Kansas City News Blog

By CHRIS PACKHAM

Kansas City's population is up by 71,000 to 500,000 people! Maybe. Yael T. Abouhalkah has his doubts, but I'd like to welcome all our new residents personally, with a small gift basket and an envelope of coupons — I actually have to, because the neighborhood Welcome Wagon is a responsibility I take extremely seriously. Predictably, the commenters on Yael's blog attribute the population increase to "porous borders," an awesome euphemism meaning "brown people" — the current receptacle for societal anxiety, at least until the next El Niño southern oscillation or communist uprising.

It occurred to me that if I could collect just one dollar from each of these 71,000 new Kansas City residents, I could knock off for the year and work on my fantasy novel. After the jump, a proposal for the new people regarding possible contributions toward a down-payment on a particular kind of hot sandwich taking the country by storm. Click here or on this WIC-approved cheeseburger in a can:

Makin' babies: Reason magazine — which is a lot like Granny Fancier, only it's about libertarianism instead of naked British pensioners — has an article about the supposed low birth rates in developed countries, and the struggles of Gordon Parks' Shaft's "The Man" to assert a little control over hotshot loose-cannon uteruses that deliver their own brand of justice.

As usual, the concern over supposed underpopulation depends on whom you talk to — conservative commentator Pat Buchanan is pretty straightforward about wanting American white people to start having more babies to avert his nightmare scenario of an American West populated by nothing but stereotypical bandoleer-wearing Mexican banditos shooting their guns in the air and shouting, "AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI!" Neocon polemicist Mark Steyn is pretty sure that within a generation, all of Western Europe will be Islamic. Christian conservatives attribute the decline in birth rates to a general culture of permissiveness, abortion, contraception and — depending on the relative sanity of whomever you're talking to — demons, demons who fly in through the window and enter your body through the nostrils.

But as it turns out, people who speak the same language tend to enter fertility decline around the same time — in other words, women will have fewer children if their friends have fewer children, so if we want to get a handle on the problem, we just need to keep women from talking to one another. Which doesn't sound very libertarian, now that I say it out loud, so maybe I'm missing Reason's point. I do know that if infertility-objectifying magazines like Granny Fancier are any kind of cultural indicator, the prospects for population growth are pretty grim.

Speaking of overpopulation: The Kansas City Star has cut 120 jobs, apparently across all divisions. What I'm wondering is how many columnists lost their jobs, because I think anyone who gets hired at any department of the Star is immediately given a column. I'm not kidding — there are 45 columnists listed on this page, which is larger than the staff at Applebee's and way less likely to bring me a Bruschetta Burger and mozzarella sticks. For Christ's sake, how many people do you actually need to extol the manifest awesomeness of the Power & Light District? ATTENTION HUMAN RESOURCES: I could handle the entire workload of op-ed Power & Light District full-release massage all by myself. I had the boys in R&D make this prototype so our discussion could have some focus:

The Power & Light District is a jealous but merciful God

As I was drinking a Stella Artois while riding the mechanical bull at PBR Big Sky, it occurred to me that after the Cordish Company created the beasts of the field and entrusted the stewardship of the Earth to mankind, it also had the wisdom and the legislative leverage to provide outdoor drinking coupled with the kind of lax security that creates a warm, amniotic environment for safe public intoxication.

Pushing past the group of large-breasted women who had gathered in my powerful pheromonal wake, I walked outside, finished my beer with one long gulp and threw my pint glass on the ground, where it shattered at the feet of a morbidly obese security guard. He tipped his hat and wished me a pleasant evening. Following a long, satisfying belch and a brief fistfight with a pair of popped-collar douchebags from Lenexa, I urinated against the wall at the Maker's Mark Bourbon House. It was, by far, the greatest evening of my entire awesome life to date. I knew that out in the world, people were starving, homeless, possibly dying from non-non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, what doctors call Hodgkin's lymphoma. But here in the Power & Light District, all human suffering was stopped at the entrance, subjected to an ID check, roughed up and turned away.

When historians write about the Phoenix-like resurgence of downtown Kansas City, they will say that it all started with Angels Rock Bar, the Bristol, Famous Dave's Barbecue and the Flying Saucer Draught Emporium. And Mayor Mark Funkhouser is a towering pillar of awesomeness. And while we're on the subject of things that are unimpeachably awesome, how about that Sprint Center? That's worth servicing a few bonds for a number of decades, right? Garth Brooks played there! Seacrest out.