UNSTUCK: KINETICALLY KROSSING KANSAS
Reflection, Rumination & Rhetoric from the Road
If you are going to drive clear across Kansas—say, from KC, Missouri to Denver, Colorado—you need to have a few fleeting destinations in between.
There are a few good reasons for this.
One: It is a long friggin’ haul.
Two: You need to climb out and straighten up at least every couple of hours
Three: Short-term goals are important to prevent tedium (or at least stave it off as long as possible).
In Kansas, traversing the pencil straight ultra- flat I-70 punctuated by grain silos, there are a couple of options:
Wamego—seven miles off the interstate—proclaims itself the hometown of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, a fantastical tale of journeying and self-discovery.
This town is themed accordingly, with a Yellow Brick Road and a museum celebrating L. Frank Baum and his creations.
For a town to thrive it needs pilgrims for commerce. This explains why Wamego is so cheerfully vibrant while Las Vegas, New Mexico is mostly a ghost town (despite having a college).
The ironical thing about Dorothy is that, from the moment a tornado swirls her in the technicolor of Oz, she strives to return to Kansas with her little cairn terrier, Toto…
…yet, almost immediately after arriving home in Kansas, Dorothy becomes obsessed with a Return to Oz.
An anecdote from the museum curator: Judy Garland fell in love with Toto and wanted to adopt him after shooting was completed. But Toto was such a good actor, obeying every command of its trainer/owner, he was just too valuable to give up.
Like most treasures in history, the 1939 movie was not an immediate success and failed to earn a profit (despite nominations for six Academy Awards). It was only with the advent of television, and its broadcast on national TV in 1956, that the film elevated to the culturally iconic status it enjoys today.
From Wamego on , thto Abilene, where Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States, was born and lies buried in a chapel on the grounds of the Eisenhower Library, which also encompasses his boyhood home.
“Ike,” as he was known, occupied the Oval Office when I was born and presided over a decade of peace and contentment, prosperity and stability. The GI Bill, the advent of rock & roll, the Civil Rights Movement, the Interstate Highway System (a lesson learned from Germany’s autobahns). And a civility that seems no longer to exist.
An anecdote from the curator: When I asked if the museum included a replica of Ike’s Oval Office, like Harry S Truman’s Museum in Independence, Missouri, which I visited eight years ago, she replied: “No, because it did not change under President Eisenhower. He arrived with a few boxes of papers and books and never changed a thing. Except for placing a framed photo of his wife, Mamie, on the desk.”
To me, that speaks volumes about the modesty of a man simply getting down to biz.
In Kansas, for hours thereafter, only the lonely, unrelenting road.
A timely reminder when presidential leadership was a source of pride (Eisenhower.) Tonight’s SOTU was pitifully weak, painful and quite frankly intolerable.