Come On Down To Michigan --- Or Up, Either Way
For whatever reason, my old pal Brent Henderson has been eager to reveal himself as the person who was banned from the Heritage Owners Club at the same time that I was. He also wants to try his case in this forum. That's fine with me, I don't censor posts to this board. Nor do I particularly dislike Brent. I had at least three good deals with Brent over the past six years and I've also enjoyed participating in the "Parsons Street Pilgrimage" that he organizes.
However, and this is something that has wider implications than a single disagreement on a single guitar forum...
...I've also had some really unpleasant transactions and transaction discussions with Brent. The one that stands out is when a member of our forum, a Vietnam vet who was looking to cover some personal expenses, listed an H-357 on the forum. Brent told the guy he'd come out and see him in a week or so and negotiate a price. (It should be noted that Brent remembers it as four days and full price.) I told him I'd bring him the full payment in cash as soon as I could drive to his house. Which I did. Four hours later, I made it to Michigan and paid the man his full asking price.
This set Brent off and he promptly complained on no fewer than three Heritage-related discussion groups. "I GIVE, AND GIVE, AND GIVE," he moaned, "AND THEN I GET SCREWED." For the sake of preserving my relationship with the Heritage Owners Club, I promptly sold the guitar to someone else for the original net price and wrote-off the travel time and money I'd spent. But it continued to rankle Brent. He really thought --- and continues to think --- that he should receive preferential treatment in private guitar sales because of his self-appointed position as the organizer of the Parsons Street Pilgrimage. Insofar as Brent doesn't keep guitars --- he buys and sells them, usually within weeks, and doesn't hold a collection as such --- this amounts to a financial incentive that sellers are paying him to keep him happy.
I'd have been happy to let Brent step in front of me for a guitar that he would own and cherish. I appreciate everything he's done for the Heritage owners community. However, I'm not interested in helping a guy who has basically done nothing his entire life but work for his dad's construction company make a buck off a Vietnam veteran. If that makes me a terrible person, so be it.
Does it make Brent a terrible person? This is where the binary nature of modern digital communications and ideology, pun intended, comes in. From the comments so far on the other thread and on HOC, you'd think that it would be impossible for Brent to be a great resource for the Heritage community and a guy who has tried to pull some shady deals. The Internet is only prepared to view Brent as a scumbag or a hero. The truth is that he is neither, just like most of us.
The same is true for me. Certainly I've helped put the final torpedo in a couple of marriages. Were one of the aggrieved husbands in question to show up at my door to discuss the issue, would it be any defense to point out that I've made hundreds of solid guitar deals with people? That I always disclose mechanical problems when selling a car? That I have a 100% eBay feedback rating? What would that matter?
By the same token, had I resisted every temptation every woman put in front of me my entire life, would that be sufficient defense for allegations that I had cheated someone in a guitar deal or stolen a candy bar from a convenience store? Or is the truth about any given individual too large to be covered by the words good or bad?
A few years ago, Autoblog's John Neff took it on himself to blame the victim in the Carroll Shelby sexual assault lawsuit. His line of thinking appeared to be: Carroll has been so nice to us here at Autoblog, there's no way he could be guilty of what they're saying. It's wishful thinking. Like the man said,
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Some of Brent's "multitudes" are great people. Others are best avoided. So it is with everyone.