The Cats of Springfield

What shocks most about Springfield, Ohio, is that there’s nothing shocking about the place at all. This is not as promised, for all the way here, over the Appalachians and down into the rolling corn carpets of the plains, the radio brought word of chaos and strife, of Klansmen on the way and neo-Nazis too, locked-down schools, bombs, missing cats and Haitians cowering in their basements. And of course there was much hissing at Donald Trump, who started it all by doing Springfield the disservice of painting the town as the Meowschwitz of the Midwest.

“They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!” he fairly yelled during the second debate, prompting an immediate fact-check and subsequent blitz of denials that any such thing was happening or had ever happened. From the BBC to the Hindustan Times, that Trump had bared his vile, lying, racist soul was affirmed in report after report. How could he say such a terrible thing! Legacy Media and the left generally were so offended, the spirit of noisy outrage once again upon them, they seemed almost jubilant, for it must surely be the moment when Orange Man, finally and once and for all, made himself unelectable. Impeachments, confected scandals, bent New York judges and 34 criminal convictions, none of that has put him in the longed-for orange jumpsuit. Instead social media’s cat-themed AI memes were positive – Trump grabbing pussies of another kind — and in the polls he either lost no ground or gained a point of two. Ten days after the debate, according to the New York Times’ latest survey, he was four to five points up in three key Sun Belt states whose Electoral College votes would almost seal the deal on November 5.

Trump’s supporters weren’t fussed, and neither at a glance are the good citizens of Springfield. Speaking as an eye witness this past week, let me say you couldn’t find a nicer, more polite, or seemingly pacific town, or in the cycles of its history and fortunes a more typical Rust Belt city. Apart from the incidence of homicidal driving that is, which in a further testament to local civility doesn’t prompt the same volume of horns and curses you would hear just about anywhere else were someone to shoot a red light and execute a weaving right-angle turn through four lanes of oncoming traffic. Quadrant’s mobile office survived that particular close encounter, just, which happened no more than a mile to two past the sign that says ‘Welcome to Springfield’. An increasingly and quietly qualified welcome, as it happens.

In Springfield, to describe a neighbour as ‘rude’ is to utter a damning appraisal, so take ingrained good manners as a given and then mull a recent poll conducted in nearby Dayton. Less than three years ago 70 per cent of residents said they would have no objection were a migrant family to move in next door. Today, officially, it is 57 per cent, but likely lower if you consider those respondents who preferred not confirming to a stranger that they have had their fill of foreigners. In Dayton it is the Congolese. Back in Springfield, half an hour away, Haitians. And in many other midsize towns and other small cities where similar demographic upheavals are playing out there is an undeniable disquiet, which helps to explain the allegations of kittynapping, dog-eating and dusky poachers praying on ducks and geese in municipal parks.

As a distraction from larger and far broader concerns about immigration, dead cats have their uses. No need to talk about the new foreign neighbours’ strange and sometimes unsettling ways, the pop-up ghettoes or  doctrinaire multiculturalism’s prescribed barriers to assimilation, of suddenly swamped schools, overburdened hospitals and drivers who regard red lights as suggestions rather than commands. Best not mention any and all of that if you are member of the Left’s media auxilliary, especially during this final act of an election-year drama that has made immigration an issue Kamala Harris and her Democrats are anxious to avoid. After allowing – indeed, facilitating — as many as 20 million new arrivals to enter the country, both legally and otherwise, the appeal in talking about something else is obvious. So, as when the conjurer distracts with a fluttering handkerchief,  instead of the immigrant wave itself it is the new arrivals’ alleged dietary habits which have been the focus of reporting, refutation and yet more mainstream editorialising about the “primordial rage” of  Trump’s hateful xenophobia.

Meanwhile, in Springfield, the locals hear Trump railing against unregulated migration and know firsthand he is talking about their town and its imported new residents, problems no other politician will go near. Haitians might or might not eat cats – without a doubt some do, as explained below – but despite all the attention, moggycide is but a minor, almost peripheral detail. The greater truth, that special kind of Trumpian truth which comes wrapped in hyperbole and exaggeration, points to far more immediate causes for concern.

First, just to set the record straight, there is nothing new about Haitians eating cats. In Miami, home to America’s largest concentration of Haitians, other migrant groups call them just that, the Cat Eaters, which confirms the reputation was well established before Trump gave it voice. “Why do Haitians eat cats?” asks the blogger behind the community news Haitian Report, assuring readers he is about to “spill the beans” on a “little secret”:  “Contrary to popular belief, Haitians don’t eat cats because they are poor and hungry. They eat cats because it’s a tradition.”

It’s not something Haitians like to talk about, as a Christian missionary in Port-au-Prince, Cathy Walmer,  has noted.

“I had only seen one cat during my ten days in Haiti … I asked Kerby our translator, “Where are all the cats?”

He replied, “They are at home.”

“At home? What do you mean at home?” I said.

Kerby said, “Girl, we don’t eat the cats!* They are at home. They know better than to roam around. They know where they get fed! Not like stupid dogs.”

As Walmer added in a asterisked update, “*I later learned that some Haitians do.”

In this regard Haitians aren’t alone in their taste for animals not normally considered fit for the table. Some years ago the Wall Street Journal reported from Utah on the local Tongan population’s appetite for lo’i hoosi, which led to an unfortunate incident when a group of Tongans purchased a young girl’s Shetland pony, pole-axed the pet in front of her and drove off to enjoy a horse-meat feast. Even with Google’s tweaked algorithm  giving the appearance of doing all it can to filter out results positive for Trump, it’s not difficult to find plenty of documentation establishing the Haitian diet sometimes runs to felines.

Yet the media’s immediate and unqualified insistence was that the claim of cat consumption was entirely spurious – just one more of Trump’s “baseless claims”. Funny thing, for that is the exact same term used to dismiss all allegations of electoral fraud, once again despite an immense body of evidence establishing that bringing out the dead on Election Day is a venerable American tradition. If Trump’s standing in the polls is any guide, the obvious conclusion is that at least half the US population now believes, and with good reason, that the Fourth Estate simply can’t be trusted. With Old Media withering everywhere, you might think savvier editors and proprietors would take the hint, but any hope of the wit and will to re-embrace impartial integrity is both the most easily refuted and thoroughly baseless claim of them all.

On Thursday night last week, Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s proxy and himself an Ohio resident, arrived in Springfield to moderate what was billed as a “community meeting to discuss immigration issues”. The venue was far too small for the large crowd of some 2400 locals who had reserved their seats, so only 350 were able to squeeze into the basement function room before the city’s fire marshal closed the doors in the name of public safety and left everyone else in a warm Indian Summer early evening. Given that at least as many townsfolk turned up without reservations we’re talking about 4000 people in total in a city of just 58,000 men women and children. No Haitians were in attendance, and the media presence was scant – Voice of America, the local TV station, Fox News, plus US-based  French author and journalist Alexandre Mendel, who reports for the conservative weekly Valeurs Actuelles and, like Quadrant, had driven to Springfield from New York in the belief there might be more to the story than the bare bones of picked-over cat cuisine. It was, we later agreed, an indictment of US Big Media that it gave the event short shrift. All week scotching claims of missing and eaten cats, plus ducks and geese from local ponds, had been front-page fixations across the country. Yet here was Springfield turning out en masse to discuss the real issues surrounding unwanted mass migration, and the media, to its shame, couldn’t be bothered opening an eye or lending an ear.

That was indeed a pity because, as with those inside, the talk amongst the many locked out of Ramaswamy’s meeting (which you can watch in full here) were the gripes of good, decent, white-bread Midwesterners who have found themselves in a situation they never wanted, don’t know how to deal with, and fear where it will all lead.

“My auto insurance has gone through the roof,” a woman in her fifties told me, adding “does that make me a racist for believing people who come here should have to pass the test to get a licence?”

“They don’t, you know,” chipped in her girlfriend. “Just go to the police, show them a Haitian licence and drive away whether you can drive or not.” This no doubt explains my near-death experience during those first minutes in town and several more less threatening incidents since.

Rents, too, have soared and complaints are legion. At the cheap, down-at-heel motel where Quadrant has been based this past week, conversations with other residents confirmed that evictions have become commonplace as rents soar and landlords convert their buildings into dormitories for single Haitian men.  “I lived in the same apartment for almost 10 years. It was home until they raised the rent,” a large middle-aged black woman told me while we took the sun in the motel’s  carpark. “Now I’m here and don’t know where I’ll go next, how I’ll ever get a home again.” Making her prospects even more bleak, the Haitian influx has taken the pressure of the demand for labour, so what she earns at her fast-food job isn’t likely to increase.

Fifty-something teacher Diana Daniels noted that all of Springfield has been impacted in one way or another, including schools where many of the newly enrolled don’t speak a word of English, making bi-lingual education a further burden on a municipal budget already in the red due to the cost of expanded policing and stacks-on-the-mill patients at the local hospital’s emergency ward. Like everyone else who spoke of Springfield’s new problems, she prefaced her remarks with the assurance she was no racist and “it isn’t about colour”. What it is, she continued, is about “an entire town’s unprecedented transformation that wasn’t asked for and is costing us dearly in so many ways.”

Before Big Media lost interest and wandered off to misreport the next election brouhaha somewhere else, the bulletins that didn’t dwell on the disputed fate of cats always mentioned “the far right”. There were reports that the Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group, were coming to defend the white race (and their cats, presumably), that the Klan might put in an appearance, and how more than 30 emailed threats led to the hospital being searched by bomb-sniffing dogs while schools and municipal offices were repeatedly evacuated. After days of this turmoil being laid at Trump’s feet, Ohio’s Republican governor Michael ‘Call me Mike’ DeWine  revealed that every single bomb hoax had come from unnamed “overseas agents”, with not single threat coming from Springfield’s long-suffering residents. Having implied disaffected Springfield was making common cause with white supremacists, the media’s sotto voce update on the threats’ origin was barely heard beyond Ohio’s borders. Why would a partisan media ever allow facts to ruin such a tight and tidy narrative?

It was quite some time ago, 1904 to be precise, when Ur sociologist and political economist Max Weber passed through the Midwest during a three-month tour that saw him visit New York and Chicago before travelling south through the heartland to Oklahoma and what were then still known as the Indian Territories. That trip prompted The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, the work for which he remains best known. There is every chance he passed through Springfield, on what was then the main rail line to Chicago, which might perhaps have moderated the impression gained in New York of a society operating as the essence and at the zenith of unbridled capitalism. Springfield, too, was a powerhouse of industry, growing like Topsy and sprouting mansions on one side of town and new, decent housing for the mostly Irish and Italian migrants, whose presence explains the many fine Catholic churches.

Visit the painstakingly preserved Westcott House, which Frank Lloyd Wright built four years later for a local industrialist, and you’ll find a contemporary English translation of Weber’s book amongst the Edwardian titles in the livingroom bookcase. New York didn’t bat an eye at piling its imported factory fodder into the teeming slums of the Lower East Side, but that sort of “monstrous city” indifference to human misery, as Weber wrote of Chicago, simply didn’t play in Springfield. The town was just too nice, the city fathers imbued with Midwestern courtesy and Christian charity to consign its poorer citizens to the stockyard hell holes of Chicago which socialist agitator and muckraker Upton Sinclair fictionalised only slightly in The Jungle. 

Springfield grew and grew and kept on growing until, starting in the Seventies, prosperity stalled and went into reverse. Factories closed, jobs moved overseas, workers left, the population dropped and the imposing public buildings erected during the town’s golden age — like City Hall below, pictured during the Twenties — mocked its reduced circumstances. In decline it was typical of the Rust Belt, and that remained the case until, around five years ago, things began to change and rather quickly too.

As Weber might have told you and Schumpeter definitely would, capitalism’s capacity to organically reinvent itself was on display, thanks largely to the e-commerce revolution. Consumers began spurning bricks-and-mortar stores and placing their orders online, which spawned a need for warehouses, fulfillment centres and shipping hubs. Located as it is on main interstate highways, beside a river feeding into the Mississippi, and bisected by rail, Springfield was an obvious choice. Amazon is the most recent arrival, right now throwing up a warehouse that it is said will deliver 2000 jobs when completed. The population, which had fallen from 120,000 to a nadir of less than half that, began to grow again – and so did the problems.

The volunteer ladies who conduct tours of Wright’s revered Westcott House (above, with the Quadrant van to the fore) are a polite and considerate crew somewhat inclined to the giggles. As an icebreaker, I posed a question that sparked guffaws everywhere but at a Chinese restaurant, where it might just have been too close to an unfortunate stereotype.  “So, where can I get a nice cat dinner around here?” The two-part response, other than in Cantonese, was laughter and, from the Wright House ladies, scathing criticism of Trump for saying what he did about cats and Haitians.

“As if we don’t have enough problems,” the guide said, adding “a terrible man” for good measure. Yet then, with hardly a pause for breath, she repeated almost every criticism of the Biden/Harris immigration debacle voiced by Trump supporters outside Ramaswamy’s town forum — the bad driving, the rents, the challenges facing schools and health care. Mention of Trump’s promise to hold a rally in Springfield brought groans. It would be interesting to know how many tour-guide ladies attend and if they will remain as adamantly opposed to him as was the case in each other’s company and earshot when in the privacy of the voting booth.

I’ve no way of knowing, but I suspect, given the choice between the former “border czar” and the man who made  Springfield’s cats global news, one or two might pull the lever for the candidate more likely to address their immediate concerns.