Chronicling The Obvious
In an off twist of fate, I find myself the single most consistent presence in the thirty-year history of Ingram's. I say "odd" because even though I wrote my first Ingram's column 23 years ago, I have been fired or set adrift on three occasions since.
More oddly still, the same factor that has led to my firing has in-evitably led to my rehiring, namely my role as Kansas City's "chronicler of the obvious." Readers like to read what they know to be obviously true. Publishers like to attract readers. But editors, alas, occasionally push their own agendas fully indifferent to the desires of the readers or of the publishers.
Case in point: An Ingram's editor of not so distant vintage scrapped a column of mine on female entre- preneurship, allegedly because it was "offensive." When I challenged her to cite an offending sentence, she upped the ante with an "appalling" one. The sentence she cited was three words long "Marriage is good."
I knew it was time for me to move on. This editor wasn't about to publish Sex, Lies and Fire Escapes. In this and related articles, I asked the one obvious question about firefighting: given that the skills sets for success are roughly the same for the Kansas City Fire Department as they are for the Kansas City Chiefs, why do we insist on gender balance only in the enterprise that is not a game, the one where real lives depend on the strength and stamina of the team members? Would the media cheer if The Chiefs were compelled to recruit women? I don't think so.
Fortunately, the Sweeneys indulged my interest in firefighting when they hired me back. Although Joe doesn't always agree with me, he is not afraid to mix it up. It is Michelle Sweeney who serves as my Jiminy Cricket. She never exactly criticizes my columns. She merely worries sweetly and out loud until I respond puppy-like with the tonal adjustments necessary to make the obvious more palatable to the more sensitive.
Two years ago, I wrote a take-no-prisoners account of how the Kauffman Foundation had lost sight of Ewing Kauffman's goals for his foundation. Prudently, Michelle worried me back to a subtle critique.
As I noted, the foundation's various PR photos typically showed inner-city children in some form of public-school setting and well-dressed adults, almost all white, in some entrepreneurial setting. "The task at hand for Schramm and the Foundation," I argued in the amended draft, "is to show kids the way from photo op A to photo op B." At the time, the Foundation had no real plans for making that link.
The column found its way to newly hired President Carl Schramm, then still in Baltimore. He called to assure me that things were about to change. He believed, in fact, that he had been hired to honor and restore Kauffman's original vision.
As Schramm soon discovered, however, the local daily newspaper had no use for the obvious. It traffics almost exclusively in the expected, the orthodox. Spurred on by some unhappy exiles from the Kauffman Eden, its writers and editors launched an unholy defense of the status quo that came damn close to getting Schramm booted.
I do, however, owe a debt to the local media in their meek and many permutations. By hewing so religiously to the orthodox, they have left all the obvious stories to me. This is particularly true for stories that have a racial component. (Off camera: Michelle starts worrying).
A few years ago I wrote a column on the uncelebrated death of Tariq Al-Ataby, an Iraqi-American cab driver. Three inner-city teens shot him after he bravely drove them home. At the time of his death, however, the media had been beating their collective breasts about what The Star called "ugly cabdriver racism," especially as practiced in New York.
As I wrote in my column, "Sacrificial Lambs," the mainstream media were ignoring the obvious, namely that there were no white American cab drivers left in New York City and few elsewhere. The real story was that in America's cities, cab drivers of color were choosing not to pick up passengers of color. This was a fascinating angle, but it unnerved the major media. They timidly retreated to the expected, time-honored position of white racism and ignored those stories--like Al-Ataby's death--that undermined it.
Three years ago, I documented the local media's most startling punt on a racially tinged story in a column entitled "Orwellian Silence Over Wichita Horror." In it, I described the murder and sexual humiliation of five innocent young people as "a night of depravity not seen since the days of Charles Manson."
"If it bleeds, it leads," they say of local news. Well, not always. One and all, the local media buried the story, and the reason was obvious: the killers in Wichita were other than white. The story did not fit the politically acceptable made-for-TV mold of, say, a dragging death in Texas or of a lethal gay bashing in Wyoming or even the apolitical Kansas murders of In Cold Blood notoriety.
What made The Star's judgment on the Wichita story so bewildering is the latitude its sports editors grant on issues of race to their best and most prov-ocative writer, Jason Whitlock. For instance, I would never have dared to call the wife of the MU president, "Oprah X," as Whitlock did recently, and if I had, Michelle would have surely stopped me.
Economic development has its own politics, and they are only a wee bit less ticklish. Although I am generally pro-development, one makes few new friends by asking the obvious questions. The one that repeats itself most often is this: why do we always feel compelled to mimic the schemes of other cities, even the crackpot ones?
The inevitable and irritating Denver has light rail so must we. On this score, I wrote the obvious: "We are the least dense metro in the world, and we have only 1/5 as many jobs downtown as are needed to elevate light rail from debacle to a merely a bad idea." Fortunately, this idea was stopped in its tracks--or at least stalled.
The fact that every other large city had a so-called "science museum" struck me as an excellent reason for us to have something else, something different and distinctive. Although I supported the restoration of Union Station, I imagined the soon-to-be Science City as "a high tech pinball arcade." I was not far off. I merely over-imagined its entertainment value.
On a recent Kansas City Week in Review, I offered the sole dissent on "Son of Power & Light," Mayor Barnes' uninspired new plan to create a "second Plaza" downtown. The obvious question was, "Why do we need two Plazas?"
The preposterous Oz theme park,
I described for what it obviously was, "the most epic and intricate public-private cluster back-scratch in recent history." Before the city invested uncounted (literally) millions in the Jazz Hall of Fame, I wrote, "Even if located in an historic area, what good will an impoverished, second-class Jazz Hall do for cultural pride?" No one has yet to answer that question. When the city proposed $50 million for a new zoo, I dissented, questioning whether a city-run anything knows how to have fun. Given recent layoffs, it apparently does not.
The letters I receive support my thesis that I simply have the opportunity to voice what most thinking people are thinking. "I just read your column. It was though I was reading my own words," wrote one recent letter writer.
"Your article in Ingram's this month was RIGHT ON," reads another. "You have expressed very clearly in words what my heart has grown to increasingly feel."
In the final analysis, it is the great good horse sense of Ingram's readers and the quiet courage of my publishers that has kept me in print lo these many years. Thanks to you all. Even Denver doesn't have an Ingram's.
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 23 years. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and occasionally scare the living hell out of the publishers.