This week, I want to talk a bit about how the period I study resonates in our everyday lives through the foods we eat.
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This week, I want to talk a bit about how the period I study resonates in our everyday lives through the foods we eat.
(Sound of a grill lighting.)
This week, I thought I’d record an idea that I’ve had for a while. Originally, this demonstration was going to be filmed for a course I taught last summer, but it didn’t get developed in time. So, on Tuesday afternoon when I was looking at the story I was developing for this week and saw how little I’d finished of it, thanks to my other work taking up a greater amount of my time than expected, I returned to this idea. So, here’s a synopsis of me grilling a couple burgers and talking about it.
First, I get the ground chuck burger patties out of the freezer. (frozen patties hitting the plate) Buying in bulk and freezing the beef helps keep costs down.
“Now the seasoning that I usually use for this, Lawry’s, has salt, sugar: definitely something which appeared through the Columbian Exchange from Madeira to the Caribbean and Brazil, and the spices are paprika and turmeric: those are also important with the trade connections in the 16th & 17th centuries, onion, corn starch, and garlic. So, this seasoning is certainly a part of it. This seasons the beef which is European in origin using spices that come from all around the globe.”
“And now, I’ll season these.” –– The seasoning adds flavor to what otherwise is just a frozen piece of bland-tasting beef. Meat seasonings are more common in Texas barbecue, where they take the form of rubs. When I’m making brisket, I will use a big meat rub from Joe’s Kansas City Barbecue to enhance the meat’s flavor.
“Now, of course you could top your burger with garnish, with tomatoes which come from Mexico, or lettuce, which is more ubiquitous, onions, which are European in origin, or mustard, ketchup (which is tomato sauce & sugar, I’m less fond of that). The point is that the burger has a great deal of different sources to it, many of which go back to the Columbian Exchange, elements of which are traceable back to Europe as well as the Americas. And then of course, you eat your burger with fried potatoes, with French fries (chips if you’re British.) Potatoes come from Peru and were introduced to other places from there, or sweet potatoes which also come from South America. I’ve read that sweet potatoes were sometimes called Taíno potatoes after the native people of the Caribbean, yet they were also used by the Tupinambá of Brazil who I study.”
After the grill heated up to around 650ºF (343ºC), which on this very windy evening took about 15 minutes, I took the patties outside and dropped them on the grill. (Sizzling sound)
Once I had the patties on the grill, I returned to the kitchen to prepare the cheese, to cut the cheese if you will. For this meal, I’m using two different types of cheese. On one burger I have an Irish cheddar and on the other a Mexican blend that’s mostly made up of Monterey Jack and White Cheddar. I discovered my love for the Monterey Jack burger at our local Tex-Mex restaurant, where the burger on the menu is made with Monterey Jack cheese. The flavor is distinctive and a nice change of pace. I also like putting provolone, parmesan, and mozzarella on my burgers, though in that instance to go full Italian burger I also enjoy including marinara sauce. I discovered this type of burger at a famous burger restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the street from Harvard’s Houghton Library, called Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, where this Italian burger was named the Dr. Fauci Burger on the menu.
“Alright, time to flip.”
“Now, of course none of this would’ve been possible without the transatlantic trade connections that developed after Columbus’s first voyage in 1492. The beef in these burgers come from cattle which replaced the bison which existed previously out here on the Great Plains, and there’s some debate about whether bison should replace beef all over again. So, maybe in 10 or 20 years’ time if I do this all over again, I’ll be doing it with bison instead of beef.” While I made my speech to the microphone, the timer went off on my watch telling me the patties were done cooking. “And now, the timer’s gone off. Let’s take these off. So, these are looking pretty good. There’s the cheddar one, and now my Monterey Jack one.”
“But now, if you’ll excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I want to eat. Bye, bye.”
Today, one week after this city's great triumph and great tragedy, I've decided to reflect on the week now passed.
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Today, one week after this city’s great triumph and great tragedy, I’ve decided to reflect on the week now passed.
One of my favorite speeches of Peter Capaldi’s run on Doctor Who came at a moment when the Doctor finds himself in the middle of a war-game just beginning. On the one side are an alien species beginning their invasion of Earth, on the other the humans fighting for survival as we do. In a powerful bit of oration, Capaldi’s Doctor cries out that none of this conflict would happen if we would just sit down and talk with each other. I think of this scene often when I’m reading news analysis of our current moment in American history. We are at a point where we so vastly disagree with each other over the very facts of our nature and our world that we only talk with people with whom we agree.
Now there’s a key semantic note here: we talk to people with whom we disagree, yet we often only talk withpeople with whom we agree. One week ago, this city was filled with millions of people talking, cheering, laughing, and dancing with each other in our moment of jubilee. One week ago, this city basked in the bright, warm mid-February sky.
I didn’t go downtown for the parade, instead choosing to watch the first hour of it at home before going to my parish church for Ash Wednesday Mass and a delightful afternoon walk on that warm day at the Kansas City Zoo. While I was at the Zoo, riding on the Sky Safari chairlift on the way back from seeing the chimpanzees, I heard over the staff radio that something was happening at the parade. A few seconds later one of my best friends, a regular Wednesday Blog reader no less, texted me about a shooting at Union Station. By the time I returned to ground at the other side of the chairlift near the cheetah enclosure I knew enough that I chose to cut my zoo visit short and return to the assured safety of home.
At that point, we didn’t know if the shooting, still ongoing, was a terror attack or a fight gone wrong. It turned out to be the latter, yet in the process 22 bystanders were injured and 1 bystander, Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was killed. Her name is now etched into the memory of this city. She is by no means the first Kansas Citian to be killed in a shooting in the past year, each Sunday at Mass my parish prays for the victims of gun violence killed in the past week, ultimately reading 184 names in the 12 month course of 2023. Still, this was the first time that such a shooting happened with elected officials from the Governors of Kansas and Missouri to the Mayor of Kansas City to State and County legislators from throughout our region were all present. There are reports of Chiefs coach Andy Reid and players from the team helping comfort other revelers shocked by the sudden shooting and leading many to safety within Union Station itself.
At the time of writing the Kansas City Police Department has reported that the two suspects in this shooting are juveniles who got into an argument at the end of the Super Bowl Rally and started firing at least one, if not two, weapons. These individuals weren’t talking with each other but instead were talking to each other. The circumstances of the laws which govern our society here in Missouri contributed to this situation, and I hope that the experience inspires change in the hardest of hearts in Jefferson City and Topeka.
That evening, feeling shocked and dumbed by the experience of seeing our jubilee transform into a living nightmare I wanted to do something, anything that could help. At dinner, I compiled a list of all of the Members of Congress who represent the Kansas City Metropolitan Area with their DC office phone numbers and posted it to my Instagram story and Facebook profile. The following morning then, I dialed the three numbers of my Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver, and Senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt. I spoke with a staffer for the Congressman and left messages with the senators’ offices.
Sen. Hawley (R-MO): (202) 224-6154
Sen. Schmitt (R-MO): (202) 224-5721
Sen. Moran (R-KS): (202) 224-6521
Sen. Marshall (R-KS): (202) 224-4774
Rep. Cleaver (D-MO): (202) 225-4535
Rep. Alford (R-MO): (202) 225-2876
Rep. Graves (R-MO): (202) 225-7041
Rep. Davids (D-KS): (202) 225-2865
Rep. LaTurner (R-KS): (202) 225-6601
In each case, echoing what Jason Kander, a local veteran and sometime Democratic political candidate, said on Wednesday night, asked each official to consider the repeal of a law called the Protection for Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) which prohibits lawsuits against the gun industry over damages caused by their products. The judicial system is something which ensures consumer safety. Without this safeguard, we are at far greater risk as a society, and we’re a society with a government that has checks and balances built into our very DNA! Those checks and balances only really work if the different branches of government, and the people who choose those in government, talk with each other about the issues of the day which in some cases can determine life or death.
As the week drew to a close, I set into a new task and worked a good 21 hours this weekend at the Kauffman Center in what was truly a wonderful antidote to the grief I felt after the events midweek. To me it seemed that many people choose to come see the Kansas City Ballet’s production of Peter Pan for the escapism that the boy who never grows up embodies. We did our part, however small, to help heal our city and restore some of that jubilant spirit to our lives. Even so, on one of those nights after a long shift I drove home down Main Street and stopped at the Pershing Road light just before midnight. Even then, days later, with St. John of the Cross’s dark night of the soul feeling ever present around me at that scene, the red and yellow confetti still gently fell as it had on Wednesday morning.
On Saturday afternoon, I attended with my parents and grandmother a rally held by the gun control organization Moms Demand Action in Washington Square Park, located across Main Street from Union Station. It is a site I know best as the annual home of the Kansas City Irish Festival’s arts area, where among other works of great imagination, I talked myself out of buying a beautiful painting of the USS Enterprise-Dfrom Star Trek: The Next Generation during the last festival over Labor Day weekend. The speakers at that rally included Moms Demand Action organizers, Missouri State Representatives, Jackson County Legislator Manny Abarca IV, and our mayor Quinton Lucas. All of the speeches I heard were stirring, and like my relations there I felt the same call to action, even as the same confetti fell around us blown on the wind from the west across the park.
Writing this on Monday night just before bed, I’m surprised to think that by the time you read this blog it will have only been 1 week, a mere 7 days, since our jubilee became our nightmare in the place where our city celebrates great triumphs. To me, this last week has felt more like two weeks, the emotions have been too great to be contained by a single week alone. I sit here, writing, hoping these words speak with you, while listening to Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic’s 2015 performance of Verdi’s Requiem. It seems to be the best soundtrack for this week’s edition of the Wednesday Blog, something which evokes the inherent conflict and paradox of human experience and human emotions. Giuseppe Verdi was, after all, noted for his anti-clerical views, yet his spirituality can be heard in every note of this great Mass of the Dead.
I thought briefly on Wednesday about what I would say if I were in the room with the two suspects in this shooting. Yet after a few moments, after all the anger, all I felt was sorrow that they made their decisions which led to the nightmare they wrought. When I listen to the Lacrimosa in Verdi’s setting, I think not only of Ms. Lopez-Galvan, but of those individuals as well who caused her death. How can we heal if we cannot recognize each other’s humanity? This prayer then, the words which Verdi set to music, as Mozart and Berlioz did before him, speak to both the victims and the perpetrators:
Lacrimosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus.
Huic ergo parce, Deus:
Pie Jesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem. Amen.
Full of tears will be that day
When from the ashes shall arise
The guilty man to be judged;
Therefore spare him, O God,
Merciful Lord Jesus,
Grant them eternal rest. Amen.
Postscript
Dear Reader, this is now the second week in a row that I’ve released a follow up to the weekly edition of the Wednesday Blog, a sign perhaps that this format does not quite work as well for current news as I might wish. About 20 hours after I wrote this week’s post and an hour after I sent the recording off to Spotify to be published at midnight Central Time, I read a story from KSHB, Kansas City’s NBC affiliate which confirmed the two main suspects’ names, their charges, and some of their testimony from their own hospital beds where they are recovering from their own gunfire.
What struck me the most about this story, which has since been updated with more information and a mugshot of the suspect whose bullet killed Ms. Lopez-Galvan, is that the man in question’s testimony shows some sense of remorse. Quoting from the article written by KSHB’s news staff, “‘Just pulled a gun out and started shooting. I shouldn’t have done that. Just being stupid,’ Mays said.” Knowing some of the humanity of this suspect speaks to me of how broadly this shooting has hurt so many.
In a week of great triumph for my city and impactful announcements, some words on civic pride.
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Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
In a week of great triumph for my city and impactful announcements, some words on civic pride.
A city is as vibrant as the people who make it, and those who build on its strong foundations do well to recognize their forebearers. Cities are at the core of our concept of civilization, the city is the star about which a system of suburbs, exurbs, and ever more distant rural communities revolve. This has been true since antiquity, when the first human settlements were established for the mutual benefit of those who lived within them. Our cities today exist for similar reasons. It’s easier to live close to the places you work, eat, and play. It’s safer to live surrounded by like-minded people who in the best of circumstances will come together when a crisis emerges.
Cities are extensions of humanity; they can be organic in how they grow and function. The cancer and rot we’ve seen grow in our bodies that pose the greatest medical struggles today, mirrors the decay we’ve see in our cities in the last 70 years with urban renewal projects that removed vibrant urban life for new modes of living which prioritized distant suburbs and cars traveling far faster than one can walk in order to better connect our sprawl.
Our cities can find common passions in their livelihoods, civic pride in the things a city is known for making, and within the last 170 years in our professional sports. A central part of my love for my original hometown of Chicago comes from my memories as young boy in the suburbs of that city during the Bulls’ historic second threepeat and the Cubs wonderous 1998 season. Here in Kansas City the passion for our local teams, the Chiefs, Royals, Sporting, and the Current, is one common bond that runs throughout this city and its metropolitan region. We may agree on little else, but Kansas Citians agree on their passion for their teams.
This week then, Kansas City finds itself amid two pivotal moments in its recent history. On Sunday night the Kansas City Chiefs won their third Super Bowl in the last five years. This was also their second consecutive championship. As Quarterback Patrick Mahomes said in his post-game press conference, “the Kansas City Chiefs are never underdogs.” This success for the city’s football team remains in stark contrast to the Chiefs of my childhood. They made a playoff run during my first year living here, yet I remember listening to their early knockout defeat on the radio around New Year’s 2000. On the day that this is released, the Chiefs will parade down Grand Boulevard through Downtown & the Crossroads surrounded by what will surely be crowds of 1 million or more.
On Tuesday of this week, perhaps hoping to ride on the celebratory mood, the Kansas City Royals, this city’s Major League Baseball team, announced nearly 5 months late their choice for a new stadium site to replace the 52 year old Kauffman Stadium located next to the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium in the eastern suburbs. In September of last year, the Royals had announced two preferred stadium sites, one on the east side of downtown along the east loop where Interstate 70 and US-71 round the urban core, and the other in North Kansas City across the Missouri River from Downtown in suburban Clay County.
By the time the official announcement was released the rumors of what the announcement would hold had already been circulating for a good 12 hours, and to the bafflement of many, the delight of some, and the dismay of more the team announced they’d chosen a third site now occupied by the Kansas City Star Pavilion and a host of small businesses bounded by Truman Road on the north, Locust Street on the east, 17th Street on the south, and Grand Boulevard on the west. This site would be conveniently located next to the local indoor arena, the T-Mobile Center, where Kansas City’s hypothetical professional basketball and hockey teams would play. The proposed stadium would also connect to a park that is in the planning to be built over Interstate 670 on the south loop, which would continue to run beneath the park and new stadium.
A city needs to balance the causes of all of its constituents, each organ working in its own manner with minimal conflict between them. The proposed site of this stadium brings out clear and obvious conflict with local small businesses, Crossroads neighborhood residents, and the transportation grid of this city. I support the south loop park project which would cover Interstate 670 and better connect the Crossroads with Downtown, yet by that proposal Walnut Street and Grand Boulevard would be blocked by the park, which was fine before a baseball stadium was proposed to go there. The stadium proposal blocks Oak Street, a vital, if less used artery which runs along the east side of Downtown and the Crossroads connecting to Gillham Road in Midtown and eventually Rockhill Road at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Holmes Road on the east side of Brookside, my neighborhood.
The proposed stadium also displaces many vibrant local businesses that are located within its proposed footprint and will likely displace further local businesses in the surrounding blocks with a large new stadium dropped in the middle of their neighborhood. To me, it seems as though the team went out of its way to choose a third option which would disrupt as much of this city’s urban life as possible. With that in mind, I’m inclined to vote no on the question of whether we, Jackson County residents should renew the 3/8th-cent sales tax that’s on our April ballot in order to keep the Royals from building a stadium at this site.
Yet, I’m not opposed to a downtown stadium. I’m merely opposed to this proposed final location for the downtown stadium. I would prefer the City of Kansas City include questions on the April ballot asking municipal residents whether we’d prefer this location or the location on the east side of Downtown, which was the team’s original preference in Kansas City, Missouri. That location is currently occupied by parking lots rather than local businesses. It won’t require the demolition of a few vibrant blocks of urban life like the Crossroads location would. The one downside to the eastern location is that it is further away from the Streetcar line, the Power and Light District, and the T-Mobile Center. Yet spectators attending games at the current stadium walk further as it is often than they would in that situation.
At the end of it all, considering the history of teams that do not get their way with public funding for new stadiums, I worry that the current ballot question will not serve local residents in the best way possible. We stand to lose a great deal if the 3/8th-cent ballot question doesn’t pass, as both the Royals and the Chiefs have signaled their intent to look beyond Jackson County for new homes without that funding. While I expect the Chiefs to stay in Kansas City, I have my doubts about the Royals.
While all this is going on here, back in Chicago the White Sox and Bears organizations are also pressuring the City of Chicago and suburban municipalities for options for new stadiums as well. The Bears were all set on a northwestern suburban location in Arlington Heights until new pressures there have led them within the last week to muse about demolishing historic Soldier Field in favor of a new stadium in the old one’s southern parking lot along Burnham Harbor. Meanwhile, last week the White Sox released designs for a new stadium located 1 mile west of Soldier Field at an empty lot between Clark Street to the east, the South Branch of the Chicago River to the west, Roosevelt Road to the north, and 16th Street to the south. Over the summer when the White Sox initially found lukewarm reception for their own stadium rebuild, their leadership mused about either leaving Chicago for the suburbs or even going to Nashville.
My worry about the Royals, then, is that if they don’t get their way with the City of Kansas City, they’ll either move to North Kansas City, which would be all right but not ideal in my book, or worse out of town all together to a booming market like Nashville, Portland, or Austin. This city is proud of its teams, proud of its people, and proud of its local character. Let’s have clearer communication between all the parties involved in as momentous a decision as this new Royals Stadium as we can.I want to see a downtown stadium, just not on the site being proposed. One piece of the report from KCURthat bugged me more than others was that the Royals were unconcerned about the parking situation around their proposed stadium in the Crossroads because “as existing parking downtown can accommodate fans who drive to games.” This says to me they see all the expansive parking lots that remain in the Crossroads as permanent features of the area, and not temporary eyesores from a time when we thought it good to carve out our urban cores for the sake of suburban development. It says to me that the Royals organization wants to operate in the urban core but not be a part of the community.
I write these blog posts on Mondays and Tuesdays, and after writing this one yesterday afternoon I’ve since read more about the project. To put it simply: I don’t know what I think about this project. One glaring issue I still have is that Royals organization has a website for their new stadium but I couldn’t find it on Google. Rather, I found it linked in a Reddit post. All of the information I have comes from KCUR, KSHB, KCTV-5, and the Kansas City Star, as well as other individuals on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter). One Reddit user posted a side-by-side comparison of the proposed stadium and the current site.
I’m still disappointed that the Royals are choosing a site that is presently occupied, and that in their FAQ they rely on current surface parking lots that dot the Crossroads for future game-day parking when we should be looking at redeveloping those lots and building garages to handle downtown parking.
Yet, I drove through this area yesterday evening on the way to a Fat Tuesday party, and I can see how they could make this site work. I still have many reservations about this project, but this morning, I don’t oppose it. I’m not issuing a retraction for several reasons: my original argument still stands on some of these issues, the podcast was already published at midnight, and I don’t have a backup plan. If anything, I want to make it clear how there are benefits and detriments to this plan. I wish the Royals site would acknowledge the impact their plan will have by closing Oak Street and displacing the businesses on the 1600 and 1700 blocks of Walnut, McGee, and Oak Streets, and again I wish they would discuss building more compact parking options than the swaths of surface parking that remains a blemish on our urban core.
I’m not happy about this blog post because I want to offer you a clear argument. Yet in this instance I’m not sure I can, there are too many factors involved. If we were looking at a spectrum with 0 as complete opposition and 100 as complete support, when I wrote the original blog post on Tuesday afternoon I was at a 35 or 40, still opposed to this project but not vehemently so. Now, I’m closer to a 55 or 60, supportive of it yet still quite cautious about what it could hold for our city.
In school we don’t just teach our subject matter, in my case history, and in some instances, geography and French, Latin, and Irish, we also teach valuable life skills. One of the skills which I am still learning how to do is the skill of balancing my time. It occurred to me several weeks ago that when I returned to Kansas City December 2022, I was looking forward to having a quiet domestic life here in my adopted home city, enjoying the arts of the city, enjoying the good food of the city, spending time with my family and my friends, going to mass on Sundays at my parish church on a regular basis, and living what to me seems like an ordinary life. In the process of trying to make that ordinary life work I’ve taken on many jobs.
This has resulted in my schedule filling up dramatically. I am fortunate to be able to work in fields that I excel in. And I know that I couldn’t do more things with my writing, with my teaching, with my service in the arts, I just need to find the way to balance all of my responsibilities, all of my passions, and all of my joys. Time management is a beautiful thing when you figure it out. I’m most of the way there; there’s still that I could be working on. I might have three or four, or maybe five things on my to-do list on a given day, but find myself finishing maybe two or three of those things because the days are short. It makes me wonder if I’m perhaps noticing for the first time in my life that I don’t want to work as much in the winter when we have such short daylight hours. When I was studying for my comprehensive exams, I used to work a good 12 hours a day often times going back to my desk after an evening of dinner and TV and resuming work until one or 2 o’clock in the morning. I realized that this was not good for me, and so have since endeavored to avoid that practice. Yet, this avoidance has resulted in me, working less overall, and getting less done. And in spite of that avoidance and ideally the extra quiet time to focus on other things, I find myself still not getting a full night sleep, because I can’t turn my mind off, and quiet my thoughts while I’m trying to rest.
This is what happened on Monday night of this week, when I found myself lying awake in bed until 4 o’clock in the morning thinking through my life since I returned home to Kansas City. I’ve done some pretty decent work today considering my sleep deprived state, yet I certainly could’ve done better. And it strikes me as fascinating how my ability to get things done can be limited by my fatigue, yet also enhanced by the adrenaline and drive to achieve my goals.
I don’t particularly want to be a self-help writer, I hope that most things which may appear in that genre could be discerned by the individual reader on their own. I am perhaps too stubborn and prideful to read in that genre, yet here I am writing something which could fit into it. Sleep is a good thing. Rest is a wonderful thing. Here in the United States, we have a tendency to work far too much and not give ourselves enough time to rest and relax. I often feel that I can’t relax when I still have things to get done, which is why I started to create to-do lists. Naturally, since I accepted a position which took up almost all of my time in the Fall, I dropped the habit of making to do list, which is perhaps a part of my frustrations today.
Recently, when I was building a lesson for one of my jobs about the history of home rule and Republicanism in Ireland, I reread Robert Emmett, famous 1803 speech from the dock, in which Emmett says That his epitaph will remain unwritten while Ireland remains unfree. There’s a sense of incompletion that I appreciate in this document because I feel that I will not really rest until the work that I am endeavoring to complete today is done. The goalposts are in sight for all these things which I am doing, so there’s chance for rest on the horizon as well. I am a very goals oriented person. Overall, I even have a stack of fun reading material which I have left there for myself to pick up and there are books which I will only begin. Once I finished other ones I’m currently reading. I worry, of course with my torturous speed of fun reading that I may very well not get to those fun books that are further down on the list until the point at which time I’m no longer interested in reading them.
So perhaps this speaks to that truism that we ourselves are often the cause of our worst foibles and faults, I think that’s fair in my case. Even now, as I dictate this weeks blog, I attempts to do more than one thing at once, to fill my time as best I can. This is a time that I would normally spend listening to podcasts and music, letting myself enjoy the sonic experience. Yet here at 6:30 in the evening on Tuesday, I find I don’t have a podcast written a blog post not paired for this week’s publication, something which I had really hoped I would have ready by now.
That might very well be a good sign of my life and times today. Even after, decisions and conclusions were reached which freed up my time and made me feel more fulfilled, I am still struggling and struggling evermore to do all of the things that I want to do in this time that I have. Tempus fugit!
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 