I'm genuinely confused by what you're outraged by here. The average New Yorker reader knows more about wines than monster trucks, so they're trying to put it in terms that will make sense to their readers.
If anything, the article reads as the opposite of pretentious to me: it makes it clear that monster trucking isn't just brainless amusement for inbred yokels, but a sport where things like the exact composition of dirt is critically important.
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.
... 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.
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.
"isn't just brainless amusement for inbred yokels"
The article never made reference to "inbred yokels". It didn't have to. It can couch its descriptions in the language of coastal elites who supposedly know more of wine and polo than they do of simple things like truck rallies. And while it's ostensibly explaining how "sophisticated" the sport is, the readers will fully understand the "isn't just brainless amusement for inbred yokels" part.
I wouldn't characterize my response as one of outrage. But I do find it off-putting and pretentious.
That's fair to say, and I don't deny being a little hostile toward snobbery and pretension. I always have been. However, I also don't think [its primary audience] is quite right. I think [its primary audience's self image] is a little more correct.
The New Yorker was founded to reflect a WASPy perspective, its celebrated founder was of rather humble background and chased that. And how many Jews, historically, were among the American elites playing polo? Your comment is well out of order.
I don't think of New York specifically or Jews at all when I see the term "coastal elites."
I think of wealthy business owners on the east and west coasts. Venture capitalists. Managers at software companies. Politicians. Just high paid and/or influential people who think highly of themselves and others in their cliques.
If anything, the article reads as the opposite of pretentious to me: it makes it clear that monster trucking isn't just brainless amusement for inbred yokels, but a sport where things like the exact composition of dirt is critically important.