... 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.