Stardate 20030804.2300

(Captain's log): Regarding the post about Harley, Brian wrote:

You leave out two things.

1. For a substantial period of time in the company's history, Harleys were an embarrassment, poorly-designed, poorly-built bikes that needed frequent maintenance and had little but a logo to recommend them--and then only to suckers who bought all that marketing baloney. H-D basically did on a small scale what the Big Three automakers did on a larger scale--sit back, get fat, and allow the Japanese to eat their lunch. (In a way this is also representative of the American personality, the tendency to allow achievement to feed hubris and transform into sloth.) You also neglect to mention that H-D came back partly on the strength of a tariff against its Japanese competition, something I suspect you would not fail to mention if it were the other way around.

2. Almost every other serious company that can reach the international market does what Harley-Davidson is doing, which is figure out how to appeal to foreign buyers. How do you think companies like Honda or Yamaha or Toyota or Sony became so monstrously successful in the US? What you are suggesting Harley do, solely in the name of American chauvinism, is ignore all foreign markets that might have different demands or tastes than the American market. Meanwhile its competitors will be taking advantage of the experience and economies of scale achieved through entering those foreign markets, including of course ours. Pardon me, but that's just stupid.

The essay is dismaying. The subject brings out your worst biases concerning Europeans--the "wussy European man" stuff doesn't even bear complaining about, it's so five-year-old in its mentality. You don't come off as someone who even owns a Harley so your pride in their business success and your paranoia of a Harley- Davidson identity crisis both seem ridiculously misplaced, almost as if you are getting vicarious pleasure *through the vicarious pleasure of Harley fans*. And as my confidante and pal H. Ross Perot would say, that's just sad.

You write stuff like this and I start to wonder if your CDMA articles are the result of the same blinkered thought process.

I responded:

It's been more than 25 years since I last owned a motorcycle, and both bikes I owned were Hondas.

It's my site and I can write what I want on it, including taking a cheap shot at Europe every once in a while. I'm sorry you don't like that, but I have no intention of restraining myself just because you think I should.

Brian responded:

You're simply limiting your audience to true believers and whether you realize it or not you're tarnishing your other, more reasonable arguments vis-à-vis Europe with such petty (and re: the tariff issue simply hypocritical) asides. If you can't see that, it's truly a shame, but since I have an interest in seeing some of those arguments prevail it's to my benefit to try to talk sense to you. The other day you linked to some particularly ingracious sniping of you in other blogs; I defended you (I don't seek credit for that) but when you write about European "wusses" and claim Harley-Davidson is selling its soul for marketing to Europe it's me who feels like he has egg on his face for doing so.

It's also petulant and unworthy of you to claim that I am trying to make you restrain yourself "just because [I] think [you] should" when what I did was email you two points of debate which you're obviously free to go on ignoring. If you are looking for an echo chamber, you'll find the quality of your rhetoric steadily declines as a result. I hope that you are better than that.

I receive between 100 and 200 letters per day, most of which comment on things I've written.

Everything substantive that I write, and most of the rest, invites at least a few critical letters. Some object to the form, others to the subject matter, or the logic, or the philosophy, or the organization, or what I included, or what I left out, or the political point of view, or to the site graphics, or to me and my genetic inheritance and family lineage.

It's common for me to receive letters from people who say that a given post was unworthy of me, and that I should not have written it because it's was undignified. But no matter what I write, there's always someone who wishes I had not written it, or wishes I had written it in a different way.

For this particular post, it happens to have been Brian who didn't like it and somehow felt compelled to tell me so. But if it hadn't been him, it would have been someone else. I have thousands of regular readers, and there is virtually nothing they all agree on except that they decided to be regular readers. (And there are thousands of others who only visit once in a while.)

I learned two important lessons about this site a long time ago:

First, the only way I could be certain I wouldn't inspire anyone to write critical letters is to write fluff.

Second, I learned that I have to stay true to myself, because I don't want to write fluff.

So I can't let myself become a slave to my critics, because I have too many of them whose opinions are so varied. (There is also a core group of critics who would only be satisfied if I stopped writing entirely.) No matter wha