Mwen Rekòmande Panik Imedyat

Having sensed that my public is calling: “In fair Springfield, where we lay our scene …”

0. This Will Never Not Be Funny

• Yes, Haitians eat cats. Here’s one a few months before becoming a source of animal protein. This was in September of 2013, on my sixth or seventh trip. Locale was Mizak, Sud-Est, ~10 km west of Jacmel. It probably got killed and eaten before my visit in June of ’14, the one where I got chikungunya.

• We are, after all, talking about ~10⁷ people in < 28k km², most of it mountainous and thereby uncultivable, which in combination with pervasive institutional dysfunctionality means they’re usually in a Malthusian trap. They don’t eat very many cats, though, because there aren’t that many of them around and, like every other noticeable mammal in the country, they’re working animals, in this case charged with rodent control.
• As for the geese, millions of Americans should be hearing this news and thinking: can we get some Haitian refugees to move here and clear out the B. canadensis blocking traffic and pooping all over? Ironically, free-range poultry go largely unmolested in rural Haiti, since in small communities everyone knows everyone else and such things cannot be hidden.
• A good heuristic: watch out for people who say “you can’t joke about that.” They’re the problem. (I’m a cat owner and have done my share of assisting in cat rescues in the past, so get that stick out of your … anatomy.) Fortunately, judging by the sheer quantity and popularity of social-media memes about this, the humorless element is massively outnumbered.
• In particular, an opportunity I hope will not be missed is Office Space jokes alluding to “temporary protected status” (TPS) and the cover sheets on reports thereof.

1. Resentment Is the Strongest Force in American Politics

• Not love of country, not desire for any kind of freedom, and certainly not concern for one’s fellow man. You are surrounded by people who are looking for someone to sic the State on anybody and everybody they don’t like, and they’ve got a list.
• Alienation has been a massive driver of support for Trump, especially among Jacksonian Americans; see Albion’s Seed for the borderland/backcountry migration cultural factors involved. The moment I knew he would win in ’16 came that summer, when I was driving through a dodgy neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas (which admittedly doesn’t narrow it down) and saw a man who looked like he could have stepped out of a Barney Google and Snuffy Smith cartoon putting an obviously hand-lettered sign for Trump in his front yard.
• The parlous state of the Democratic Party is largely due to their inability to see what they’re up against, or to imagine that they can defeat it by dismissively mocking it.
• Leftists, of course, resent Trump—and it’s become practically their only organizing principle. I may not live long enough to see them move beyond this. Don’t get me wrong: the feelings are very real, and a local blogger and Facebook friend once commented that seeing Trump in the White House was like a version of Back to the Future in which Biff Tanner is President. (My own version of this would involve a high school chess club being invaded by jocks.) Trump is a neurotypical in an ecosystem of politics nerds, and he thereby routinely outmaneuvers them.

2. All Disasters Are Local

In answer to the inevitable “how would you feel if you lived there” question … I’ve got some news, pal:

• Grazing (Midwesterners don’t surf) on over to city-data dot com, we find that for the latest year of available statistics, SGFO had a homicide rate of 10.2/100k population. KCMO had a rate of 32.6, and I can state with confidence that there is a geographic Pareto distribution such that in the dodgiest one-fifth of the municipality the rate is around 105—actually more like 115, because I happen to know that we had 185 homicides in 2023 vs 166 the year before. That’s pretty much failed-state level stuff. Welcome to the 2020s.
• In any case, it’s bad enough that, living as I do near enough to the free-fire zone, I hear the occasional fusillade of gunfire at night during the warmer months when I sleep with the windows open. Springfield is only 22.5 mi², so it’s not big enough for anybody to live very far from whatever the bad part of town is. Their experience is thereby around an order of magnitude more peaceful than mine.
• Incidentally—or not—a bit of digging and a few moments with a calculator establishes that young urban black males in KCMO are at 20x the homicide risk of the general population. I note that this means that young Haitian men in SGFO are at least several times safer … and I note that the Haitian homicide rate outside of the Port-au-Prince metro is, at worst, comparable to the aggregate US rate, ~5/100k/yr; probably lower, but I’m interpolating. It’s almost like culture matters, or something, to say nothing of game theory, but that would be a whole separate post. (Journalists are usually innumerate, so they aren’t going to actually, y’know, report things like this, just moan about how we’re all Racist™ for discussing it.)
• But what about the Epidemic of Alien-Caused Traffic Deaths™? Well, turns out that traffic fatalities in KC are also way up since, whaddaya know, 2020. We’re up around 70 so far this year—again, this is for the municipality, not for the metro, so annualized it will be 18 per 100k or so. Lots of them are hit-and-runs, and in any case this is, in all likelihood, several times the rate in SGFO. Not to overlook the obvious, few if any of them, or the homicides, involve illegal aliens. By the way, the traffic deaths map pretty closely to the homicide neighborhoods.
• But what about all the Threats to Our Children and Heroic Teachers in Schools™ causing closures in Springfield? Um … well … the Blue Springs, Bonner Springs, Grain Valley, Grandview, Independence, KCMO, Kearney, Lee’s Summit, and Raytown school districts have all gotten bomb or shooting threats within the past week. Like the song says, everything’s up to date …

3. Springfield, Ohio Is … a Boom Town

• We used to know about these. This realization alone ought to be enough to ball-gag the hysterical nonsense of recent days on both the left and the right. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries these situations happened regularly, and they were always rough and generally uncomfortable. And to be fair, the well-intentioned part of the Immigration Act of 1924 was intended to get such phenomena under control, although it inevitably paved the road to, eg, the MS St Louis.
• This seems like the right place to mention that SGFO lost 28% of its population between 1970 and 2020. Whatever else is happening, that’s being reversed in a hurry.
• As in various other locales—Ukraine since 2/24/22, southern Israel since 10/7/23—our vacation from history just ended, and in the usual Hemingwayesque gradually-then-suddenly fashion. You can’t wish it away.
• What are the actual risks? From what I’ve been able to glean, basically a lot of discomfort and the occasional irruption of chaos, although as noted above it’s modest by comparison with what goes on in a big-city slum on the daily. I’m unimpressed by, for example, the $300k said to have been spent on Haitian Creole translators by the Springfield City School District, because in the real world, counting benefit packages, that’s only a couple-three FTEs. I’m more impressed, or would be if I had hard figures, by the drawdown of local medical resources, because as I well know from my involvement with the COVID-19 situation, that kind of thing can get out of hand very quickly. Unfortunately, in the current climate, a dispassionate analysis is unlikely—a meta-risk of sorts.
• What about the opportunities? I not-altogether-humbly suggest that this be approached as a problem to be solved, and not in any superficial sense, as by dismissing it as a racist overreaction—or imagining that we can just “build the wall.” To be specific in my inimitable way, there are churches stepping up, and they’re who to talk to.
• The grain of truth in the silo of nonsense (expression not original with me) of the “racism” argument is that the reaction to this situation is largely driven by the fact that it’s affecting the ~40k white people in SGFO. And the grain of truth in the silo of nonsense about the “it’s the worst thing ever” argument is that the place isn’t that big; even if the numbers have been exaggerated, that’s a lot of Haitians to drop into a town that size—last I heard, there were ~5k in the KC metro, population ~2M, so 0.25%, vs possibly two full orders of magnitude higher in SGFO. As I’ve had occasion to note at least a couple of times on this blog, in Lewis Model terms, the “multi-active” Haitian culture massively differs from “linear-active” American culture … and successfully interfacing between them is the great challenge to be met.

4. Civil Society and Its Enemies

• Like several other political disputes in the US in recent decades, this is being presented as a clash between pure risk acceptance and pure risk avoidance, when it’s actually a combination of risk mitigation and risk transfer. Risk mitigation is what the churches are attempting; risk transfer is what the state government is attempting by sending extra state troopers and $2.5M in clinic funding. I repeat: wishing it away is not an option; this is a challenge to be met.
• Being what I am, I have to wonder about the backlash to the church in American cities generally, depending on the outcome of the election. Jacksonian Trump supporters are often unchurched and resent even relatively local ecclesiastical authority, which is what makes the paranoia on the left about “Christian nationalism” so hilarious. But a Trump victory could bring both a literally violent reaction from the left against evangelical Protestant congregations (and conservative Catholic parishes) and legal harassment of those that work with immigrants—often the same churches. A Harris victory presumably means just the legal harassment part, but against churches that articulate socially conservative values, even if they work with immigrants, as they often do. Again, welcome to the 2020s.
• After all that, I’m not especially worried about the next couple of calendar quarters, at least. Whatever this is predicting, it’s not the end of the world.