What If They Gave A War and Everybody Came?

I keep meaning to take the honyocks to the World War I museum at the Liberty Memorial, but something else keeps coming up. Then I heard about how Mayor Lurch* is proposing to cut funding to it, and I figured we better go while we still could.

The museum is circular, and there's a bridge from the outside ring (where the gift shop and ticket sales and whatnot is located) to the museum proper.  Above you is glass, and you can see the stone phallus if you look up, but you don't notice that so much.  Because the floor is also glass, and you're maybe ten feet over a field of flowers.  It's beautiful and disturbing, and so perfectly appropriate, I suppose.  I remembered a t-shirt I saw years ago that said, 'On the other hand, what if they gave a war and everybody came?'

The museum starts out with a fifteen minute flick on how WWI got going.  It's not perfect, and even a little politically slanted, but its about as succinct an explanation as I've ever seen.  Fifteen minutes ain't much to work with, though I think I could make the explanation even shorter (and I'm not normally thought of as 'concise'):

The President of the United States and a crime boss like John Gotti differ only in window dressing and relative spheres of influence.  In other words, political leaders, whether elected or born to a monarchy, are nothing more than pretentious gangsters.  You've seen the Godfather, you've seen Casino: World War I was kind of like that.

There, that's all you needed to know.  Seriously, plug in Crips and Bloods for Germans and French, and switch the map of Europe for a map of Los Angeles and you could come up with a very similar story.  The LAPD could be America, only going in when the violence seems to matter to rich whites in Orange County.

I know, a couple paragraphs back, I criticized the film introducing the museum at the Liberty Memorial as being politically biased, and then I go and say something like that.  Welcome to Lobster Land: I don't pretend to be unbiased.

I've thought a lot lately about Švejk, and one of the themes you find in that novel is 'Why do we care about Ferdinand?' Here's a country, what's now the Czech Republic, whose citizens are drafted and sent to die in the trenches on behalf of some inbred Hungarian asshead who's been making Czech life less enjoyable by divine right.  

I'm sure more than a few Czech soldiers thought, 'Wait a minute, isn't that the guy I wanted to shoot telling me to go defend his reign over my country??'  Of course, the idea of 'country' in the sense of nationalism was relatively new, and the introductory film didn't miss that.

A nation in the sense of nationalism isn't really much more than a gang, is it?  It's 'these people are like me, so I'm with them' and anyone else can suck it.

The scale, of course, makes a difference.  It's stupid for one teenager to machine-gun another in gang warfare, but millions of teenagers drafted to murder one another in the trenches, well, stupid isn't a big enough word for that.

And speaking of scale, it's impressive to see what the weapons look like.  These are the first weapons of 'modern' warfare, howitzers with barrels you could almost hide in, mortars that throw shells the size of basketballs, machine guns, airplanes, torpedos...

Em wasn't in favor of going on this adventure, by the way.  She had places to go, people to see, people she wouldn't see if I couldn't get her to shut the attitude off.

Everything can't be the Cosmosphere.  Of course World War I isn't as inspiring as putting a man on the moon.  Could we have been on the moon in 1918 if we had put the effort in getting there we put into seeing how many young men could be murdered for no reason? 

That's why the Sphinxes at the base of the tower have their wings folded over their faces.  War is so horrible, even a creepy monster like the Sphinx can't bear to see it.

Everything was boring, according to her, until we actually went up the tower.

I've been there, but maybe 20 years ago.  I remembered the stairs but not the elevator to them. 

The mechanism is pretty open to view, just a cage to keep you from sticking your fingers into it.  I don't think I've ever seen how elevators work so clearly.  Pretty cool stuff.

Once we were up on the platform, well, we didn't think it was a windy day.  But we about got blown off the tower.  When we launch a model rocket and watch it go off into the sweet by and by under canopy and wonder, well here's your answer.  The winds might be 5-10 on the ground, but go up 217 feet and it might be a gale.  Go up a thousand feet and don't be surprised if that slowly descending rocket is going to move without leaving a change of address.

One of the museum employees told us to check out the Red Cross museum across the street at Union Station while we were there, and we did.

First off, it's not a museum, it's a display on the third floor.  For seconds, most of the employees of Union Station don't know it's there, so if you ask for directions, in my experience, two out of three will tell you there's no such thing.

I've wondered about going to Bodies Revealed while it's showing there, and to my surprise, Em even expressed interest in it.  But it's expensive.  $24 for adults, $19 for kiddos.

But the third person I asked did help us find the creepy wax-museum setup on the third floor, and we had fun walking around the station, checking out the Irish Museum we spotted on the way in and whatnot.

*Mayor Lurch is, by the way, probably the closest thing to an honest man I've ever seen win the mayorship of a full sized city. He's not much of a personality, which may be part of why I tend to think he's shooting straight. But besides that, going back a good fifteen to twenty years, Kansas City, Missouri has been obviously reckless with its TIF projects. The theory behind TIF is you take a blighted area, give a huge tax break to a big box retailer or developer to put something there. The sales taxes generated by the new store pay for the development, and the resulting economic activity has a cascading benefit in the community, creating jobs and boosting the tax base surrounding the project. The problem is the politicians and the businesspeople who work these deals out both have a vested interest in the project going forward even if the deal stinks. The politician can say, 'Look, there's a Costco there where before there was only a dirty bookstore and some slums,' and Costco, who would never have built in that neighborhood because the shrinkage they'll face ruins their business model, gets government subsidies sufficient to overcome those losses.



What's wrong with that? Well, if the city is providing $5 million in tax breaks and only ends up netting $3 million, they've got a bit of a problem. Do this over and over, and add zeroes onto those figures, and it gets pretty desperate. In the case of the Glover Plan, I recall, part of what the city provided was a substantial payment to help the aforementioned dirty book store, blight that they felt it was on one corner, move to another corner in the same city.

But back to Lurch, the present Mayor of Kansas City. He's an accountant, and it shows. When I say he seems like a straight shooter, one of the things he's known for is pointing out where the TIF projects aren't performing nearly like the blue sky they were sold under. Offering funding cuts to the Liberty Memorial and the Zoo may be unpopular, but I have a feeling he's telling the truth that the city is overdrawn and something's got to give.