A Summer of Bread and Circuses

It’s June.

The Knicks are back after more than half a century.

The World Cup is underway.

It’s almost Father’s Day, and I’m sitting here reflecting on fatherhood, and remembering all the Junes I’ve seen - including one “June” who was actually a pretty girl in 8th grade at school.

“June” was completely out of my league, although I didn’t know it at the time.

I live far from the place I was reared, and it’s well over a half century since my last county fair, which I seem to recall was in...June.

Some things you only meet once in life, and if you meet them as a little kid, they stick in the memory.

I met “The Zipper” when I was about 8 or 9 years old - at the Platte County Fair.

This was the same fair where the dark-eyed, dark-haired man in charge of the “House of Horror” convinced me and my brother that they had a werewolf in a cage out the back, but he was too dangerous for public display.

The dark-haired man said if we came back after midnight when the fair was closed (with ten bucks), he would show us the werewolf.

We lived a good few miles out along Route 92, so me and the brother never made it back to the fairgrounds that night. We daren’t ask our parents for ten bucks because we were poor, and besides, we couldn’t ask for a lift back in, because the dark-haired man had said it was a SECRET.

But back to “The Zipper”. There was a huddle of boys on the fairway near The Zipper, some munching cotton candy, others with lips tinged blue from a flavor of snow cone made from ingredients known only to chemists.

Everyone was daring the others to go on The Zipper.

You see, The Zipper was the only ride at the fair with a “Barf Barrel” placed at the exit.

What’s more, the oldest boy present (an impressive 14 years old), stated with no small amount of gravitas (and two cross-my-hearts) that only last month, a cage from another Zipper in the next county had broken free mid-ride, flinging two young boys a hundred yards to meet their untimely doom.

This latter piece of news raised the dare stakes considerably.

So of course me and the brother went on The Zipper. We didn’t need the Barf Barrel, because we both got sick on the ride, screaming like banshees for it to stop.

I’ve never seen another Zipper since that long ago night in June with “Brand New Key” blaring from loudspeakers as we retched, certain of our impending deaths.

“The Zipper” has become, for this writer, a hazy symbol of American culture itself, or at least a certain kind of childhood cultural upbringing.

Bright lights and screams, sugar and rust, bravado and menace.

And when that “certain kind of childhood” was played-out within a mostly poor, “white”, working-class, evangelical community, memory itself can feel like an ever-present and malevolent stalker to some of us.

*****

Over half a century later, it would be a little bit trite, and a lot easier, to write regular elegies to lost innocence.

I would love to be able to write pieces a la Garrison Keillor, filled with gentle humor and reassurances that the USA and its people are, all in all, good and decent.

Many Americans are lucky enough to grow up in a well-adjusted, loving, and supportive family environment, in a town, city, or place with a sense of community, with enough money for education, health care, and a nice roof over their head.

It’s fertile ground for companionable childhood memories, the kind we like to share, and the kind most people enjoy reading.

As a writer, there’s a damn sight more of a living to be had from selling this kind of affirmation.

But for vast numbers of people in America, things are and have always been, well, different.

For Black and Brown people especially, but also for the people often called “white trash”.

This makes some Americans see things a bit…differently.

Like when we look behind the glitz of this week’s sporting events...

The cheapest tickets to last week’s NBA match at Madison Square Garden cost more than the average American factory worker could earn in a month and a half.

Owner of The Knicks, nepo baby James Dolan, couldn’t care less. Neither could his buddy, the current US president, a man who loves basketball so much that he slept through much of the match he attended. We’ll presume he stayed awake when this same friend, James Dolan, got married at Mar-a-Lago a few years back.

Gianni Infantino, the unspeakably corrupt head of FIFA (soccer’s world governing body), turned a blind eye as US Customs and Border Protection denied entry to a fully-accredited and highly respected football referee for no apparent reason than the fact that he is a brown Somalian.

You see, the head of US Customs and Border Protection, Rodney Scott, and his boss, Donald Trump, don’t like brown people from “shithole countries”.

That’s not all that Scott has in common with his boss.

The man protecting the World Cup from brown professional referees has no respect for women, having been a member of a US Border Patrol Facebook group in which members mocked migrant deaths and shared misogynistic jokes.

“Jokes” were not even the worst of it. Scott has also been accused by a San Diego Superior Court judge of making rape threats against female whistleblowers at the US Border Patrol agency.

And while our eyes remain fixed on NBA Finals and World Cups, while we enjoy the sounds and smells of summer fairgrounds, a story which broke less than two years ago is reaching a conclusion this month.

Amid the spectacle and bombast and bread and circuses, thousands of Haitian asylum seekers await news of their ultimate fate in Ohio.

Just like Omar Abdulkadir Artan, the Somali referee told he is not welcome in the USA, these Haitians have the misfortune of also being from a “shithole country”.

*****

There are thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio due to a convergence of circumstances and various interests.

Springfield saw manufacturing jobs begin to disappear in the 1980s, with job losses peaking over the last 20 years.

While some of the whys and wherefores are open to debate, the loss of so many jobs was mostly due to a broad range of developments which helped to create a perfect storm.

These developments included the advent of neo-Liberal economic policies (aka “Reaganomics”), the signing of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), automation of many manufacturing processes, poor and/or callous business decisions, and a burgeoning economic globalization (a fancy way of saying that companies began to outsource labor to places like China and Mexico where labor costs were lower).

Many residents, facing long-term unemployment, moved away - which meant that the population of Springfield plummeted from 80,000 to just over 60,000 by 2014.

The people of Springfield were clearly anxious to halt this decline in population (and their general standard of living).

In 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook much of Haiti to pieces.

Anywhere between 100,000 and 316,000 Haitians are believed to have died in the worst natural catastrophe to hit a single country this century.

For an already poor country, the fall-out was almost insurmountable, with consequences including food insecurity, street and gang violence, and widespread lack of access to medical care.

In 1990, the US Congress enacted legislation granting legal status to certain designated countries, which meant that people from those countries fleeing war, natural disasters, political crisis, political violence, or civil unrest became eligible for visas under the TPS (temporary protected status) system.

Depending on the country, TPS is reviewed every 6, 12, or 18 months, at which time protected status can be extended or revoked.

As of July 2025, the following countries had an active TPS designation:

Afghanistan

Burma (Myanmar)

Cameroon

El Salvador

Ethiopia

Haiti

Honduras

Lebanon

Nepal

Nicaragua

Somalia

South Sudan

Sudan

Syria

Ukraine

Yemen

Venezuela

Haiti, having already been brought to its knees by the 2010 earthquake, saw its US-backed authoritarian leader Jovenel Moïse assassinated by Colombian mercenaries in 2021.

The ensuing street violence and political unrest led to thousands of Haitians fleeing to the USA under the TPS system, including to places like Springfield, Ohio, where many businesses welcomed them as a cheap source of labor.

In 2024, a Haitian immigrant knocked down and killed a local child while driving without a licence - an incident which touched-off open conflict between some locals and the Haitian immigrant community.

This is the point where Trump and J.D. Vance waded into the fray, leveraging this single incident into their white nationalist re-election campaign rhetoric in September of 2024, spreading false, racist, and ridiculous rumors suggesting that Haitians were stealing and eating local peoples’ pets.

Between then and now, Trump’s authoritarian attempts to use ICE and US Border Patrol have been held back by a thin line of judges.

Pending a final outcome, Trump’s minions have used other duplicitous means to try and force out the Haitian community, such as refusing to renew immigrants’ driver’s licences, making it impossible for many to work.

Like Cubans, and most Latin Americans, Haitians find themselves forever used as pawns in games of colonial chess.

*****

Inspired in part by the success of the American Revolution, enslaved Haitians rose up against their French colonial oppressors in 1791.

And won.

Many Haitians had hoped and even expected that the new USA would recognise their independence - after all, many free Black Haitian “Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue” had fought alongside American militias against the British only a decade earlier...

Under the ever-classy pedophile slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, the USA withheld recognition, choosing to isolate the new Caribbean nation, fearing that Haiti would become a beacon and example to enslaved peoples in the USA.

What’s more, the USA would enforce a trade embargo on the nascent Haitian state, an embargo which signalled the start of two full centuries of US colonialist interference, including the brutal occupation of Haiti by US Marines between 1915 and 1934.

Way back in 1825, French gunboats had already returned to Haiti, demanding financial “compensation” for the loss of French slaveholders’ “property” during the recent revolution.

Failure to comply would have resulted in the French government refusing to recognise Haitian claims of independence, and almost certain war.

With no help forthcoming, Haiti had no choice but to accept these terms.

Economically isolated and financially crippled, Haiti was forced to take out more and more additional loans to service this “independence debt”.

Shortly before WWI, the US “acquired” Haiti’s national treasury, and after WWI, Haiti’s remaining “debt” was moved onto the books of US investors such as the National City Bank of New York (later known as Citibank).

During the U.S. occupation of Haiti, more than seven percent of Haiti’s land was given or sold to U.S. companies.

Interest which had accrued on loans taken out by Haiti between 1825 and 1875 was not finally paid-off to US investors until 1947, shortly after the end of WWII...

From the establishment of the first European settlement of La Isabela by Christopher Columbus in 1493 - right up to the present day - Indigenous and African peoples on the island once called Quisqueya or Ayiti have been victims of slavery, colonialist exploitation, international capitalism, and the violent puppet regimes supported or enabled by outside interests.

And this is why 15,000 to 20,000 Haitians could end-up in a Rust Belt town in Ohio in 2024, willing to work LEGALLY in factories owned by shameless multi-national conglomerates like Dole, PLC., a company which cut its teeth by overthrowing Indigenous leaders and taking-over much of Hawaii in order to turn it into a vast pineapple plantation, manned by field workers from Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines and Portugal.

Pineapples are not native to Hawaii, by the way. But then again, nor are American capitalists...

It’s all part of the game called “Global Capital”, and the winners under this system don’t give a solitary f**k what people at the bottom - Black, White, Haitian, or American - think about it.

Until they need a vote, that is.

At election time, the mess caused by greed and neoliberal economic theorists (like Ohio-born Arthur Laffer) can be blamed on cat-eating Haitian “unhumans” by racist, misogynistic dungsacks like J. D. Vance and Donald Trump.

*****

As an 8 year old, I never wondered why school janitors, or the people cleaning up the fairway at 3 in the morning (once The Zipper had gone dark and silent), were always people of color.

Now I know why.

Just like I know how billionaires own the NBA and world football.

One in a million kids from a borough in New York or a favela in Brazil will make it to Madison Square Garden or a World Cup Final.

And if they dare to remember and speak for the millions who can never escape poverty, if they dare to point a finger at the Epstein Class, they will be told to “Shut up and dribble”.

Keep the show on the road. UFC on the White House lawn.

Politicians are carney barkers, and real estate moguls own the fairground.

Bright lights and screams, sugar and rust, bravado and menace.

Bread and circuses.