Don't be hatin' on the Monster Trucks. I have gone to a few. They're actually harmless fun. You spend a couple hours watchin' shit get smashed up, and that's pretty cool. Granted, it's a sign of our wasteful excess but you know what, it's a drop in the bucket compared to some things (how much electricity do all the lights in Vegas waste every day... every goddamn day?)

And it's (to coin a phrase) good, clean fun. Nobody cusses, nobody gets beat up (leaving the tragic accident out of the picture for a moment), and you know what? Nobody loses. It's not really a competition, any more than the hydro races are.

Compare that to the sad state of fans & sportsmanship at almost any other professional "sport" and see if you don't agree. Or check out the ever-increasing amounts of violence in "Pro Rasslin" or any of the other extreme fighting sports that keep being invented. I'll take watching big trucks smash old cars any day over that violence & sexist shit.

Not everyone there to watch the monster trucks is a right-wing gun-totin' zealot out to strip you of your rights either. No more than every member of the crowd at any Saturday night show at, say, Nectar is a tree-spiking Greenpeace member who throws blood on fur coats. I'm also certainly not breeding like a rabbit and neither are most of the other people attending, from what I can see. Most are perfectly normal folk with two kids and ordinary jobs.

Nobody goes to a monster truck show hoping to see an accident. They want to see some big trucks smash stuff up. Yeah, it's primal, noisy, and pointless. Isn't listening to a band thrash away at full volume for a couple hours sorta the same?

And you know what? The shows really are for kids anyway (again, putting the tragic accident aside for the moment). Children have short attention spands, and enjoy things that are noisy and full of action. Monster truck shows fill the bill pretty well. Would you take a six-year-old to an art gallery, and try to explain why, say, the artist braided ropes out of his dog's hair and nailed it to the walls and expect him or her to get it? No.

I go to art galleries, I actually enjoy a lot of the weird and strange stuff artists do in Seattle, so you can't peg me as one of the philistines you're railing against. However, if I did have kids, I'd take them to see monster trucks far more than I'd take them to art galleries (although I would do that too).

Having said that, the accident was tragic, my condolences to everyone involved. From reports it appears that a safety device meant to contain a mechanical failure failed itself - one of those once-in-a-million freak accidents that there's not really a way to prevent.