Bad to the Boardroom
by Jamie Wilson

Calling in sick on the first truly nice day of spring is a quasi-religious holiday for a lot of us, though it makes bosses and economists cringe and knocks unknown decimals off the GDP. But as no one labors with as much bizarre gusto as the American worker, it follows that we should blow off steam with similarly improbable enthusiasm.

Outfitted in all manner of reflective gear, we take to the roads en masse for a little collective me-time. And possibly the most visible, and certainly the most audible, group enjoying the weather are the motorcyclists.

One would imagine that motorcycle enthusiasts latch on to the first days of a new spring, as we all do, for that sense of vitality and vim conveyed by a world awakening to itself. The symbolic appeal of tulip blossoms and budding trees is as contagious as it is undeniable. Yet cyclists, and the Harley-Davidson set in particular, appear to have been celebrating something all together different these days: themselves.

With the price of a new Harley at somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000, the average Harley owner is, well, anything but average. Unless they're among the few people out there who rely on their bike as their primary means of getting around, most motorcycle enthusiasists land well within that demographic with the sort of Robb Report income level to afford ridiculously expensive hobbies (see also: big-game hunting and small-yacht sailing). True: It's hard to deny that hogs make a statement, one that other like-priced hobbies can only dream of. It's just that now the statement is less "born to be wild" than "I have arrived."

A few weeks ago, I was sweating it out in my car on the way home from work when I came up on a Harley. The noise was there; the trademark chest-rattling throttle was happening, and I have to admit I envied the rider, the open road, the wind blasting against his chest. I wished I'd brought my Credence disc.

But once I got closer, I saw cool black helmet and leather jacket on top but pinstripe pants and wingtips below. Confounded, I pulled along side to check him out. I felt a little foolish for envying this guy, who straight out of the T. Rowe Price commercials — "invest with confidence," drive home from work with confidence, put on your necktie with confidence. Whatever it was, the smug grin he gave me didn't say "bad to the bone." More like, "My 401K's bad to the bone." Eventually he pulled off the highway at the Greenville exit, probably the most affluent suburb in Northern Delaware.

It was bummer, a defeat for all the people who really do believe that Harley-Davidson motorcycles are the embodiment of cool. And they are cool. Really cool. But this guy and countless others like him, who, according to Harley-Davidson's demographic info, are the norm now, was definitely not cool.

The real shame is that these bikes are not like the countless other things we used to think were cool but then turned out to be inherently uncool — public hangings, for instance. Harleys have simply been usurped by uncool people. Like cowboys. They were cool, but then serious people, people like our president, started cultivating cowboy images for themselves. (And even though most of these guys own their own ranches, that doesn't make it right. In fact, it doesn't even make sense. They wear suits and go to luncheons and almost always work past 5 p.m.; cowboys do none of these things. At least not in the movies.)

That rarest of commodities, coolness, is being gobbled up by the elite at an alarming rate. Range Rovers and Nantucket don't seem to be enough anymore, and the great majority of Americans are beginning to feel the pinch. The average Joe will never run a country or a corporation, but a motorcycle, a John Wayne grin, knocking off early on a nice day — these things are within his reach. He lost the fight for fly-fishing and cigar smoking years ago; he at least deserves something. He's keeping up his end of the bargain, after all. He's not going to install a wine cellar and his wife won't start shopping at Anthropologie. Why steal his cool?

So to the CEOs, senators and day-traders everywhere: Leave us these simple pleasures, these last vestiges of cool. There are a lot people who need motorcycles and tough guys more than you do. Let us have them. In fact, you'll be doing yourselves a favor. Because no matter how good it feels to roll up to a board meeting on a Harley or dust off your cowboy boots with a copy of the Wall Street Journal, the cool that you can buy and the cool that you want are worlds apart. And everyone else can tell the difference.

E-mail Jamie Wilson at jgreerw at hotmail dot com.