Davidson needed to build a power cruiser to cater to the younger market segments and to stave off their impending second doom, they had to get the Germans to build the engine because the Harley designed V-twin is an absolute mechanical joke that I wouldn’t trust to power a riding lawnmower let alone carry me from one end of this great country to the other. The Revolution engine is a laugh in and of itself. While Suzuki is producing the GSX-R1000 based on 20 years of winning, Harley is the only company in the world that would introduce a new model, make it their top of the line power horse and base it on nearly a decade of consistent losing. That’s the difference between Harley and other motorcycle manufacturers. Other manufacturers know what they are doing, Harley does not. Other manufacturers learn from their mistakes, Harley has not, does not and will not, ever.

Harley does the bare minimum to get buy, sorry, to get by. Like the popular (and all too true) T-shirt says, “if they (Harley Davidson) had more engineers than lawyers, they would be able to build a better bike.” You don’t know how true that is but then when you’re busy pimping your logo on everything under the sun from Barbie dolls to bags of coffee, I guess you really don’t have much time to give a lot of effort to the little things like research and development.

Now, if you are perhaps talking about the new VRSC V-Rod in regards to fresh technology, then I have to be the bearer of bad news for you. The V-Rod is a German engine in an American frame, so it is essentially import powered (causing a great amount of consternation among The Faithful). The V-Rod is a double edged sword of Damocles for Harley Davidson in that it shows that the company is starting to think about its future and is beginning to realize that its current line of gold painted turds isn’t going to sell much past the end of the Baby Boomer generation. The introduction of the V-Rod (or the “water hog” as it is referred to by its owners) also proves my belief that Harley simply cannot change, ever. They cannot adapt, they cannot learn and they cannot build anything other than what they have built all along. If they could, they would, and they wouldn’t be selling Barbie dolls and cigarettes in order to keep them afloat financially. Harley had a chance to come back from the dead once, they took the chance that they had been given and built a house of straw out of it. When the big bad wolf of entropy finally comes along and notices them, again, it’s going to be all over except for the crying.

The V-Rod is concrete proof that Harley has painted itself (once again) into a corner and is screaming (once again) for help because (once again) they lacked the forward thinking and vision that other motorcycle manufacturers have had all along. I would respect the V-Rod a lot more if it was all Harley because that would at least be a hint that Harley Davidson has realized the error of its ways and was trying to do something contemporary but when I discovered that it was a German engine, I had to laugh. Who does Harley think they are fooling? Harley simply does not know how to produce a motorcycle nor do they know how to run a motorcycle company. Harley is not proactive in their business thought and strategy, they are reactive and defensive, slow to change because they are not only in unknown territory (technology and engineering wise) but also because they are scared that the fragile yet highly lucrative marketing bubble that they have created may burst and collapse. Harley’s management style almost led to their demise once before (and may do so again in the years to come). Harley is far more concerned with their laughable heritage, with their make-believe image and with their silly copyrights than with actually making motorcycles or improving their designs and the breed.

Now, when you talk about HD having fresh ideas, I will take it that you mean fresh ideas like:

“Hey, Skeeter! Let’s call up that there Mattel toy cumpahknee and see if they can produces for us a big old line of Harley Davidson edition Ken and Barbie dolls. Let’s make Barbie be bowlegged and come with a bottle of shine and Ken will have a five-o-clock shadow and a Skoal ring in the back pocket of his jeans. I also gots me an idea for a double-wide playset to go with it.”

Or …

“How abouts we done goes and calls up them there Ford folkses and tells them that they gots to produce us a Harley Davidson pickup truck so that thuh owners of our bikes won’t be so damn-blasted embarrassed to haul their tore-assed-up bikes around when they done go and break down on them.”

Or the ever popular meeting breaker followed closely thereafter by a motion to adjourn …

“Hey, Bubba! I’ll trade you a jug of shine and a twenty foot CB antenna for some Polaroids of your sister in the shower if you got them. Oooo weeee! I swear to Gawd she’s hotter than two field mice fucking in a burlap tater sack on a Summer night!”

Yeah, I can see those types of ideas being thrown around a boredroom, sorry, a boardroom in Milwaukee and undergoing some serious in-depth discussion. After all, you’re talking about a group of backwoods hillbillies who were probably genuinely confused as hell the first time someone took away their old corn cobs and gave them a roll of toilet tissue to use instead.

“when norton, bsa, and indian were putting out the same technology they had used for twenty years harley was moving forward.”

You mean, of course, that Harley Davidson was moving forward into oblivion and doing so at an ever faster downwards spiral thanks to poor management and laughable business strategies (does the name “Holiday Rambler” ring a bell with you or are you too young to remember that managerial debacle?). I will admit to having a certain professional respect for Harley Davidson up until about the end of the 1950’s. After that, The Motor Company spent the next three decades of its existence becoming a manufacturing joke and then they spent the last two decades of their first century in business refining that joke into a fashion and designer apparel empire that really had nothing at all to do with their motorcycles or the humble, beginnings of Harley Davidson.

If you want to read a real success story, if you want to read about a man with a dream, a man who built that dream into a world class company that produces incredible motorcycles of all kinds, power equipment, generators, lawn mowers, high performance world class sports cars and even highly sophisticated bipedal anthropomorphic robots, then I suggest that you read about Sochiro Honda and how he came to found and manage the Honda Motor Company. After all, the only robots that Milwaukee produces are the non-volitional hickabilly automatons that make up its languid customer base.

Now, as for those other companies putting out the same old technology for twenty years in a row, what the hell do you think that Harley Davidson has been doing for the past two decades? Has anything really, and I mean really drastically changed at HD since Willie G. and his twelve disciples took the company over? No. Harley Davidson has been doing the very thing you claim that the other companies were doing, long after most of them are gone. I guess that proves that Harley Davidson is a follower and not a leader.

“the first sport bike appeared on the scene in 1958 when the sportster was born. nothing could touch that bike in its time.”

The Sportster did indeed have a time in the spotlight, but it was a very short time. The Sportster rapidly lost its market position to lighter, faster, less expensive import bikes from Japan and Britain and today the Sportster is relegated to being known as the cheapest, entry level purchase into the Harley lifestyle. Many of your own misguided brethren even scoff and ridicule Sportster owners, telling them to get a “real” Harley, i.e. a more expensive, larger Harley than the little “clown” or “kiddy” Harley that the Sportster is all too often known as among your rank and file. The Sportster never was a sport bike, it was a hot rod, at best. There is a difference. It was a big motor in a light frame and it never had, currently does not, and never will have the suspension or brakes to match its (comical) power output. The Buell with the Sportster engine is a sport bike, the Sportster is not a sport bike. The Buell is what the Sportster should be today, if Harley, like the rest of the world, had allowed the Sportster to evolve.

The problem with the Sportster, both at the time of its introduction and even today, nearly five decades later, is the same problem that plagues Harley Davidson; stagnation. The Sportster is like most of Harley’s product line, a good idea a long time ago, but the rest of the world has left the concept far behind and refined it in the process. An excess of power and a shortage of weight is one of the primary recipes for performance known to man, Harley didn’t invent this concept, they merely used this principle for one of their models of bikes and the bike was a success, in its own right. However, nothing changed after that which is the primary problem with the Sportster. For decades now the Sportster had remained virtually unchanged while other companies have used the same principle, refined it, and are currently taking it to its most logical, physical and technological limits.

Are modern sport bikes descendents of the 1958 Sportster?

No. The concept of the Sportster goes even further back than Harley’s 1958 example, all the way back to the hot rods of the late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s. The concept is not unique specifically to the Harley line of products. Harley Davidson took the concept for the Sportster from early hot rodders so it wasn’t that original of an idea and Harley certainly didn’t invent the concept of putting a big engine into a light frame. What is sad is that it took Harley Davidson all the way until 1958 to produce this combination, whereas the rest of the world was running around using this particular concept for decades before Milwaukee. Sorry to let you down with that bit of reality there.

Today, the stock Sportster is pretty much a joke with even the biggest cubed, largest motored examples barely breaking into the 12s in the quarter mile (and doing so with a lot of huffing, wheezing, vibration and with the help of a good tail wind to boot). Twelve second quarter miles might have been impressive, five decades ago, but today that kind of performance is laughable to say the least in something you think belongs in the “sport bike” category of motorcycles, a group whose smallest members (the 600cc class) is running mid ten second quarter miles while the open class and full liter bikes (still smaller than the 88cid Harley V-twin) are hovering around the ultra-low 10s / high 9s stock. Sure you can throw parts at the Sportster to get them to go faster but you practically have to rebuild the entire bike in the process and you can easily double the cost of the bike while doing so. That’s not good.

Stagnation, on a number of levels, is what has relegated the Sportster to its lowly position today. Stagnation is the fact that Harley either didn’t understand the full concept of the Sportster (thereby they did nothing with it to refine the idea over the five decades since its introduction), they didn’t care, or they were simply unable to be creative enough to increase the performance (more power, better handling, better brakes, lighter weight). I believe the latter is true, Harley simply cannot produce a contemporary motorcycle design because they aren’t smart enough to do so. If they were, they would have done so and remained both competitive and contemporary. Their failure to produce anything that can be considered “world class” or “contemporary” is not only telling, it’s nigh on unforgivable. It’s a sad day for this country when the world’s last superpower produces a national motorcycle built to third world technology.

Let’s look at things from a mechanical perspective, shall we? While there is a big difference in the evolution of design and the forward march of high technology between a 1984 Honda VF500F Interceptor, a 1994 Honda CBR600F2 and a 2004 Honda CBR600F4i, there is almost no difference at all between a 1984 Sportster, a 1994 Sportster and a 2004 Sportster. That’s two decades of refinement and advancement for the Honda sport bike creating a better, lighter, more powerful, faster, more competitive machine and twenty years of stagnation for the Harley Sportster where they did little or nothing. Please don’t try to use the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” routine. The Sportster was broke a long time ago. Harley’s response is more properly stated as “if it’s broke, we don’t know how to fix it.”

In two decades, Honda’s sport bikes have lost significant weight, improved their handling and doubled their power (57hp in 1984 to 115hp in 2005). I don’t see that kind of evolution with the Sportster which still has, if it’s lucky, the amount of horsepower that the 1984 VF500F Interceptor was producing way back then and the Sportster doesn’t even handle as well as that 20 year old example of a sport bike.

Stagnation: think of it as the mechanical equivalent of inbreeding.

“i am sure that you probably ride a crotch rocket rice burner of some kind and that is fine and dandy.”

Yes, I ride an import motorcycle, a sport bike; the 2004 Honda CBR600RR. I guess you could call it a “crotch rocket” but I prefer to think of it as more of an exotic. Owning the double R is like driving a Ferrari GTO in a world full of 1977 Ford Pintos. The CBR is an example of cutting edge high technology, it is composed of advanced materials and precision craftsmanship applied using science built upon decades of experience (I’m afraid that when it comes to high tech alloys, the only titanium you will find on a Harley is in the surgical pin used in the hip replacement of its geriatric rider). Your use of the derogatory and insulting term “rice burner” clearly shows that my ownership of an import is anything but fine and dandy with you and that you look down on anyone not riding a bike just like yours.

Here’s a little bit of simple, real world science for you and the other ignorant hayseeds like you… Japanese bikes do not burn rice. Instead, they burn premium gasoline, in the 92 or 93 high octane flavor. My sport bike is considered one of the high end examples of what is offered by Japan’s Big Four motorcycle manufacturers. The CBR600RR is powered by a compact, ultra-high compression, light weight, close tolerance, high performance, computer controlled, electronically fuel injected engine that is one of the most advanced engines on the planet. This engine produces 115 crank horsepower from just thirty-six cubic inches (which is more than twice what you make out of eighty-eight cubic inches). Can you honestly claim that your Harley or its engine is built using modern designs or that any part of the bike that you ride is cutting edge? No, you cannot. Therefore, calling my motorcycle a “rice burner” is like me saying that your Harley is powered by moonshine and barefoot banjo music.

“more power to you but that bike began as a harley.”

Oh my sweet tap dancing Arlen Ness in a little pink tutu trimmed with white lace!

What the hell is your major malfunction?! I swear I don’t know what highly illegal, basement lab brewed, amateur mixed, ad hoc pharmaceutical of choice that you are rampantly abusing but it can’t be very good for you in the massive quantity that you are partaking or the schedule of use that you are seeking to maintain when doing so. I suggest that you seek professional therapy post haste, sir, because, contrary to your own special form of mental retardation, my bike did not begin life as a Harley. My bike was born from a heritage of championship racing and a long lineage of winning, two ideals that Harley Davidson is totally unfamiliar with.

Yes, Harley may have, a long time ago, put a relatively big motor into a relatively light frame and sold it as a regular production model but the point is, they did nothing (NOTHING!!!) with it after that and it wasn’t really their idea to begin with. Harley Davidson, merely took a tried and true concept already in use by hot rodders and they applied it to a regular production model of their motorcycle line.

Saying that any modern sport bike is a direct descendent of the 1958 Sportster not only shows your rampant arrogance but also your unforgivable ignorance. Professionally speaking, I would say that the 2004 Honda CBR600RR has about as much in common, lineage and heritage-wise, with the 1958 Harley Davidson Sportster as a cheetah has with a donkey.

“the technolgy in your motorcycle as well as in your car and other areas is all a direct result of a fundemental idea.”

I'm sorry.  If Milwaukee has anything that can be referred to as fundamental in nature, then it’s probably more properly spelled with a “duh” after the “n” as in “fun-DUH-mental.” No, the technology in my car and my bike are not new, but they are highly refined from their original concepts. Both of my cars and my motorcycle rely on engines that make power through the principle of internal combustion; the mechanical operation of pistons, valves, cams, the mixing of fuel and air into a cylinder and the introduction of a high voltage spark to ignite that mixture in order to produce power. My car has a supercharger mounted to the engine, from the factory, and superchargers are at least as old as World War 2 and probably, if memory serves me right, existed even before that! Both my car and my bike are fuel injected and while their fuel injection is computer controlled, fuel injection has also been around since the advent of the internal combustion engine. Hell, German fighter planes were using mechanical fuel injection in World War II and the Corvette used Rochester mechanical fuel injection in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s.

No, my cars and my sport bike use tried and well established, well tested technology, but the point is that this technology has been refined, over many decades of research and development, of testing, of trial and error, of competing and winning against similar technology, of finding what worked and what didn’t work. My cars and my sport bike are modern examples of the continuing refinement of traditional ideas. Now, if my bike sported a pulse wave modulated anti-gravity lift system and was powered by a pocket size fast propagator anti-matter reactor, yeah, I’d say that the technology was “new” but my bike isn’t powered by such fanciful technology. No, the technology of my bike (and my cars) is not new. However, the technology behind the construction and performance of my bike is very highly advanced, not new, but refined and advanced to levels that Milwaukee simply cannot understand nor can they reproduce this technology in their current state of development.

Next you ignorance cursed hillbillies will be trying to convince me that Harley Davidson holds the patent on internal combustion or has trademarked the concept of rubbing two sticks together to produce fire (an analogy not at all out of place in describing the internal workings of their engines). I wouldn’t be surprised if they did try to copyright the act of internal combustion, after all they once tried to trademark the sound of their engines. Hell, if they could, they’d copyright leather and chrome as well. It’s too bad you can’t copyright ignorance because Harley would not only be one of the world’s leading suppliers of this commodity but also one of the world’s leading consumers as well.

“how dare you deface the ideals that harley stands for.”

What the hell do you care? You don’t even have enough respect to capitalize the “A” in “American,” the “C” in “Christ” or the “H” and “D” in “Harley Davidson” and don’t tell me that it doesn’t matter because it’s email or the Internet. If your computer is anything like the bike you so fervently pledge your allegiance to, I could understand if perhaps your SHIFT key is broken however I’m more inclined to blame it on your ignorance and your rather telling lack of even an elementary education. Hell, as a Harley owner, you’re lucky if you can recite your ABCs in order without a note or two from a banjo or a harmonica to get you started.

“it is an american icon.”

No. Harley Davidson is an American embarrassment and a pop culture icon.   In their pitiful effort to survive, they have become that which they stood so strongly against, in other words, they sold out.   The kind of gullible fools who support and reward Harley Davidson would make a Special Ed class look like the top honors carrying graduating lineup at Harvard. Case in point; you.

“harley riders buy their bikes because they love them”

Simple pleasures for simple minds.

Many years ago, J. Gullato shared with me, via email, one of the most succinct insights, regarding the whole retarded Harley Davidson mindset, that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Mr. Gullato said “sure, if you asked nine out of ten people what kind of bike they would want they would say Harley Davidson but then nine out of ten people don’t know shit about motorcycles.” That, I think, is the crux of the whole problem. The people who buy Harley Davidson aren’t thinking on their own, instead they’re letting Milwaukee do the thinking for them.  I believe that it would be far more truthful to say that “Harley riders buy their bikes because they’re gullible fools who don’t know shit about motorcycles.”

“not to be a badass though many of us are, and, that being said, i would like to meet you sir just to slap the taste out of you mouth.”

Ah, good! I was wondering when the totally make-believe “I’m a tough guy (and / because) I ride a Harley” thought process would appear in your argument. Let’s get something perfectly straight to start off with; you’re not a bad ass. If this particular email of yours proves anything at all to anyone, it’s that you’re a complete and utter dumb ass (not a bad ass). I find it laughable that you somehow (erroneously) think that you’ve magically transmogrified into a real biker (and / or) bad ass just because you (own / ride) a Harley Davidson. Please excuse me if I laugh out loud in your hillbilly face.

If you were a real bad ass, then you wouldn’t be riding an overweight, underpowered, outdated motorcycle like a Harley. No, instead you’d be riding something super serious like a Gixxer, or a CBR or a Ninja or a Hiyabusa. You’d be riding something with some guts that also took skill and intelligence to work on both the street and the strip / track. Bad asses don’t ride pop culture icons and redneck mopeds.

You aren’t as bad as you think you are, in fact, you’re no where near as bad as you (want / pretend) to be. Riding a Harley and saying you’re a bad ass is like taking a $60,000 RV camping at a KOA site and then telling everyone that you’re going to be “roughing it” in the wild. For all of your put on bravado, when the rubber meets the road, the truth is that fifty-seven horsepower and five thousand RPM seems to be about the limit for upstart malcontents like you. Face the facts, you ride a Harley because you can’t ride a sport bike, you don’t have the reflexes or skill or the intelligence to handle something like a sport bike, you don’t have what it takes to control that kind of power or understand that level of technology. Oh, you can talk about all of the mighty power that your Harleys make and how tough they are but when you look at what you ride, both mechanically and technologically, you ride some of the weakest production motorcycles in the world.

As for your comically inept threats, well, let’s just say that I’m really not surprised that you would want to physically harm me because my opinion differs from yours. After all, since people like you live in a very fragile, very closed minded world of constructed from whole cloth make believe I can fully understand why you would want to lash out at anything which seeks to shatter the artificial perception of your life and your world. I’ve long said that Harley owners don’t live in the real world, at least not the world that the rest of us live in. I can understand why you would want to physically hurt anyone who proves time and time again just what a bunch of loser, no-life posers you and your kind are. I can understand your deep frustration when someone comes along and repeatedly points out just how ridiculous your lives have become. The famous author Isaac Asimov once said it best when he explained that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” and Harley owners prove him right each and every time.

The difference between you and me is that people like you have to brag, incessantly, of your choice in motorcycles, of your loyalty to a false religion, and of your physical and martial prowess whereas I do not. Who I am and what I am are not defined by what motorcycle I ride nor do I swear allegiance to the company that makes my motorcycle. Your bike and your image are your life, they are the core aspects of your personality, a personality that was so devoid of substance to begin with that it took the introduction of a big flashy motorcycle and a make-believe lifestyle to make you a complete person, to make you who you are today. Your life is a lie because your Harley and the pretend lifestyle which goes with it defines you. I have no wonder why you and your kind are so defensive and quick to react to any one who threatens who and what you have become. Without your bike, you are nothing. Without the pre-packaged image and lifestyle that you subscribe to, you are both mundane and superfluous, a skin tag on the ass of humanity.

Oh, I never grow weary of you hillbillies and your amusing threats of violence because, like I have stated, your threats define you and your kind. Your threats wonderfully illustrate your narrow mind and your limited ability to reason rationally or think logically. Another important difference between you and me is that never once in any of my replies, whether private or public, have I in turn wished violence upon any Harley rider nor have I ever threatened a Harley owner.

Why?

I don’t threaten you or your kind because I don’t have to. I don’t have to prove that I’m a bad ass to you or to anyone else because what you think of me is not important to me. Those who know me know what I can do and they trust me with their lives. That’s a powerful form of trust and it says volumes for my character, my capabilities and my prowess. Curiously, I have found (in my half decade of service as a police officer and as a member of my department’s SWAT entry team) that it is the very people who brag the most about how bad they are that are the first ones to hit the floor when the sugar turns to shit. Remember: those who can do it don’t brag about it because they don’t have to brag about it. My own personal philosophy is to walk softly and carry a big stick.

Oh, I’m afraid that your little show of raw physical strength has been wasted as this is not a contest of strength, rather it is a battle of ideas and you are sadly ill equipped for even a light skirmish in this particular arena. When it comes to discussing ideas and concepts, to debating change, a Harley owner is the kind of inwrought Philistine who would take a baseball bat to a voting booth. If this were just a contest of strength, then it would be based upon the performance of our bikes, not the physical strength of the riders who own them. If this were a contest of strength, based on performance, even my lowly 600cc would whip anything that Harley produces (including the ridiculous cross-bred V-Rod).

Save your silly, store bought, make believe poser persona for the buck tooth, bowlegged, tread bare, high mileage, tassel crotch skanks at your next group ride. They might quiver and dampen the seat on your Harley when you start spinning your lame talk but as for me, I’m not impressed by your kind. Never have been, never will be.

“we ride out motorcycles for the feeling that we get on the back of those things. they have crazy low end torque and even though they dont slolom, or rev to 15k rpms, or pull fucking wheelies out of the shop they do what they are supposed to do, and that is the bottom line.”

Perhaps you ride your motorcycles the way that you do because you can’t ride your motorcycles in any other way, even if you tried. Now, let’s think about this logically ...  I know I am asking a lot of you to put into service the few brain cells required to reason it out but I think you’ll learn something here so work with me. The reason why your motorcycles don’t slalom, or rev to fifteen grand or pull wheelies out of the shop is the simple reason that your motorcycles can’t do any of those things.

A wheelie on a Harley?

Yeah, if the laws of physics and gravity were repealed, sure, you might be able to get the front tire a few inches up off the ground. The problem with any Harley is that you have an excess of weight and a shortage of power, a problem which occurs as a byproduct of the outdated design in every model that Milwaukee produces. My bike can do wheelies (if I so choose to do them which I don’t) because I have a much higher power to weight ratio than you do. Please don’t think that stunts like wheelies and stoppies are the sign of a skilled rider, anyone can do those with a little bit of practice. As a rider with twenty-five years of experience both on and off the road in everything from two to four wheelers I have to state that stunts and those who do them on public streets don’t impress me. Of course, when it comes to wheelies, it certainly helps that I’m probably lighter than you as well. When it comes to doing stunts, some of it is bike and some of it is rider and as such, I think even a 170hp Suzuki GSX-R1000 would be huffing and grunting like the dickens to try to put some daylight between the road and the front tire with your fat hillbilly ass lodged in the saddle.

A Harley on the slalom? Right… Putting a Harley on a road course with anything other than straight line between two points, is probably the very definition of masochistic (if not suicidal). Wringing what little horsepower that you can out of that irrigation pump you call a “motorcycle engine” is part hillbilly black magic sorcery and part pure doggone luck. There’s no science to it, and there hasn’t been any science to it for about five decades now.

Rev your irrigation pump to fifteen grand? Not likely. Maybe if you had three Harleys in a row, revving to redline and you added up the RPMs between them you might get a total of fifteen grand but you’d have to count fast before the parts started flying. Hell, I’ve seen Cummins Turbo Diesel engines in Dodge trucks with higher rev limits than most Harleys can see and as for having crazy low end torque, well, if I were trying to get six hundred pounds of junk moving, you had better believe that I would want all the crazy low end torque that I could get coming my way. The problem is, a Harley Davidson engine isn’t the best design in the world and even though you are producing some appreciable amount of torque, you’re still doing it in a piss poor fashion.

“i would like to see you go to a bike rally and talk the shit that you talk on your pussy fucking website.”

As for talking to Harley owners the way I do on this site, yeah, I’m known for that too. You see, most Harley owners are thin skinned facades. It’s been my personal experience that if you make a few steps towards them, if you invade their personal space directly and act like you not only own the whole area but their souls as well, they rapidly melt in short order and go back to being the scared little CPAs and used car salesmen that they were Monday through Friday.

Case in point. This past weekend I rode my CBR down to a car show in another county, a nice leisurely 45 miles one way on a warm Spring morning. There were four hundred and sixteen entries so it wasn’t a small show by any stretch of the word. I parked my CBR next to a blue and white Gixxer 600. Those were the only two sport bikes there, the other ten motorcycles were all cruisers, standards and tour bikes. I’d say there were probably an even mixture of Harleys and imports. I wore my “Special Ed” t-shirt and walked around like I owned the place. You would not believe all of the Harley posers there in their leather chaps, their vests with all the patches walking up and down among the rows of cars and how many people were wearing Harley Davidson T-shirts and baseball caps. Funny, I didn’t see that many Harleys in the parking lot. Where were all of these bikes that these people owned? During my walk through the show, I saw two Harleys get trailered into the show and I just shook my head and laughed because they were bone stock and soon had a small group of rednecks gathered around them to oooh and ahhhh. Why were they trailered? Well, you wouldn’t want to get something plebian like a rock chip in that custom $4000 paint job, now would you? Heaven forbid if you actually rode your Harley more than a few miles a year, why, that might reduce its investment worth and its resale value! But I digress… suffice it to say that there were plenty of Harley posers there that day but they must have ridden ten up on each bike to get there if you counted the number of T-shirts to actual bikes present.

Fast forward a few hours and I was minding my own business when two laughably tough looking Harley slathered ass clowns came up behind me and read my shirt aloud so that everyone around the car I was looking at could hear them. After they finished, one of them said:

“I bet he rides one of those pussy ass plastic bikes up by the entrance.”

Well, that was, as they say, all that needed to be said. When I turned around to stare at him, he and I both got a pretty good surprise in that we found out that when I straightened up (from bending over to look inside the cockpit of a ’72 Plymouth Road Runner) that I had a good four inches of height on him and obviously more muscle and mass. These two bozos were just a pair of kids, they couldn’t have been much older than their early 20’s but here they were trying to start trouble because their mouth was bigger than their brain. The kid who had made the comment about my bike took a step back but it was too late. I stepped right smartly into his personal space and planted myself right square in his world front and center with an authority that made him visibly nervous. He tried to regain his composure but it was too far gone. His friend stood there as useless as lug nuts on a birthday cake. It was funny to watch this kid’s lower lip quiver and his face drain of color as the rusty mental gears in his noggin ground together trying to come up with a way to get out of the situation that his big mouth had just gotten him into. I let him suffer for a few seconds until he finally cowed down and backed up another step. The other people around the Plymouth were edging to get a better view in case it turned into a brawl.

“I’m sorry, little boy.” I told the kid. “I didn’t quite hear what you said behind my back. Now that you can say it to my face, perhaps you would give me the courtesy of repeating it.”

“Let’s go, Jess.” The other kid said.

The kid I was staring down was frozen so bad he must have been pissing ice cubes in his pants.

“Did I hear you say something about you not liking my bike?” I said slowly, edging forward another step as he retreated another step.

“Let’s GO, Jess! Come ON, man, let’s GO!”

Jess finally got the idea and both he and his buddy turned to leave. I was willing to let them go since I had given them a good scare. That’s when I noticed that Jess had a clip-on pony tail! What the… I couldn’t believe that this kid was stupid enough to wear a clip on pony tail and try to walk the walk. Oh, I was not going to let this poser step off and get away like that!

“Hold up, boy.” I told him sternly and the kid stopped dead in his tracks as I marched over to him at a brisk pace.

“You’ve got something there on the back of your head. Here, let me get it for you.”

I unclipped his stupid little fake pony tail and looked at it. Who the fuck wears a fake pony tail? What kind of person is so lame, so incomplete that they have to wear around a clip on piece of hair to make them look like they’re tough. Where do you hillbillies get this crap and who do you think you are fooling with it? It doesn’t impress people, it only makes other people laugh at you.

“Here you go.” I said, handing him his clip-on pony tail back to him. “I think one of your sister’s Barbie dolls is missing this. You better run along and see that she gets it back before she gets worried and starts to cry.”

Oh, he wanted to say something but I stared him down, eye to eye and never backed down. He knew I was waiting on him to say something else but his mind was obviously keeping a tight leash on his mouth. The way I was holding my helmet in my hand, chin bar clenched tight, probably told him that if he tried to do something stupid like throw a punch, I’d use the helmet to rearrange his stack and knock his block off. After what seemed a minute or two of a staring contest (I hate people who dip, they always have this nasty air about them…), he wisely backed down and left, partially in tow of his friend who was doing most of the motivating for them to leave the vicinity. I watched them go, turning to look over their shoulders at me and talk rapidly between their selves. I didn’t worry about what they might do to my bike, that was why I had insurance and since my bike did not define who I am nor did I base my life around it, any damage or destruction to the bike would be of minimal inconvenience to me. I could always get another bike, no problem.

“Hey, brother!”

I turned around at the words. A man and his wife had watched the whole episode and they were laughing at how it had turned out. He walked around the Plymouth and introduced himself as Mike Reynolds and his wife Sheila. Mike then shook my hand and told me how happy he was to find someone original in this crowd of posers. We talked bikes and cars for about twenty minutes until we parted company. He got the URL of my website and a week later, ordered the same shirt I was wearing and two other designs as well.

So, to answer your question, yes, I live and let live but if you start something, I’ll be sure to finish it for you, no problem and if you get your feelings hurt in public, too bad. That’s your own damn fault. I’m not scared of you or your kind, because I’ve seen too many of you and know your kind all too well to ever take you seriously.

“i hope you wrap that piece of shit ride around a tree but even that is too good for you and besides it is not the fault of the bike you ride that its owner is an ass hole.”

Ah, good!

Yet another common staple of the classic pre-programmed Harley owner specific retardation rears its ugly head and this time it’s the tired old “You don’t like Harley Davidson so I hope you have a terrible wreck on your little piece of shit rice burner and I hope you die a horribly painful death, you big dumb meanie!” type response. Sigh. You hicks are nothing if you aren’t predictable. Having myself been in several near fatal motorcycle accidents over the last two decades (drunk driver ran a red light and destroyed my ’93 Honda VFR750F in Oct ’94, I hit a deer at 70mph while sport touring on my ’95 Kawi Ninja ZX-6R in August ’98 and my ’04 CBR600RR was recently destroyed by a careless driver who hit me from behind on my blind side while I was trying to merge onto highway 98 from a turn lane on May 13, 2005), I can safely say that having been on both sides of being up and down on a bike, I wouldn’t wish a bad motorcycle accident on anyone, not even someone as despicable as you. I guess that’s just one more thing that truly sets people like me apart from people like you and at the same time shows everyone reading this just who the real biker is in this discussion.

God bless you, ride safe out there and thank you for your happy wishes to me down the road. Your absence of character and your lack of class are both very evident failures and go far in adding up to your total negative sum worth as a basic human being.

“i am sure that it would be much happier in the hands of someone who appreciates the heritage of it.”

Oh, I strongly disagree!

I feel very confident that my sport bike is quite happy right where it is, belonging to someone who fully understands its heritage and its pedigree, belonging to someone who treats it with respect and appreciates it for the technological piece of art that it is. This, of course, as opposed to you, an uneducated clod who apparently doesn’t have the first clue about anything at all on two wheels. I don’t know what it takes to be a “factory HD technician” but apparently having an IQ less than the rear wheel horsepower of your bike must be a requirement if not an unfair advantage.

“maybe you should research the facts and the community before you start making shallow comments and unwarrented slandor about a true american unlike yourself.”

It’s not so much a “community” as it is a “commune,” isn’t it? I find it hillarious that this accusation is coming from someone who actually believed that Honda was started by Harley Davidson (using American money… we can’t forget that part). Maybe it is you who should research your facts before you open your mouth and fire off ignorant emails at people who know far more than you ever will. Oh, and here’s another startling revelation: I am an American and probably more of an American than you ever will be because unlike you, I understand that my birthright isn’t based on something I own (and something that can subsequently be taken away rather easily) nor does my birthright come with some stupid requirement to own a Harley before I get all of my citizenship rights. What I ride or what I drive does not determine in any way whatsoever if I am an American or not nor does it determine to what degree I am an American any more so than it does for you.

“and maybe you should go tell the next group of bikers you see that they are all pussies and only think they are badasses because they ride a harley.”

Ah! I’ve got a far better and far more humorous idea. Since you’re an ignorant racist who’s not afraid to openly insult black people (at least from behind the safety of his computer), why don’t you prove to us what a truly bad ass biker you are by finding a large group of black males and calling them “niggers” to their face. You don’t seem to be afraid throw racial slurs around on the Internet so let’s see you do it in public, little boy. Chances are good that if you actually do try this in real life that you’ll be shitting teeth for a week and eating soft food for the rest of your life, especially if they’re riding modern sport bikes and all you have is your ridiculous Harley. Oh, and you might want to schedule a few days off from work after you try this because I bet it’s going to be really hard to walk around or work with that stickered-up half-helmet of yours and your pair of Oakleys shoved sideways up your ass.

“but i know that you wont because you hide behind your fucking computer.”

Well, I think you’ve hit just about every cliché and staple defense known to the typical HD owner in your insipid little email. When it comes to hiding behind a computer, I bet you could teach me a thing or two about that. No, I don’t hide behind my computer but I also don’t go around looking to pick fights with complete strangers just because they are somehow different than me, either. You see, I have an opinion, an original opinion (in direct contrast to yours) and it is a well thought out opinion that I have supported with facts and information gathered from your kind for over a decade and a half now. That opinion is obviously different from yours (which causes you no amount of consternation) but much to your chagrin, I am fully entitled to have my opinion because this is America and I am an American. Throughout history, Americans have always spoken their minds, especially about things which they thought were wrong or about things they thought were being done badly.

I could care less if you read my opinion or even if you like it or not. I could care less if I hurt your feelings or if you lost sleep over it because I gave you a hint at the truth. However, I will defend my opinion to the best of my God given capacity and talents. Since my opinion is located on my website, in my domain, which is bought and paid for by me, and since I do not advertise my website, since I do not charge admission nor do I troll other people’s websites and post my opinion or opinions on their turf, that means you have to come here to my home turf, read my opinion and either agree or disagree. If you disagree with me, I could care less. You obviously have your reasons for disagreeing but I’m really not interested in hearing them. What you are doing now is invading my private space, you’re marching into my front yard, shouting at me in my house and telling me that not only am I’m wrong but that you don’t appreciate me having the thoughts that I do in the privacy of my own home. You see,, my entire domain is actually a private domain, it is my property and it is you who are trespassing. Yes, I leave the gate open for anyone to come in, I don’t charge admission but I expect you to be on your best behavior. If you are not, if you get rowdy, then don’t be surprised if I walk right out the front door, snatch you up by the scruff of your red neck and put you out on the curb with the rest of the garbage. If you start trouble here, I will take you down several notches and show the world what an idiot you are.

The funny thing here is that what you are asking me to do, is the very thing that you and your kind have been guilty of doing for decades now. Now, let’s think about what you just said… You’re asking me to go and actively be an asshole and ruin other people’s motorcycling experiences because their view or their possessions aren’t exactly like mine. Who acts like that? Harley owners. Besides, why should I go and tell a bunch of image slaves pretending to be bikers to change when it’s so much more fun just to watch you and your kind pose? If Harley stops selling bikes to hayseed dirtfucks like you, I’m out of a hobby (and a deep source of humor to boot).

Find me in public and we’ll talk shop, but if you look down your nose at me and tell me to get a real bike, I’ll dress you up one side and down the other in a fashion that would make R. Lee Ermey look like Mary Poppins in comparison.

As for hiding behind my computer, I don’t hide behind my computer. I don’t have to. My email, my physical address and even my home phone number are clearly stated on my website but I guess you were too stupid to figure out where to look to find that information. My site is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). While a lot of people on the Internet (like you) pretend to be one thing online while they are another in the real world, such is not the case with me. Why should I lie to you about who I am? If I’m not afraid of some of the local hardened criminals knowing where I live, I’m certainly not scared of someone like you on the Internet knowing where I live. However, since you missed it before, here it is again.

Christopher T. Shields
1117 National Guard Road
Columbia, MS 39429
601.736.8401
 

There, I’ve posted my information for the umpteenth time, now let’s see you do the same, champ. I’ve called your bluff, now it’s time to lay your cards on the table and we’ll all get to see what a pathetic loser you really are when you can’t match my hand. Go on, I dare you to send me your contact information so I can freely post it here. You won’t, though, because posers like you are shit scared of me. I am everything that you want to be but never can be because I am a true individual and an original human being. You are nothing to me, no threat, no challenge and certainly no equal.

“i live in orlando florida by the way so if you are ever here please look me up i would love to meet you. so fuck off.”

Well, now that’s an open invitation if I ever heard one but I really doubt that I would be interested at all in ever meeting you. You see, I tend to gravitate towards people who are of at least my own educational background or, failing that, at least somewhat interesting.  I don't foresee myself looking up or hanging out with someone who is dumb enough that I could use simple Jedi mind tricks on them to get them to do what I wanted them to do.  Yes, I truly doubt that you and I could ever sit down and have a lengthy conversation because I’m afraid that I really don’t know any words small enough for you to understand.

“Midnight Rider"

“Midnightrider?” Oh, you have got to be kidding! Your email address sounds more like the title for an old Allman Brothers song from the mid-1970s than some email handle for a “real” biker. Yep, ole Willie G. must be so proud to know that you’re one of his most devout followers.  In fact, I bet he's smiling all the way to the bank.
 

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