Discussion for article #236421
Iām not joking when I say that the 1st thing I think of when I see pix of these fans is that they mostly vote GOP ā if they vote at all ā and that gives me the blues. Whereās BB King when you need him?
Oh the pity of it.
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Those showing up sans a wife beater (man or woman) and tacky tattoos are treated like Muslims disembarking at Dulles.
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You could have gone to Mad Max: Fury Road and saved yourself three days, hundreds of dollars, and been spared the trouble of catering to kids.
I also have some vague notion that at a Monster Jam show, the destination of four million people annuallyāmore than the number who attended Yankee games last yearāone might discover something about auto culture in 2015.
It would serve the writerāand this seriesāwell to set out with more than just some vague notion of what theyāre writing about.
If TPM wants to run a series about young Jewish Brooklynites establishing their literary/journalistic credentials, the raw material is there. But leave it to people who know something about cars to write knowingly about cars.
This series has been a real disappointment.
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What you learned? Iāll wager one thing you learned that America isnāt pronounced with 4 syllables. " 'Mur Kuh"
First thing that came to mind was HSTās fictional story of the Mint 400, and which became āFear and Loathing in Las Vegasāā¦
I have no fear of Las Vegasā¦I do loathe itā¦
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Iām PhD with a blue collar background and always find this sort of thing interestingāthe snobbish comments from people who probably are like my neighbors (hopelessly unable to fix anything simple or recognize when their building is falling apart) and, at best, curiosity. Iāve been to monster truck shows, Evil Knievel motorcycle jumps, etc. In a certain sense, itās no more exotic than going to a baseball game.
Itās helpful to remember that nice, well educated people can be total trogs. When the teabaggers came to DC, they included plenty of pleasant LL bean wearing folks who ordered lattes at my local Starbucks (enough to be holding up the line!). I recently went to a reading by Michaelangelo Signorile for his new book and there was a preppy young man who desperately wanted to defend some āniceā āresponsibleā well-educated conservative, whose niceness, etc. Signorile had pointing out how meaningless the :niceness" was and the homophobic track record of this person. People need to confront their silly bourgeois expectations before they can actually move the country forward.
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Iām not so sure. I went to a couple because my 6-7 yo son liked trucks, and it was something to do (and Iām a mechanical engineer, so I like machines, too). At least half the people there were there for their kids.
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Its more like what this motorless guy learned outside of his vehicleless existence in New York.
New York is big but it aināt everything. Much happens in the middle of the country and all the way out west that would sere the brain of this New Yorker Iām guessing.
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I live in Oakland, California and believe it or not, in this most liberal of places, the Monster Jam (i.e. the monster truck show) comes here once or twice a year to the Oakland Coliseum and/or PacBell Park where the Giants play. I have gone to watch it, twice. The stadiums were full of perfectly normal people who just happened to find enjoyment in big-ass loud trucks going off jumps and crushing other vehicles. The first time I went, it was raining, and watching those trucks spray mud all over the place was quite a spectacle. A liberal friend of mine enjoys it so much, she has been to the national finals in Vegas. She had a blast.
It is just entertainment folks. As the author seems to have found, strip away the judgment and preconceived notions about the people you find at these events, and maybe just for a minute you might find you can have a good time with them watching the spectacle.
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We have NASCAR and the Indy 500 and monster truck rallies and fake wrestling.
Other cultures have bull fighting and bull running and caber tossing and live sword play and feeding people to wild animals (or used to.)
Itās a wash, imo. Thereās just something about human nature which these activities appeal to, both for the performer and the spectator alike.
He just died last week 
Spend a few hours on Georgetown Rd. adjacent to the track in Indianapolis during 500 week. I challenge you to leave without serious reservations human procreation is decidely unwise.
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Needs to be a caveat before every slice of Slice.
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Iād be curious to see what this coupleās reaction would be to the Concours DāElgance at Pebble Beach. How do you fit educated, wealthy and in some cases very liberal people spending 10, 20 or 30 million dollars on āautomotive cultureā into this narrative? Or any Sunday here in Las Vegas for a ācars and coffeeā show, with a mix of low riders, hot rods, ricers and classics.
Itās art, guys. Kinetic sculpture. In my opinion, maybe the most American of art forms. There are a million rulesā¦and no rules at all. And it crosses ALL economic, political, ethnic and even gender boundaries. Hell it spans the globe, with unique expressions found everywhere on the planet (see Japanese car culture for some REALLY great stuff). Jeepneyās and Tuk-Tuks may be a form of public transportation in some less developed parts of the world, but they are often just as much an expression of the owners creativity and love of his vehicle as Ralph Laurenās $30mil Bugatti.
I went out to the race track a couple of years ago with a friend who raced a Dodge Viper in club events. I suspect he had somewhere north of $250k tied up in his hobby, and he was quite good, winning his class at a number of events (he was in his late 60s/early 70s at the time). At the same event, the Ferrari club was present. One gentleman easily had several million dollars tied up in transporters, race cars and luxury motor homes. If he wins the majority of races, and the championship at the end of the year, he will take home a nice trophy and a couple of hundred bucks in prize money. Hardly worth the effort, and yet there are literally thousands of people just like him doing the same thing (well maybe not quite as expensively) all over the country on almost every weekend. I raced a little bit in SCCA back in the early 70s, and followed various teams ever since. Itās a BIG world out there, and motorsports/automobile ācultureā is everywhere.
Sheeshā¦New Yorkersā¦what are you gonna do?
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You mean like Bourbon Street on literally any night of the week canāt? Or ditto the Las Vegas strip (where I live)? At least Indy only happens once a year.
From The Atlantic, āMillennials: Not So Cheap After All:ā
This week, Bloomberg reports new data from J.D. Power & Associates, which finds that Millennials, or Generation Y (essentially: anybody born in the 1980s or 1990s), now account for 27 percent of new car sales. Thatās more than Generation X, and second only to Boomers.
I read the article with gritted teeth. Red-faced and gripping my confirmation bias like the steering wheel of a drift-turning Motorsport vehicle, I emailed J.D. Power to get the data, hoping to find some morsel of evidence that Millennial demand for cars wasnāt actually growing quickly.
Now that I have seen the data, I can report: Millennial demand for cars is growing quickly. New vehicle sales among young people are rising as if drawn on a ruler.
I am a child of 1960s Long Island. My cousin drag-raced a '56 Chevy Bel Air (āThe Exodusā), and Iād watch him and my uncles labor away on that thing and rev the engine so loud you could hear it for a mile. Iād go to Islip Speedway with my father and sister to root for the x3 Mustang, breathe exhaust, swallow flying bits of track-dirt and leave deaf with my checkered-flag souvenir.
The people there were mostly what I might now, in an unkind moment, refer to as White Trash. At the time I didnāt know what that meant, or that I was White Trash myself.
Iāve lived a reasonably successful, responsible life, and my education and standard of living far surpass those of my parents. Iām sure I have more in common intellectually, and certainly politically, with the readers and writers on TPM than with the monster truck fans. But I share a love of automobiles (and banjos) with those interbreeding ignoramuses. That will never go away, and I donāt want it to.
For many of us then and now, a fascination with and love for automobiles has gotten in the blood. We still feel it, we understand it, and we know in a way others canāt that the American automobile isnāt going away any time soon.
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Thumbs up!
You know, Iād like to be at the party, it just isnāt fun anymore unless one is susceptible to brain washing. It is sad really that spirituality has become so base and mundane. There are more and better ways to participate and I am not talking bad religion. Monster Trucks are not a vision, like so many other destructive distractions in a lost and narcissistic culture. Besides, pre-teens should not be drinking monster beverages.