OK, this is really starting to look culty

Trump recently doubled down on his earlier Tweet-attack on Harley-Davidson. This time, he basically called for a boycott of Harley-Davidson.

To be clear, no Harley-Davidson competitors are choosing to manufacture bikes in the U.S. because of Trump's trade war. In fact Indian, which most people seem to think will be the beneficiary of any Harley boycott, will also be shifting some manufacturing to Poland. But Trump's not lacing into Polaris. I wonder why?

Forget the fundamentally Bizarro-world situation of a sitting President calling for the boycott of a venerable American company – this looks more and more like the behavior of a cult leader, not a mere politician.

In every cult, there's a moment where the leader forces his followers to give up something they dearly love. It's often money;but it could be foods followers love, or sex – or followers might even have to give their spouse to the cult leader.

What the followers have to give up doesn't matter, as long as it's something they love. You wouldn't think that such a request from the Dear Leader would strengthen bonds with his followers, but it does, because it puts the followers in a sunk-cost dilemma.

Once Trump's followers choose him over their beloved Harleys, they'll be his for life.

Could it backfire? Sure. If someone pushed back effectively, they could make the GOP pay by costing it a seat or two in Wisconsin. I can't really see Matt Levatich taking that assignment on – he's got enough on his plate right now. But a smart Wisconsin Democrat could use Harley-Davidson as leverage to weaken GOP support in a critical swing state.

More SUVs = more pedestrian fatalities. They make motorcyclists less safe, too.

Last week the Detroit Free Press broke big, well-researched story on the way that America's shift from autos to SUVs, light trucks, and crossovers has resulted in a large increase in pedestrian fatalities. "The Freep" as the paper's affectionately known, has a long history of excellent automotive reporting. "Death on foot: America's love of SUVs is killing pedestrians" is another high point and proof that daily newspapers and in-depth reporting are still worth the effort

Detroit Free Press

The problem, as the Freep points out, is not that more people are being hit, it's that the people who are hit are more likely to be killed. The reason is obvious: higher hoodlines mean that pedestrians are hit in the torso, instead of the legs. The newspaper found that in other countries, auto-pedestrian strikes are gradually getting less deadly, as car makers and regulators address pedestrian survival. But over the past decade in the U.S., pedestrian deaths have climbed dramatically. According to the story...

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety calculated an 81 percent increase in single-vehicle pedestrian fatalities involving SUVs in 2009-16. The Free Press/USA TODAY analysis of the same federal data, counting vehicles that struck and killed pedestrians rather than the number of people killed, showed a 69 percent increase in SUV involvement. The assessment also showed increases each year in the proportion of fatal pedestrian crashes involving the popular vehicles.

The increased lethality of SUVs and the like has been a real sore point for me, for at least that long. Vehicle makers are obviously aware of the increased morbidity and mortality rates for pedestrians, when comparing cars with light trucks. They've been negligent for years, have rarely attempted to mitigate pedestrian impacts, and have not even warned SUV buyers that the vehicles they've chosen are far more likely to accidentally kill a pedestrian. 

Meanwhile NHTSA has been certain that SUVs are significantly more deadly to pedestrians, and especially deadly to children, since at least 2015...

Text: NHTSA Graphic: Detroit Free Press

In general, American auto makers like GM tend to treat this as a problem that can be solved with technology like Automatic Emergency Braking, and they resist considering pedestrian survival a part of overall crashworthiness.

While the Freep, and most safety researchers, have for now focused on SUV/pedestrian impacts, it's obvious that the same factors make SUVs deadlier for cyclists and motorcyclists, too.

Thanks to the Detroit Free Press, I hope we'll now see a mother-fucking huge class action suit on behalf of the 6,000 pedestrians killed every year. Honda has voluntarily researched, tested and built pedestrian survival into its sedans for decades If we force other auto makers to do the same, it will only increase the survival of bicycle and PTW riders, too.

No Harley's Matt Levatich didn't call Trump a moron. Trump, however, is hitting back anyway.

Trump: I thank Harley for building in America from CNBC.

What a difference a year makes, eh? Shortly after he took office, Donald Trump met with Harley-Davidson executives and union leaders, taking the opportunity to describe Harley as "...an American icon; one of the greats." Now, the company finds itself in a feud with the Bully-in-Chief.

Last week, an unsourced quote ostensibly from Harley-Davidson's CEO Matt Levatich flew around the Twittersphere.

“Our decision to move some of our operations is 100% based on President Trumps tariffs. Mr. Trump knows nothing about economics and even less about trade. The man is a moron.”

I knew the moment that I read it that it wasn't a real quote, and frankly, everyone else should have known, too. (In the limited defense of people who believed it, Levatich did, before the last election, criticize the Republican primary field in what was likely a thinly-veiled insult to The Donald.)

Harley-Davidson, in frantic damage control mode, issued a strong denial.

The matter should have ended there, but it seems not to have ended, because this morning, Donald Trump responded with something that isn't a fake tweet, attacking Harley-Davidson.

There are about seven levels of bullshit in this, beginning with the fact that Trump cites 2017 sales figures, figures from a year when Harley execs put on a fawning display on the White House driveway for Trump and Pence -- after which Trump thanked Harley for building so many bikes in the U.S. (If you want a point-by-point explanation of just how stupid this tweet is, go here.)

Harley-Davidson faces a host of challenges, not the least of which are increased costs of materials and new tariff barriers as a result of Trump's trade policies. As a Kansas Citian, I'm bummed that they're closing the plant here.

This iconic company may not face an existential crisis, but it's not far off. Whenever I'm at a gathering of motorcycle journalists and motorcycle industry executives, the topic of "What can Harley do?" inevitably comes up, and few if any of the assembled 'experts' have any good ideas to offer. I, for one, actually have high hopes for the 'Livewire' project, but I'll breathe a sigh of relief if that even happens.

This story's not going away today, either; since my original post I've even heard about it on NPR. What should Harley do? Nothing, for fuck's sake. Just wait, head down, until Trump turns his attention somewhere else.

That said, I can't help but wonder whether, some day, Trump will attack some American icon and have his supporters finally decide it's beyond the pale. I can only dream... In the meantime, the last fucking thing Harley needs is Trump kicking 'em when they're down.

#HimToo: Revisiting the Steve McQueen legend

I’ve been thinking about McQueen a lot lately, in this #MeToo moment.

Per Wikipedia, this McQueen mug shot came after a DWI incident in Alaska.

I never knew him, but over the years I’ve interviewed a bunch of people who did. The last round of interviews took place three or four years ago, when I was researching the American team (including McQueen) that competed in the 1964 ISDT; that year, it was held in Communist East Germany.

Although a number of American riders had competed in the ISDT, that was the very first U.S. ‘Vase’ team. Besides Steve McQueen, the riders were Bud Ekins, the man who basically introduced McQueen to motorcycles and went on to stunt double him in some famous movie scenes; Cliff Coleman, another movie-industry guy who was another one of McQueen’s small circle of friends; and Dave Ekins, who was Bud’s brother.

By the time I researched that ’64 ISDT, Bud and Steve–the protagonists in the story–were both dead. But I spoke to Dave Ekins and Cliff Coleman at some length, as well others who knew him in the '60s.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave high in the Himalayas for the last few months, you’ve read enough about Harvey Weinstein to know that the movie business has, historically, tolerated some very bad behavior by powerful men. Usually, those who knew him joked about McQueen’s behavior and I admit that, in writing about that ’64 American ISDT team’s wild sexual romp from London to Ehrfurt in the GDR and back to Paris that summer, I glamorized some caddish behavior.

Some of the people I spoke to are McQueen fanboys to this day. But I remember having second thoughts early in one of those (several, long) conversations. One of his friends chuckled as he described the way that even as a young mechanic/shop-hanger-on, if he was out riding with the film star, McQueen never offered to pay for road food and gas. In fact, the star had a remarkable knack for “forgetting his wallet”. When pressed, McQueen had a lifelong habit of weaseling restaurant and gas station owners out of payment–he’d feign not having any money with him, and usually merchants who were besotted with his fame would agree to let it slide. If they didn’t, McQueen would eventually pull a checkbook from his sock and, grudgingly, write them a check.

Although McQueen was always generous towards the orphanage/reform school where he spent some of his teens, he was a cheapskate even at the height of his fame, as the world’s highest paid actor. Variations on that I-forgot-my-wallet story were told over and over by everyone who knew him. Which, even when I was writing a story that traded on the McQueen myth left me thinking... Yeah, but he sounds like a douchebag.

And it wasn’t just that he was cheap. He was basically semi-literate, and by turns sullen, paranoid, obsessively jealous of other actors, prone to fits of rage, and had (to say the least!) poor impulse control.

Even in an industry that rarely punishes bad behavior, McQueen was such a petulant prick that it hurt his career. And the Dunning-Kruger effect really kicked in when he set out to produce his own vanity project, LeMans, without a real script. The movie was an expensive dud; both a commercial and critical flop. To add insult to injury, James Garner starred in Grand Prix which was pretty good, and a commercial success. McQueen hated Garner.

Of course, being an obnoxious cheapskate with a chip on his shoulder, and famously hard to deal with, wouldn’t actually get him on the #MeToo hit parade. But his shitty behavior definitely extended to women too. He was a serial philanderer–although I suppose he never cheated on his last wife, Barbara Minty McQueen, because they only got married right before he died.

McQueen’s friends told stories of going out with him, where he’d pick up broads who were willing (often eager, of course) to fuck the world’s biggest movie star, but who were then pressured to fuck his friends too. He pressured women to partake in group and/or anal sex and if they wouldn’t comply sometimes just stopped his car in the middle of the road somewhere and kicked them out.

But, par for the course, he was enraged by the thought that his wives might ever have cheated on him. There were persistent stories of him assaulting them, and threatening them. And at least one account of McQueen physically assaulting a coat-check girl, when he was on the town with a reporter. There’s that bad judgment again; the star actually handed the reporter $500 a few minutes later and asked him to go and buy the girl’s silence.

A few months after the #MeToo thing took off, I bought an old copy of Penina Spiegel’s biography McQueen: The Untold Story of a Bad Boy in Hollywood. Spiegel conducted hundreds of interviews in a comprehensively researched account of McQueen’s entire family history. What I got from reading it was– and this is not a surprise, considering the kid’s childhood was closed out in the California Junior Boys’ Republic reform school in Chino–that he was pretty much bound to become an emotionally stunted adult.

McQueen didn’t have a lot of genuine friends, but the guys who were his friends, even speaking after his death when you’d expect them to buff his myth, don’t really describe a ‘bad boy’; they describe an asshole whose flaws they tolerated or more likely celebrated, particularly where his abusive behavior towards women was concerned.

As an actor, he had a limited range. But at the end of the day, McQueen still starred in The Great Escape, which included what is at least arguably the most famous motorcycle scene in movies. He genuinely dug bikes, and did the sport of motorcycling a favor when Solar Productions (his company) produced On Any Sunday. And, Bullitt. Et cetera. So, you get to decide how you feel about him.

But, #HimToo. Definitely, him too.

Former journeyman MX racer reinvents himself as (fraudulent?) food star

The latest issue of the famed New Yorker magazine features a long feature story on a former motocross racer named Damon Baehrel, who operates a small restaurant in upstate New York.

Baehrel – who is now in his early fifties – was an aspiring motocross racer in the 1980s, although there’s no indication that he was fast enough to turn that into a living. He worked in restaurants and then operated a successful gourmet catering business.

Baehrel's now in his early 50s. He lives on a few-acre farm in upstate New York. He clearly is a master forager, but the carrying capacity of such a property is not consistent with his claim to preparing thousands of meals per year from ingredients foraged on his own land. Which begs the question, "Why create such an elaborate lie?"

But about 15 years ago, he began an elaborate reinvention. He built a small restaurant in basement of his farmhouse, where – if you can believe this – he prepares some of the world’s finest dining using virtually only ingredients he forages from his own property.

His food’s been sampled by many highly-regarded food writers and bloggers. Prices currently run over $400 per person per meal (and do not include wine, although diners are welcome to bring their own.) The food is real, delicious (so I read), and fantastically inventive. This 16-seat restaurant is frequently seen on lists of the world’s best and most exclusive restaurants.

It’s the only one on the list where, apparently, absolutely all the cooking is done by one person.

If you can believe Damon Baehrel, there’s a five-year wait for reservations.

Where the story gets weird is, Baehrel creates real food that he serves in the context of a fictional business. He claims to have served all kinds of celebrities who have, in fact, never been there. Nor is it even remotely possible that he could prepare the number of meals he says he’s serving by himself, in the facility at his disposal, or with ingredients foraged off a few acres.

From the New Yorker: In 2002, Baehrel said, he shut down the restaurant for renovations and got back into competitive motocross, entering races around New England. “I made some money,” he said.
Is it just me, or is it unlikely anyone's making money in Vet 30+ C class races?

In fact, it’s more likely that virtually the only people he serves are restaurant reviewers and influential food bloggers. Why he would go to such elaborate lengths to create a mostly-fictitious restaurant business is another part of Damon Baehrel’s mystery.

It seems pretty clear that the food he makes can stand on its own, but maybe food critics would not give him the attention he clearly craves, if he didn’t create an exclusivity myth to wrap around his story.

Maybe at some level he’s a compulsive liar who can’t let his food do the talking for him. If so, he luckily or brilliantly concocted a myth that food writers desperately wanted to believe was true. That's why it took so long for someone like Paumgarten to do the very simple math involved in proving that the ex-motocrosser-turned-genius-chef's claim that he's serving (tens of) thousands of meals a year is false.

Or was there supposed to be some other end game? If there was Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant profile of the chef has probably curdled the plan.

Although he told the New Yorker writer that he raced professionally around the U.S. in the '80s, the only place anyone can confirm Baehrel raced back then is here. If any readers remember him as an '80s-era pro, please let me know, eh?