Just like many other great speeches, Churchill’s Sinews of Peace address delivered on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri was reduced to a few soundbites that everyone recognizes but can’t necessarily put in a context. In this case there is probably not a person alive who haven’t heard about the Iron Curtain, a Cold War reference to the division between the Soviet- and Western-influenced zones in Europe. For almost half a century, the Iron Curtain dominated the international relations, as well as lives of hundreds of millions of people. Today, its legacy is still haunting the world and, on a smaller scale, provides inspiration to a large section of this blog.
Since there is no large-scale event like an All Star Game planned in Kansas City in the year 2013, I propose to make the 30th anniversary of the movie The Day After the theme for the year. Granted, The Day After is a horrible, poorly acted, made for TV movie, with special effects that make The 7th Voyage of Sinbad look like the Star Wars, but it scared the crap out of millions of Americans and convinced President Reagan to sign a Nuclear Treaty few years later.
The movie demonstrated that it only takes hours after the nuclear strike for the American Military to disband and start fending for themselves, few days for the food riots to start, and few weeks for most people to lose their humanity and forget the English language. It also showed that the government will be predictably unprepared, a nuclear shelter doesn’t protect against a big gun and that people will still ignore the warnings and go to a movie theater right before being blasted with inexplicably excessive number of nuclear devices.
The idea of using The Day After to promote tourism in Kansas City is not new and not even mine. In his article “Kansas City after “The Day After”” published in the Travel Holiday Magazine in June 1984, John Garrity quotes Richard Pfanenstiel, director of the Missouri Film Commission saying:
“The Day After was the best thing that ever happened to Kansas City, Kansas City looked good”.
then goes on to write:
“If you caught the final 20 minutes of the ABC’s The Day After, last November’s doomsday movie, you probably don’t agree with the above statement. You saw Kansas City as an ash-gray rock pile, a windy moonscape dotted with small fires around which a few radiation-ravaged survivors huddled for warmth. The Day After, you guessed, would not o for Kansas City what Where the Boys Are did for Fort Lauderdale.
“As of Sunday night,” Kansas City Times columnist Arthur Brisbane wrote after watching the film, “we’re famous as the city ABC blew up.”
Or, as some other wag noted, “There goes the neighborhood.”
“If it weren’t for the honor of the thing,” a television newsman deadpanned, “I’d just as soon have passed it up.” This last remark, of course, paraphrased Mark Twain, the most famous of all Missourians, who predicted that mankind’s folly would bring it to just such an inglorious end.
Others contend that ABC, by blowing Kansas City off the map, actually put Kansas City on the map. The film has now been shown to nearly 200 million viewers around the world. And if The Day After depicted Kansas City as unlivable after a nuclear strike, its pre-attack footage captured this heartland city at its best: tree-lined boulevards, lush parks crowded with joggers and Frisbee throwers, monumental fountains, fashionable people shopping at fashionable store in the Country Club Plaza. The camera caught them all with an aching poignancy.
Whether Kansas City will be rewarded with a sudden influx of foreign tourists (along the lines of Hiroshima’s sober pilgrims), it’s too early to say. But even the casual visitor to Kansas City could do worse than use The Day After as an approach for a visit.
As you can see, I already completed all the necessary research, made a trip to the Kansas City Library and suffered through the entire 2 hours 6 minutes of the movie (which I have successfully avoided for my almost 20 years in this country), and now I am presenting this concept to the Kansas City Convention & Visitors Association absolutely free of charge. We need to hurry up before Lawrence steals the idea. I propose the following mottoes to be used in the campaign (sample):
Kansas City 2013: We Haven’t Been Blown Up For Real, You Know.
Kansas City 2013: We Are Not Mutants.
Kansas City 2013: Come Visit, The Radiation Is At Almost Gone.
Proposed activities (sample):
Multiple walking, bus, Segway, Volvo station wagon and helicopter tours will carry the tourists to the sites shown in the movie such as the Liberty Memorial, Plaza, Nelson-Atkins Gallery, West Bottoms, Truman Sports Complex.
With a new wave of revolutions in the Middle East, certain historic parallels come to mind. In the last 50 years many countries experienced revolutions, some were violent and others peaceful; some turned out to be successful and others failed or brought about a slew of unintended consequences. We remember the most dramatic ones, or maybe the ones some of us witnessed in person; others were forgotten or drowned in the stream of worthless entertainment news. Whatever happens in the Middle East, the odds for the positive outcome are not very good.
In 1968 the Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to prevent it from straying away from the Comminist party line. The Life Magazine covered the events in the issue headlined “Czechoslovakia:Death of the Bright Young Freedom”. I don’t remember this subject being covered in our school history books; if it was, the official version would have likely be completely removed from reality. The only time anyone mentioned it to me was when my Father talked about someone he knew who was serving in the military in 1968 and was deployed to Czechoslovakia.
This set was published in the April, 1959 issue under the heading “A beautiful parole worker,Pat Rice, brings glamour to the grim proceedings in Kansas City, Kansas municipal court“. Hopefully Ms.Rice, who should be about 70 years old now is alive and well and still has this old magazine.
Bonus question:what’s on TV?
20 yr. old parole office aide Patricia Rice at home.
