[petsfed]

I feel like an article that starts with "A monster trucker is the kind of person who has a favorite type of dirt." is trying to say something about "the kind of person who has a favorite type of dirt", and fans thereof, and its not positive.

The whole article reads to me with the same smug superiority as an Onion article about, well, self-described sophisticates enjoying things with a smug sense of superiority[0]. The thing curiously absent from the article is any sort of enthusiasm for the subject matter. Its all very clinical, and seems at best bemused about other people's enthusiasm, without anything to suggest why that enthusiasm might be justified.

0. https://www.theonion.com/ill-try-anything-with-a-detached-ai...

[dsr_]

You know who else has favorite kinds of dirt?

Farmers.

Gardeners.

Potters.

Kids who have ever been in the wrong sandbox.

Sorry, I think your interpretation is incorrect.

[petsfed]

... but not, you know, urban sophisticates. There's nothing to tie a gardener's experience of dirt to a monster truck driver (or fan). There's nothing to tie a potter's experience of dirt to a monster truck driver. The way farmers are discussed in the article, I submit that the writer doesn't know, or care to know, any of those either.

There's a lot of words expended on how the people who are already fans get excited about some event. But the thing I was waiting for was the writer to express some excitement himself. Its always held at arms' length. Bits like

>The appeal has a certain timelessness: people have always liked really big stuff, particularly of the unnecessary variety. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco. For perhaps obvious reasons, this is usually a male impulse.

or more damningly

>It was the experience of seeing something amazing and slightly ridiculous, something you’d have never thought of yourself, like a dog juggling knives. I understood the hugging impulse.

and

>As they rumbled by, grown men yelled at the top of their lungs, and a bachelorette party in front of Nudie’s Honky Tonk took videos.

really make it clear that the writer wants us to know he's not one of them, and you, the average New Yorker reader, should not try to find common ground with these people. He doesn't change his tune until the final segment, where he drives one of these trucks himself. Until then, its just bemused descriptions of other people's excitement, and its hard not to hear some second-hand embarrassment in those descriptions.

[bombcar]

Here’s a video on a similar “redneck phenomenon” with respect and admiration shown to what is happening: https://youtu.be/VZ6_8WJ3mh8

[gumby]

I read it as sympathetic and supportive.

[AlbertCory]

Exactly, and we have Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe as good examples of how to write this kind of thing. Zach Helfand isn't fit to clean their typewriter keys.