It can't be unrelated to the marketing as a product for macho-men that Harley Davidson's leadership was so immune from looking self-critically at what was wrong and changing it. It's one of the central features of toxic masculinity that it is a betrayal of "manliness" to do that and it guarantees that making that your brand will make you brittle and breakable and unable to adapt. It's rather hilarious that Trump's xenophobic racism was the occasion of him saying something that might have almost been right. Broken clocks telling the right time twice or once a day.
Hollywood features heavily in this. Is there anything that has aged less well than those biker movies? Though I regretted the minutes I spent on Easy Rider as soon as the opening credits were through. Piece of shit.
Update: It's a business, it's no more than that. Those who pretend it's an art, I think, are misguided.
Marlon Brando on the movies
I had wanted to find a clip of Bullwinkle Moose doing his Brando imitation but I couldn't. I think it was living up the the bullshit of Harley cultism in the movies is as much of a reason that the company history is so full of funny stuff like them bawling and crying to Reagan for protectionism as smarter companies unencumbered with that macho nonsense ate their lunch and Reagan, the movie-cowboy capitalist rugged individualist (there are no milieus more violently demanding rigid conformity than the macho man ones, at least not outside of Pyongyang) giving it to them.
Update: I can't get the damned comments to stay off, every time my malware program functions it seems to kick them back on. Needless to say the idiot who was temporarily cowed by finding out he'd called his hero, ol' Charles Darwin an idiot is back because it's apparently news to him that hours are made of minutes. I regretted all of the minutes in Easy Rider as I knew I would as the opening credits ended. It is Hollywood crap, a "counter culture" that is not counter to anything important, a lifestyle movie that challenged nothing except hair styles and costume. It went no deeper than that. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was in every way a more daring movie.
Update 2: Brando was a world-weary 49 when he said that on the Dick Cavett show, he'd already been in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris and had refused the Best Actor Oscar, he was hardly a beatnik. It's not as if he didn't know the business better than an ass whose ignorant mind and concept of "art" was formed by the movies. The idea that Marlon Brando was ever a beatnik is ridiculous but that someone whose every idea is a product of Hollywood crap and the ass end of commercial pop would think so isn't surprising.
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