All hell seems to be breaking out around the wider word, what with the various scandals swirling about the White House and the Islamist uprisings in middle eastern capitals and European side streets and the sinking feeling one gets from a 200 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Averages, but here in Wichita the more immediate problem is the darned River Festival.
For those unfortunate souls who reside outside our usually pleasant little prairie city, the River Festival is an annual nine-day-long series of concerts, athletic competitions, parades, parties, fairs, food courts, fireworks displays, and family-oriented frolics that has become an insufferable civic annoyance. Every city of any size has some similar event, we assume, but for pure congestion, inconvenience, and frustration to the average resident none can possibly match Wichita’s traditional get-together.
The festival began on Friday afternoon, and the normal rhythms of everyday were live were immediately disrupted. A trip to the bank to deposit some checks became nearly impossible due to the street closings in anticipation of the opening parade, and only an intimate knowledge of the back alleys, parking lots, and side streets of downtown Wichita allowed us find a circuitous route to the drive-thru window, and how the office workers ever made it home at rush hour remains a mystery that we are glad we were not on hand to witness. Later we drove to mail off the payments for our end-of-the-month bills, but a new series of street closings forced us on a long walk to the post office at the edge of downtown. Being afoot and free of further responsibilities we decided to take in a bit of the parade, which ran the gamut from a local Naval reserves unit in their crisp white uniforms to the city’s tiny band of disheveled Occupy Wall Street nuts protesting the Monsanto Company over some corporate outrage or another, but we soon found ourselves pushing through unaccustomed crowds on the way back to the car. In the evening we attempted to share a beer with a friend who habituates a friendly little hipster coffee shop in the Delano district, a typically placid and sparsely populated neighborhood just across the Arkansas River from downtown, and found ourselves stuck in a crawling traffic jam reminiscent of midtown Manhattan during a transit strike.
The people-watching proved interesting, but depressing. It wasn’t so much the high proportion of morbidly obese passersby, a sight so common that it now goes almost unnoticed, but rather the abundance of profane tattoos, vulgar t-shirts, menacing glowers, and obnoxious behavior. An intimidating deployment of police officers kept the crowd mostly within the bounds of the law, but the muscle-bound boys in the heavy metal tank tops were woofing and the girls with the beefy thighs protruding from obscenely short shorts were shouting “whoo” with all the intimidatingly youthful vigor that the First Amendment allows, and it all somehow evoked the atmosphere of a low-down honky-tonk on the verge of barroom brawl. Wichita is a very middle-class, middle-American city chock full of well-dressed, well-behaved people with well-kept lawns and recently washed family sedans, but one couldn’t help noticing how few of them were strolling through downtown and Delano as the River Festival stretched into the night life.
Old-timers such as ourselves can recall those long ago days when the River Festival wasn’t like this. The festival started out in 1972 as the Wichitennial, an obligatory celebration of the city’s first 100 years of incorporated existence, and the modest offering of events proved such a good time that a few civic-minded organizers decided to do it every year. In its earliest incarnations the festival included an art and book fair where our father would load up on Readers’ Digest condensed novels at a nickel a piece, a Frank Capra-esque parade that once featured our unicycling talents, a few concerts in the Riverside parks featuring local talents such as the Midian Shrine Hillbilly Dixieland Jazz Band or some of the livelier gospel quartets, and quaint competitions such as the bed races down Main Street, bathtub races on the Arkansas River, and a tug-of-war on the sand bar in a river bend near downtown that the closest thing to beach one can find in Wichita. There was a delightfully cornball quality to the whole affair, a small town festival done in relatively big city style, and it attracted an unabashedly old-fashioned crowd of moms, pops, and their well-mannered children which intimidated even the rough and rowdy elements into their best behavior.
So appealing was the River Festival that it began to draw bigger crowds, which in turn led to more careful planning, corporate sponsorships, focus-grouped and market-reached events, slick advertising by the more avant-garde agencies in the city, big name acts of 20 years booked into the bigger stages, and the gradual fading away of the bed races and bath tub races and the spontaneity and small town goofiness that had made it all worthwhile in the first place. The moms and pops and their well-mannered children seemed to fade away from the festival, too, leaving the streets of downtown and Delano to the packs of feral youths in the tank tops and too-short shorts with the woofing and whooing and fighting words tattooed to their necks. Our more respectable friends tell us that they now spend the River Festival safely tucked away in their east-side or west-side homes, bringing to mind the old Yogi Berra line about a restaurant that no one goes to anymore because it’s too crowded, and those of us who live in Riverside and the rest of city’s aging center all seem to just grouse about it.
Judging by the stories of violence, drunkenness, and boorishness that show up on the Drudge Report and other news summaries after big city festivals around the country, the River Festival is not a uniquely annoying event. Everywhere the middle class and its orderly ways seem to be abandoning the public square for its own gated sub-culture, where the children are privately educated and carefully segregated within their socio-economic group, thus ceding the streets and sidewalks and public schools to the rougher and rowdier elements of society. The same lowering effect can be seen across the popular culture, and in the social standards that prevail throughout the year at funerals, weddings, political meetings, and other events were a certain propriety sense of decorum was once observed, it all drives the last vestiges of old-fashioned sensibilities further into seclusion.
In another week or so the River Festival will be over, but the slow decline into a ruder society will likely continue. Reversing the trend will require the silent majority of the middle class to reassert their traditional cultural domination, and at this point they seem too quiet and well-mannered for that. Maybe this has something to do with all hell breaking loose around the rest of the world, too, and in any case it does not bode well.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 