It is official, the holiday season is upon us here in the GreyNorWet. Without the need or benefit of the news I can ascertain that this is true because verily the three stars of another Christmas coming have aligned. Firstly, it is raining like three cows pissing on the same flat rock and looks as if it will continue to do so for days. This is always a harbinger of winter in Seattle. Secondly, what has become the horrible gasping of a sick industry has arrived in the form of the annual December International Motorcycle Show. Smaller and more desperate for the last three years, the show is like a reunion of starved survivors of some island stranding, desperate to see who has lived to attend the next year. Thirdly, the first airing of Frank Capra's "Its a Wonderful Life" is on network TV, complete with insufferable commercials breaks so long that I can blog away without fear of missing anything.
The rain pours down outside, not as a brief hard Midwest shower with clearing and a promise of a rainbow, but endlessly, unceasingly, without pause or respite.. I take smug pleasure in the insatiable and persistent torrent. I don't derive my pleasure from the rain itself, but rather my stubborn ability to survive it. I share this ability with many of the other hardy inhabitants of this region. We eschew umbrellas even in the most dismal of day long soakings. We own more Gore-tex per capita than any other population on the face of this watery planet. We walk proud, heads held high, while all around us mold and mildew are growing on anything that stops moving. And, if we are motorcyclists with any grit, in December we ride to the annual motorcycle show regardless of the impending monsoon.
Each year, around the second week in December, we gather to preside over what more and more seems like the demise of the motorcycling industry. Each year the show gets smaller and grimmer as we gather to socialize and to count those merchants who survived through another year. My favorite manufacturers are absent now, KTM, Triumph, Aprilia, MV Agusta and others, still making motos but not willing to shell out the dough for a display booth at the show. Besides the economic tale that the missing vendors tells, today I ran into lots of moto folks that I haven't seen and the news I got from them is not good either. Folks I saw today have been laid off, run out of unemployment or are working twice as hard for the same or less money. We walk the show, catch up with each other, worry about our race club surviving the economic pummeling of falling racer participation and how we are going to survive until the next year.
Regardless of the rain or the economies of the moto industry, in "Its a Wonderful Life" George Bailey gives us inspiration that no matter how crummy or desperate events become, there is hope for redemption. When it seems certain the fat cats are going to smash the workingman's holiday to bits, there is still hope, at least in Capra's classic. Of course when Frank Capra cast Potter as the greedy banker, the villain is just a small town piker who had never purchased and sliced thousand of bad mortgages into derivatives and then repackaged them so many times that the the risk was hidden and passed on and the profits safely pocketed. Mr. Potter is a safe, small and beatable holiday Scrooge, defeated by honesty, hope, character and a caring community. The unscrupulous bastards of Wall Street that have cooked up the current economic collapse are a lot slicker, smarter and more evil than Potter could ever dream of being. Greedy, Grinchy pond scum, every one of them.
Tomorrow I don the Big Red Suit and try to spread the cheer. The rain falls every year and keeps us all moist and dewy and green. The motorcycle community, of which I am a part, has taken body blows in the past, reinvented itself and survived. I am sure it will survive this time as well. My holiday wish is that everyone survives these difficult and scary economic times. Everyone, that is, except those sons-of-bitches that put greed and personal gain ahead of ethics and showed total disregard for the good of their fellows. My holiday wish for those parasites is that, with any luck, there is enough coal to go around.
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