Jacology: Editorial On Kansas City Rivalry Is Lazy

(KPLR) – Yael Abouhalkah writes columns and editorials for the Kansas City Star. It’s a pretty good newspaper. He’s a pretty good writer. But like a lot of us, he gets lazy sometimes. You know, like when you had to write a paper in school. But you weren’t really feeling it. So you’d write some lame compare and contrast thing. You know, comparing Lincoln to George Washington, or Athens to Sparta…or Mars to Earth.

Abouhalkah had a deadline this week, so he filled it with a column comparing Kansas City and St. Louis. The headline? Kansas City keeps rising while St. Louis keeps falling. His main point seems to be that St. Louis is an unhealthy, dangerous, dying city while Kansas City isn’t. He even breathlessly points to Kansas City having more residents than St. Louis.

Does that include cows and chickens? I ask because Kansas City covers 315 square miles. That’s almost five times the area covered by the city of St. Louis. Five times. Kansas City’s amazing jump past St. Louis to become a global economic powerhouse, sort of the Hong Kong of the Great Plains, is because of K.C.’s booming population, apparently achieved by annexing farms and chicken coops for miles in every direction.

Abouhalkah notes St. Louis had a population of almost 900,000 in 1950, like he just found this out. I know the Pony Express was discontinued, but I didn’t think it took news that long to travel West. He concludes that Kansas City is growing and thriving and St. Louis is one step away from being Atlantis and vanishing underneath the river forever.

Abouhalkah KC versus STL shtick is trying to fuel the cross-state rivalry. Yael, buddy, here’s a hint, it’s only a rivalry if both sides say it is. We have a few rivalries around here. Chicago in baseball. Detroit in hockey. New Orleans in crime. But Kansas City? Not so much.

I’m Charles Jaco and that’s Jacology.