I was scrolling through Google’s most-searched searches of 2020 today. Most of them were sad. Or if not exactly sad, tied to unhappy things. People dying. Specific people dying. Hundreds of thousands of people dying. Civil strife. Oppression by agents of the state. A calamitous election saga.
One was not sad. And not tied to unhappy things. One—and it was only one, on the whole page—was kind of funny.
When people in the United States, in the year 2020, typed “Where is” into Google, the third-most frequent way they finished that phrase was “Kansas City”. It took me a while to figure out why this was. The Kansas City Chiefs won the 2020 Super Bowl, which led to a lot of people considering Kansas City for the first time, including evidently Donald Trump, who congratulated the state of Kansas on the win despite the Chiefs playing in Missouri. But for a few minutes, having not remembered all this happened, and happened in 2020, I was under the impression Americans have a ceaseless urge to figure out where exactly Kansas City is located. It wasn’t until I looked back through the 2019 and 2018 most-searched searches that I finally realized it was a temporary thing. I thought that every single year, Americans, in millions of individual circumstances, became fed up with not knowing where Kansas City was, set aside what they were doing, and turned to Google for help.
I’m disappointed this isn’t the case. It would be way funnier if this were an eternal thorn in the American psyche, the way other cultures might struggle with questions of God or questions of nature.
I’m also disappointed because Kansas City is confusing. It’s in Missouri, but it’s not as simple as that. It’s also in Kansas. There are two Kansas Cities, and even the lesser one—the Kansas one—is bigger than the largest city in ten different states. There’s a lot of Kansas City in Kansas.
Thankfully, the Googlers are asking the right questions. Here are the top two “people also ask” searches when you Google “Kansas City”:
Which is the real Kansas City?
We’re coming out and saying it. One of these has to be fake. One of these two cities does not exist. There can only be one Kansas City in this universe, and the other is a flaming stack of fraud.
Why is Kansas City split?
This is a question I hadn’t considered. When I read it, I assumed it was just because of a river, but then I looked at the map while I was checking where Kansas Speedway is (something that made me feel dumb within milliseconds of clicking “search”), and the river’s pretty much north of the city. Or at least north of the Missouri city. The Missouri Kansas City. Kansas City, Missouri. Instead, the divide is just the longitude line that forms the southern half of the border between Missouri and Kansas. And this is where I’m again disappointed. Not that it’s a longitude line, but that the next “people also ask” wasn’t: “When was Kansas City settled?” Because if these states willingly split the city in two, knowing it was going to be a fairly big American metropolis, that’s a pretty good story. Wheeling and dealing.
I’d look myself. I’d continue this blog post. I’d figure this out.
But the American people aren’t ready for that question yet.
