With a little help from Knight Ridder's Kansas City Star, where advertising passes for news, Kansas City's mayor has become the Grand Mistress of Real Estate Illusions.

 
It's a bird, no, it's a plane, no, it's Supermayor Kay Barnes flying over downtown Kansas City, Missouri!

Not only has the mayor defied gravity, she has defied naysayers! The Kansas City Star featured Mayor Barnes in its May 23 Questions and Answers column, 'This Weeks Newsmaker.' Star reporter Lynn Horsley led into the Question and Answer session with a statement: "You defied naysayers and announced impressive plans...."

As a matter of fact, the Mayor does not make the news. Newspaper publishers, editors and reporters make the news. And the Star makes news about Mayor Barnes almost every week nowadays. Each time she suddenly emerges from secret negotiations with her private partners and unveils plans for yet another superproject - which in truth veils the truth about what is really going on in the conventicles behind the scenes - unanimously appreciative Star reporters wag their tails so furiously that one cannot imagine how many words the editors had to cut from their articles before sending them along to the printer.

Most recently a Star reporter - who has stars in his eyes and whose acclaim for the mayor knows no bounds and whom is therefore called "the mayor's lap dog" - referred to the mayor as a movie star. A frustrated Enron investment analyst on the staff declared the mayor's basketball project to be financially sound - so sound that he did not bother to project the numbers. Another reportorial adulator whose brain resembles a basketball dreamed of her as a basketball star. We blame them not for loving their favorite pastimes after football - movies, drinking and basketball - as the mayadevi toys with them on behalf of her consortium of powerful consorts. Little do they know that the mayor is not a mere star, but is rather a celestial mayadevi incarnate who is dribbling their brains with one illusion after another.

Sometimes the dribble is so incredibly superficial that we suspect that something more than the usual Heart of America boosterism is in play. Who knows? Has legal or illegal graft revisited City Hall? Could certain editors and reporters be on the take too? Are they being putaized at work? or unduly entertained by big corporations here and there? was a girl or car or some other gift delivered? But that cannot be. We would rather write the whole thing off as ignorance, and observe that the more people think they know about the mayadevi, the less they know about reality. Of course they might all be intuitive geniuses, but that is highly improbable, despite their ecstatic effusions whenever very important personages like the mayor appear.

Star reporters do not seem to have the presence of mind to pierce the mayor's projected veil with pointed questions, or at least to take peeks under her addresses. Once in awhile we do hear a blunt question or two from them, but there is no cross-examination after the mayor glosses over it with mayic phrases. Has any reporter gone over the advance studies, crunched the numbers, analyzed the propositions and projections, run some comparisons, asked for second and third opinions from outside experts? Has any one of them, just for instance, examined the so-called "civic-minded" land-banking whereby developers assemble the properties they know the mayor will want for her projects? so that we will know the profitable extent of their civic-mindedness?

In point of fact, to ask pointed questions about the mayadevi's projections for the corporate welfare of downtown landlords, real estate developers, bankers, and big corporations in general is to be just another naysayer. Naysayers must be ignored pursuant to the official civic-leader doctrine: "Ignore Sayers."

One most important function of a mayadevi is to cultivate ignorance by covering up the truth with all sorts of real estate projects. The mayadevi is of course a multi-tasker. As we know from various scientific studies, multi-tasking stupefies people and allows the mayadevis and their consorts to toy with people and to get away with everything.

We would not mind the mayic projections so much if Tom Pendergast were in charge of making them work, for then the money would be spread out much more democratically. As it is, the majority of people, to wit the poor, are saying, "There ain't nuthin' in it for us!"

But never mind, we like to be bulldozed, to be rushed into big real estate projects if not rushed into war - a war on poverty will not do for sheer excitement. The flimsiest of pretexts will do. Once the pretexts are pierced, well, we will not dwell on the past, we will stay the course, we will move on and ahead to where no man has gone before.

Be ignorant! Ignore naysayers! Remember Hitler's 1942 words, "What would have happened to us, by Heaven, if we'd been a group of pessimists!" Let the pessimists be damned! Hail Mahamaya!