The Kansas City Star's Mike Hendricks has published another of his "nothing matters and what if it did" complaints, this one a column slugged "In the 'burbs, does it matter who's KC's mayor?"
From his soft perch on the minivan beat, he observes: "Over the past couple of months, the Kansas City mayor's race has come up exactly zero times in day-to-day conversation with suburban friends and acquaintances who work outside the news media."
Telling!
Hendricks then hedges a little: "But on the off chance that the subject does arise at my daughter's soccer game or at the grocery checkout, I put the question to friends, co-workers, community leaders and the two guys who faced off in Tuesday's mayoral election."
Wait -- Hendricks leaves his house?
Nah. Why should he? He's a social-networking wizard, able to take the metro's pulse with a few keystrokes:
"I commute into the city every workday and spend more waking hours there than I do in my 'bedroom suburb,' " a pal of mine said via Facebook.
That's a longer answer than Hendricks received from mayoral runner-up Mike Burke's office, to which he apparently posed some kind of "why should people with decks know who KCMO's mayor is" query. He quotes Burke's rep: "Short answer: We are all one community." Hendricks notes that Sly James didn't answer him -- proof that the incoming mayor has a well-calibrated sense of media priorities.
Hendricks notes that he and his quoted Facebook friend both live in Lenexa, before he protests that the place that gave the world Paul Rudd is no mere "bedroom suburb." Perish the thought. It has an Applebee's and everything -- one of the businesses that makes Johnson County, as Hendricks puts it, a "net importer of jobs."
Finally, he wheels out his big gun: Mary Lim-Lampe, chairwoman of Mid-America Regional Council advisory committee One KC Voice.
"For a community organizer, it's hard to convince people we're interconnected," she tells him.
He mulls this over, gives a sage nod and then weeps for community organizers: "The job might be easier were there a unified transit system or another bistate effort like the Union Station redo." The columnist sighs a halfhearted closing zinger: "But don't hold your breath."
Wait, Mike, wait -- don't go yet. Are you saying your neighbors should give a happy Lenexa fuck about Kansas City, Missouri, and help build it a toy train? Or are you saying Kansas Citians should dry their net-job-loss tears and get over Johnson County? Someone get on Facebook and ask him.
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This items is one of those knee-jerk "we're cooler than the suburbs" rants that the Pitch periodically regurgitates to renew its claim on some semblance of urban cred. If you guys really believed that, you wouldn't have your boxes all over Johnson, Clay and Platte counties. People have their perspective skewed in these parts, and think that living in Brookside or on the Plaza makes them some kind of brave pioneer. The fact is that most of the city of Kansas City, Mo., is as suburban and vanilla as the neighborhoods in Lenexa, Liberty or Parkville, and the city is so spread out that only tiny pockets of it have the denseness, energy and vitality of what most people elsewhere in the country think of as an urban atmosphere. Not that there's anything wrong with that--people obviously have found other qualities that make living in the area appealing--but why do people have to pretend that KC is this mean-streets urban bunker that suburbanites are too timid and ignorant to appreciate?
And by the way, before criticizing Hendricks or other non-KC citizens for not caring about the mayor's race, you might ask the 80 percent of those who do live in the city why they didn't care enough to vote?
Mike,
You say you're not complaining, but it sounds an awful lot like you are. I'll read tomorrow's column, but I'm quite certain it won't satisfy me. And judging by your paper's readership numbers, it won't satisfy many others, either.
As far as your passion goes, it seems you've been fairly dispirited for a while. I can't recall much that you've done that was stellar since you were picking Robert Kory apart a few years back with the Wonderful World of Oz fiasco, or whatever that scam was called. You were really top notch then. And now that I think of it, you rallied up a nice column a week or two ago about the Sunflower site going to shit once more. But Scott and the Pitch rightfully point out that columns like the one he references isn't the best use of ink that the Star's buying.
Hey, kids, thanks for the mention. Great to have The Pitch back skewering the the big bad Star once again. Not complaining.
That's your job and you've been falling down on it lately.
Meanwhile, check out tomorrow's column. I don't know if it displays enough passion there to satisfy Tom Violence. But hey, some days there's more passion than others. Sound familiar?
Scott,
You nailed it with this column. Sad thing is, Hendricks used to be a great voice and wrote and reported with passion. Yael's the only Star columnist who seems interested anymore.
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