TGIF: Thank God It’s Fall

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2023

It’s a marker of how mind-numbingly stupid, infinitely gullible, and deeply brainwashed younger generations of journalists are that our local newspaper can publish an article, as it did this summer past, attributing the rail warping on the Downtown streetcar line to … climate change. Really.

No indication that anyone had the intellectual curiosity to compare past performance of rail here to periods of even hotter weather—say, 1934, THE hottest summer on record here, when the city operated a network of streetcars exponentially larger than ours today.

Nor did there seem to have been any curiosity to compare recent performance of the local streetcar to that in cities experiencing greater weather torment this year. Like, oh, Phoenix. Suffering a historic summer heat wave this year, the 28.2-mile Valley Metro Rail System is 12 times the length of Kansas City’s Downtown streetcar. Over the 30 days from mid-June to mid-July this year, the daily high there exceeded 100 degrees—every day. The highest in that stretch was 115 degrees; the average high was 108.4. The system ran without disruption.

Kansas City has never even seen a 115-degree high, not even during the BTU onslaught of ’34. 

Texas has been scorched this summer, as well. The rail systems in Dallas and Austin seemed to be running just fine. Would it be too much, then, to ask the local media mavens if they could set aside their fervent adherence to Climate Change Dogma to ask a few questions? Starting with: 

• What other factors might contribute to rail failure? 

• What, specifically, made the rail on one small stretch of rail over I-670 fail? Why isn’t the rest of the line imperiled by world-ending heat?

• Who manufactured the steel in our system’s rails, and have any of that producer’s other products incurred similar deficiency of performance elsewhere? 

• Anything about the design and installation process that might make parts of this system more vulnerable to failure during periods of warmer weather?

This is the problem with Groupthink: It’s not just that the most relevant questions don’t get asked, it’s that those afflicted are incapable of understanding that their original premise may be flawed. Sure, you can find “experts” at far-flung universities to offer confirmation bias by declaring this year’s heat as evidence of apocalyptic change. But can you force yourself to seek out evidence that counters your base assumptions?

I’m old enough to remember the days of tar-and-gravel residential street surfacing in these parts. As kids, we used to delight in grabbing sticks to burst the tar bubbles rising in the summer heat. Once upon a heat stroke, it was understood that when you live in a region with four distinctive seasons, summers could get hot, winters could get cold, and—sometimes, in the spring and fall, there would be stretches of idyllic Southern California weather. Sometimes, hours and hours of it.

Most of my career was spent in newspapers, and a big chunk of that for an outfit that no longer exists. It had more than 30 fairly large newspapers in diverse geographies across the country but seemed fixated on pounding a particular style of management-think into each one. The mid-level editor program that took staffers to Miami for a week at a time was popularly derided by the rank-and-file as Clone School. You could see the change it made in people, right down to the wardrobe, with the adherence to the KR uniform for the men: Carolina-blue Oxford shirts, ties, khaki slacks. They dressed like the wait staff at a fast-casual restaurant.

The chain also seemed averse to placing local talent in leadership roles at its papers, rotating Clone School II grads into those locales for a couple of years before sending them on to the Next Big Thing or washing them out as Gannett fodder.

One of those masters of meteorology was in a key newsroom role in the early 1990s when some particularly warm weather moved in. Having made his way to Wichita after stints in Minneapolis and the Pacific Northwest, he appeared to be encountering Kansas-level heat for the first time. For weeks on end, he would lead daily planning meetings with exhortations for the staff to go “bigger and deeper” into the impact of a 100-degree day on the readership.

The eye-rolling among natives at those meetings was quite impressive. The typical staff rejoinder was: “Welcome to July in Wichita.” He simply couldn’t comprehend that this wasn’t “news” in River City; it was life on the Great Plains. Most of us had internalized that long before. 

His innate understanding of readers’ real concerns wouldn’t last long; he was soon instructing new legions of deep thinkers as a college professor in his beloved Northwest. 

The presence of dullards on city desks today, then, is nothing new. It’s just a shame that they feel compelled to put their ignorance on display with ink on paper. And that they take such pride in doing so.