"They're Eating the Cats!"

Memeified demagoguery, the war on the working class, & America's downward spiral

Meme posted by Pres. Donald Trump on Truth Social hours before his September 10, 2024 debate with VP Kamala Harris

Anticipating that some of my Blue State friends would find it beyond the pale, I was initially hesitant to use the above MAGA cat army graphic to kick off this post. After some reflection, however, I decided to do it anyway. Because at least to me, this AI-generated image captures something fundamental about the Zeitgeist of this strange political season, as well as the degenerate state of American culture.

A gun-toting army of MAGA-hatted tabby cats? Love it or hate it, any honest broker has to admit that it’s an arresting meme. Simultaneously silly and symbolic, cryptic and crass, cartoonish and transgressive, it’s humorous — yet also (again, any truthful observer should admit) threatening.

It’s a right-wing in-joke that (yet once again) relishes triggering the libs. It also channels a lot of meaning that (yet once again) is tricksterish and ambiguous. And it’s probably the most surreal political intervention I’ve ever seen (although these days, of course, it’s impossible to keep track).

Plus it’s not simply the image itself. It’s the fact that this meme was posted by none other than former President and current Presidential contender, the one and only Donald J. Trump, to his Truth Social account several hours before last week’s first (and most likely only) 2024 Presidential debate. Unbeknownst to those of us who aren’t au courant with the latest trends in very online right-wing world, the rumor that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio had been killing and eating local pets (and waterfowl) had already been circulating in such networks well before the debate.

We don’t know whether Trump pre-planned what landed with most viewers (including myself) as a shockingly bizarre statement that came out of nowhere: "In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there." WTAF? That definitely caught everyone’s attention.

Trump, once again, proved adept at generating press coverage, ginning up partisan acrimony, and setting the terms of mainstream public debate. Quickly, almost everything else that was said during the debate was forgotten (although, absent specifics, the legacy media confidently celebrated it as a huge Harris win).

Post-debate, the Internet was flooded with even more animal (and especially cat) memes. Many (again, any honest broker should acknowledge) were incredibly funny. As long as you bracket the fact that making such an accusation about Haitian immigrants is, in fact, dangerously inflammatory (or just don’t care), it’s simply true that a lot of these memes (as well as songs, videos, etc.) are creative, entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny (see, for example, the “Mission Impossible”-soundtracked “Cats in Ohio Right Now . . . “ video, currently at 13.5 million views on X, also available on YouTube).

The ubiquity of these memes and their significance in driving political discourse points to our disturbing new normal today. It’s become standard to accept an absurd level of disconnect between the true complexities of a crucial policy issue (in this case, immigration) and how it’s popularly framed in public discourse (are Haitian immigrants really eating pets in Ohio?).

The resultant Red v. Blue rhetorical battles — in this case, right-wing defenses of viral jokey memes versus left-wing denunciations of racism, nativism, and fascism — don’t map onto the concrete realities of the policy issue in play at all. The consequence is a political culture that’s not only dizzyingly surrealistic but also toxically and dangerously divisive.

The centrifugal forces of these political and cultural forces make it difficult to step back and ask yourself: What’s really going on here? What’s the bigger picture? And what does it all mean? Even if you do so, it’s hard to wrap your head around what’s happening in anything approaching its true complexity — let alone come up with a compelling narrative that seems to make sense of it all.

Most of us aren’t experts on immigration issues. (I’m certainly not.) And that’s just one of many in play when it comes to having any in-depth understanding of what’s been happening in Springfield, Ohio, and other places like it across the country.

Humans are meaning-making creatures, and nature abhors a vacuum. Consequently, our stock Red v. Blue narratives easily rush in to fill our current chaotic void of culturally shared political meaning — which, of course, only fuels the confusingly divisive churn further.

It’s in the interest of our major media and social media companies, as well as political parties to keep this socially destructive dynamic going. Highly emotional, divisive issues drive engagement, leverage loyalty, and make money. Consequently, these vested institutional interests also have a strong incentive to marginalize, cannibalize, or co-opt any more serious, nuanced, and considered perspectives that come down the pike.

There’s a lot of good content here on Substack and other such independent platforms. But all of it put together doesn’t come close to counterbalancing the clout enjoyed by the likes of the Republican and Democrat parties, and The New York Times, CNN, and Fox. True, that’s slowly starting to change. But not fast enough to impact the unnerving shallowness and downright idiocy of a U.S. presidential election season driven by cat memes.

“Childless Cat Ladies for Kamala” versus “They’re Eating the Cats!” Seriously? It would be funny (and again, the memes on both sides have been hilarious) if it weren’t so profoundly disappointing and potentially disastrous.

Basic Facts

Given this dynamic, it’s instructive to note that many if not most of the key facts concerning the impact of immigration in Springfield, Ohio, aren’t in dispute. To the best of my knowledge, neither Team Blue nor Team Red contests any of the following:

• An estimated 12,000-20,000 Haitians have moved to Springfield, Ohio, a small city of approximately 58,000 people located between Dayton and Columbus, since the Covid pandemic.

• Most of the Haitians in Springfield qualify as legal immigrants under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.

• TPS allows migrants who otherwise would not have legal status to live and work in the U.S. legally and receive government benefits including Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and housing assistance.

• The Trump Administration tried to end TPS; the Biden/Harris Administration expanded it. As of March 2024, TPS covered roughly 1.2 million of America’s 21.6 million noncitizen immigrants.

• Most Haitian immigrants were drawn to Springfield due to “its relatively low cost of living and ample employment opportunities, including manufacturing jobs the city's chamber of commerce has worked to create.”

• The fact that so many immigrants arrived so quickly has meant that Springfield “has struggled to handle the soaring demand placed on health care, housing, schools, and roads,” among other problems.

• Local residents had been making impassioned complaints about such issues to their public officials well before Trump’s “eating the cats” accusation put Springfield in the national and international spotlight.

Considering these facts, I can think of lots of seemingly obvious questions that, as far as I’ve seen, have gotten little to no public attention. For example:

• How much does it cost American taxpayers to provide public education, social services, and health care to immigrants under the TPS program, both in Springfield and nationally?

• Why did so many Haitians come to Springfield so quickly? Was it simply driven by their own social networks or were other factors also in play?

• Doing a little research into this question myself, I found one (and only one) local newspaper report documenting that Springfield city officials had, in fact, started investigating this very question themselves back in October 2023. According to this story, they suspect some powerful local companies had secretly worked to engineer this sudden mass migration. The city is considering legal action.

• Now that Springfield has been in the national spotlight for almost two weeks, why aren’t employment-related questions a bigger part of the story? True, there have been repeated references to the fact that local employers wanted this new workforce and that the immigrants have, on the whole, been great workers. But what about this city investigation? And how does the influx of so many newly legalized immigrant workers impact the labor market and wage rates, both in Springfield and nationally, particularly for working-class jobs?

• (Important update since this post was published: I just became aware of Asra Nomani’s exclusive investigation into alleged labor trafficking in Springfield. Please read her important story, “Feds and State AG Investigate an Alleged Human Trafficking Empire Run in Springfield, Ohio.” I will post some quotes in the comments below as well.)

• The same local news story referenced above also discusses city officials’ concerns over how Haitian immigration has impacted the local real estate market. Rents have risen rapidly, “often resulting in the eviction of long-time tenants who can no longer afford to stay in their homes.” Further, “one of five property purchases in the country is now by an LLC for investment purposes.”

• The New York Times approvingly quotes Gary Durst (who, research reveals, owns one such LLC) as saying, “I probably have $25 million invested in this town. I believe in this town.” Only acknowledged in passing, however, are the facts that: 1) landlords prefer immigrants over local residents, as Haitians will live grouped together as needed to pay higher rents, 2) landlords have stopped accepting federal housing vouchers from local residents in 200 properties, 3) these shifts have caused an unspecified number of them to become homeless.

• Why isn’t this confluence of increased corporate control of rental housing, mass migration, rising rents, and homelessness in Springfield generating more discussion? Even cursory research reveals that it’s emblematic of serious housing problems in many other parts of the country. The Harris campaign has made housing a central issue, promising $25K to new home buyers for a down payment. But what about renters? And the changing structure of the rental market with increased corporate consolidation?

• To what extent is the Springfield experience with immigration post-pandemic representative of other small towns in the U.S.? Is it an outlier? Have a lot of other places been struggling with similar issues? If so, how many? If not, why not?

But, of course, we, the American public, don’t get to hear any intelligent discussion of these and other issues by any of the so-called “experts” who should not only be asking such questions but perhaps even have good responses to them. No, we just get to hear our political leaders and superstar journalists argue endlessly about whether Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are really “eating the cats.”

Red v. Blue Redux

Perhaps needless to say, Team Blue’s line on the Springfield issue is wearily predictable, repeating the same tired set of utterly familiar Trump-hating themes.

As Jamelle Bouie representatively charged in The New York Times, both Trump (and Vance, who has served as the semi-offical spokesperson for the Red narrative) are liars, racists, xenophobes, and fascists. As such, they naturally want to fan “the flames of hatred” in Ohio in ways that produce “threats of violence” and “may well bring physical harm” to the Springfield community.

Further, Bouie maintains, Springfield’s Haitian immigrants are not only there legally, but fill “a valuable need”:

They reversed a slow collapse that has already sapped the life from so many former industrial towns . . . they work hard and seem eager, by all accounts, to establish themselves as productive members of the community.

Major Springfield employers, Team Blue points out, have welcomed the Haitian immigrants with enthusiausm, as they tend to be reliably good, hard workers.

Team Red, in contrast, continues to beat the drum that Biden/Harris administration has been “destroying our country” through unchecked illegal immigration. They also regularly accuse the legacy media of pushing pro-Democrat propaganda to cover up that fact.

Working from these priors, Vance has aggressively defended Team Red’s promotion of the “eating the cats” rumor as the only way to get an otherwise impenetrable Establishment to pay any attention whatsoever to the havoc that mass migration is wreaking on the country. "I've been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months and the American media ignored it…until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Vance told CNN's Dana Bash in a highly contentious, widely watched interview. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.”

Here, it’s worth noting, Vance is not exactly admitting to making up stories, as the legacy media has repeatedly claimed. No, he’s a lot more dodgy than that. On the one hand, Vance repeatedly asserts that these pet-eating accusations came “from firsthand accounts from my constituents.” On the other, he acknowledges that his office never fact-checked any of these complaints. In this way, he leaves open the possibility that they may be true — or not.

Basically, his point is that he doesn’t care either way as, in his view, the means of anti-Haitian rumor-mongering justify the ends of refocusing public attention on the fact that such immigration is “destroying our country.”

Meanwhile, back in Springfield, the longer this sensationalized, memeified, racialized, and weaponized story grinds on, the more local residents — both native- and foreign-born — suffer.

Since the debate, over 30 bomb threats have been made against schools, government buildings, and city officials’ homes. Two elementary schools and one middle school had to be evacuated. State troopers were deployed to all 17 local school buildings. And those are just the numbers: One can only imagine how much fear, anger, confusion, and conflict there has been among local children, youth, and adults on the ground.

Naturally, Team Red is adamant that they bear no responsibility for any of this. “We can condemn the violence on the one hand, but also talk about the terrible consequences of Kamala Harris' open border on the other,” Vance insists. “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing,” he posted defiantly to his followers on X.

Team Blue, of course, rejects such rationalizations completely. “The idea that Haitians in Springfield are abducting people’s pets and eating them is not just a normal lie,” wrote Zach Beauchamp, senior correspondant at Vox:

The idea of barbecuing a neighbor’s beloved pet is such a violation, so alien in nature, that it renders the alleged targets outside the scope of what we recognize as human behavior. It is an attack on Haitians not only as individuals, but as an entire group. It is a kind of dehumanization that has historically led to deadly violence against the targeted group — often by design.

So who’s right? Team Blue or Team Red? Most Americans feel enormous pressure to pick one side and stick with it, no matter what. But why should we? To me, it seems obvious that both sides are making some good points — and some very, very bad ones.

Personally, I agree with Team Blue that the Trump/Vance ticket should not be promoting the claim that Haitian immigrants are killing and eating people’s pets. It’s not only morally reprehensible, but culturally and politically dangerous.

And no, it doesn’t matter if someone can come up with a few isolated incidences where something more or less along these lines may have been true. Even if that’s the case (which hasn’t been proven), to promote the accusation that Haitian immigrants are “eating the cats” is nothing but rank demagoguery.

In this instance, Team Blue is right: Such inflammatory claims do predictably generate social division, hatred, and violence. At the same time, on a more subtle level, they also corrupt countless people by encouraging them to internalize dehumanizing views of others.

In addition, according to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, they’ve produced a situation that hostile foreign countries are exploiting, terrorizing the town with bomb threats and further stoking hate, fear, and division.

That said, I agree with Team Red that the Biden/Harris administration has effectively pursued an open border policy, and that this has had very negative impacts on American society, and particularly the working class. I also 100% agree with Vance’s contention that the mainstream media has consistently refused to cover this issue (as well as many others) with any even remotely reasonable degree of honesty, accuracy, or integrity — and that instead, they have been acting as the de facto propaganda arm of the Democrats.

I also agree that the primary way that Team Blue avoids dealing with any issue they want to avoid is by either pretending it doesn’t exist or attacking anyone who brings it up as racist, sexist, fascist, etc. And I agree that this behavior is also socially destructive, generating division, hatred, and violence along with a deeper, more internalized corruption of the “better angels of our nature.”

And so, here we are: Churning in a social media whirlpool with lots of funny cat memes, watching our political leaders and star journalists undercut the foundations of our society, and wondering if everything is just swirling down the drain.

But hey, it’s the season of proudly defiant “childless cat ladies” versus trangressively humorous calls to “save the cats”! Choose your team! And get excited about casting your vote!

And oh, never mind that when it comes to Harris v. Trump, your vote only matters if you live in one of 15 “battleground counties” within one of only seven “swing states” . . . or that “outside spending in the 2024 election cycle has surpassed $1 billion, outpacing prior election cycles.”

No — let’s focus on those cats!

Flashback 2012: “Welcome to Springfield, Ohio: The ‘Unhappiest City’ in the U.S.”

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry released his caustic takedown of the devastating impacts of bipartisan neoliberalism on the American working class, “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore,” almost two decades ago. If you have an extra seven minutes to spare, I strongly suggest using them to watch the above video, which nicely illustrates McMurty’s biting lyrics.

Then, consider the fact that the situation described there has only gotten worse since the song came out — and that it references Dayton, Ohio, which is only 26 miles from Springfield.

Sadly, it’s not suprising. Because when it comes to the ravages of American deindustrialization and its attendant corporate predation, Ohio holds a certain tragically iconic status.

That’s why it’s not surprising that this current news cycle isn’t the first time that the small town of Springfield, Ohio, has made the press for its problems.

In 2012, for example, the Canadian Globe and Mail published an article entitled “Welcome to Springfield, Ohio: The ‘Unhappiest City’ in the U.S.” “The road south from Toledo is a veritable museum of American industry,” it begins. “You pass the rich farm fields and local processing plants, the stately century-old homes . . . evidence of the wealth that flowed from the industries that first built automobiles and other vehicles”:

But many of the homes are badly in need of some paint, and the towns wanting for life. None more so than Springfield, 70 kilometres west of the capital, Columbus. It is here that you see evidence of the full flowering of U.S. manufacturing – and its near complete collapse that today has left behind a lost generation and a bitter population . . .

As recently as 1983, Newsweek magazine named Springfield one of America's ‘dream cities.’ There was little crime, a university, racial harmony (the city was the first major U.S. community to elect a black mayor), a vibrant downtown, still active industries and a central location on the region's road and rail networks.

Last year, however, the Gallup polling organization described Springfield as the "unhappiest city" in the United States. Gone were many of the factories, and, like so many U.S. cities in the rust belt, the downtown was deserted. Unemployment rose and, with it, crime . . .

In the 1920s, there were 10 companies here building their own cars. International Harvester, the farm-machine giant, started here. (It's now called Navistar.)

Navistar…now employs only a few hundred workers in Springfield, down from the almost 5,000 union members it employed 30 years ago. Most of the assembly jobs have been relocated to non-union facilities in Texas and Mexico.

Four years later, Springfield was once again featured in the news, this time on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” (Notably, this story was reported by Uri Berliner, who recently quit NPR in protest over its deliberate suppression and misreprestation of critical news stories; he’s now at The Free Press.) This story provides more detail on Springfield’s decline, documenting that ”median incomes fell an astounding 27 percent in Springfield between 1999 and 2014, more than any metropolitan area in the country”:

Source: Uri Berliner, “Springfield, Ohio: A Shrinking City Faces A Tough Economic Future,” NPR Morning Edition (Sept. 19, 2016)

During the 1990s, the story continues, Clark County, Ohio (where Springfield is located) lost “22,000 high-paying blue-collar jobs.” Then, even after some rebound of jobs, wages remained “stuck in a trough.” As a result, “for many in town, a middle-class life is out of reach. And it's hard to see a way out”:

Take one of the big employers in Springfield — Navistar, a truck manufacturer. Jason Barlow, who represents Navistar workers for the United Auto Workers union, used to work on the assembly line. "When I hired in in 1995, I hired in at $17.65 an hour. Now (in 2016) an employee hires in at $15.68," he says. And that doesn't account for inflation.

“That squeeze on blue-collar workers — the march of automation and global competition — isn't just landing on Springfield,” the story continues. “It's happening throughout the U.S. and the industrialized world.”

Ruins of the Packard automobile factory, Detroit, MI (2013)

War on the Working Class

Experts agree that the state of Ohio lost well over 300,000 manufacturing jobs after NAFTA took effect in 1994. (For those too young to remember, NAFTA was the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the time, it was lauded by Democrats as a signature achievement of the Clinton Adminstration.)

The graph below illustrates this precipitous decline — which, of course, very much included Springfield.

Source: Ballotopedia, “Fact check: Did Ohio lose 300,000 manufacturing jobs because of NAFTA?” (Dec. 3, 2015)

Economists are divided, however, over the extent to which NAFTA can be blamed for this dramatic decline of Ohio’s manufacturing job base. Correlation, as social scientists like to say, is not causation. In other words, just because this steep decline started soon after NAFTA doesn’t mean that other factors weren’t equally or more important — or that it wouldn’t have happened anyway, even if NAFTA had never existed.

I’m no expert. But looking at the data and considering the high level of politics that are inevitably involved in such economic debates, I can only conclude that even if other factors no doubt also mattered, NAFTA almost certainly played a very significant role. (And yes, I do fault Democrats for refusing to acknowledge and grapple with that fact.)

Source: Evan Comen, “Victims of the opioid crisis: Counties with the worst drug problems in every state,” USA Today (Aug. 2, 2019)

If the precise role that NAFTA played in destroying the economy of towns such as Springfield is contested, however, the role that Big Pharma played in profiting off the wreckage is well documented.

Of course, the “opioid crisis” was (and remains) a national problem. Ohio, however, has been and remains one of the states most affected by it. And everyone now agrees that the roots of that crisis trace straight back to the determined efforts of Purdue Pharma to push OxyContin onto the most troubled parts of the American working class back in the 1990s.

As documented in Beth Macy’s book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America (2018), after the FDA loosened rules on pharmaceutical advertising in the mid-90s, spending “ballooned from $360 million in 1995 to $1.3 billion in 1998.” Plus, “nearly all pharmaceutical companies spent more plying doctors with freebies.…new sales strategies pushed the narrative of curing every ill with a pill and emboldened many patients to seek medicines unnecessarily.”

Of these supposed cure-all pills, Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin — which was aggressively marketed as safe but was in fact a highly addictive opioid — was pushed most profitably of all.

The timing was perfect: The drug found a ready market in the economically devasted towns impacted by NAFTA (and increased global competition more generally). Macy explains:

From a sales perspective, OxyContin had its greatest early success in rural, small-town America — already full of shuttered factories and Dollar General stores, along with burgeoning disability claims. Purdue handpicked the physicians who were most susceptible to their marketing…The higher the decile—a term reps use as a predictor of a doctor’s potential for prescribing whatever drug they’re hawking—the more visits that doctor received from a rep, who often brought along “reminders” such as OxyContin-branded clocks for the exam-room walls.

“Purdue’s growing legion of OxyContin apostles,” Macy continues, made “more than a million calls annually on doctors in hospitals and offices, targeting the top prescriber deciles and family doctors, and aggressively promoting the notion that OxyContin was safe.” All told, “pharmaceutical companies spent $4.04 billion in direct marketing to doctors in 2000, up 64 percent from 1996.” By 2001, Oxy sales hit $1 billion annually.

As detailed in the graph below, the resulting “opioid epidemic” hit Ohio hard, with the rate of overdose deaths expanding exponentially through the 21st century. (While not on this graph, they spiked even higher during Covid.)

Here, it can also be seen that Ohio’s pattern tracks with the larger, national one described by Matt Biven, MD, in a recent series of Substack posts, “A Deep Dive Into the Opioid Crisis”:

First came the prescription wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which launched the entire enterprise. Next came the heroin wave, which per the CDC roughly started in 2010, when the prescription-addicted turned to the streets. From about 2013 to today, we have been awash in synthetic opioids like fentanyl (heroin requires farming poppies, but fentanyl is cheaply made in labs)

Biven goes on to explain that when it comes to corporate profits, we can expect new innovations coming down the pike:

But wait long enough, and Big Pharma always wins. Amoral, soulless corporations — often the same ones paying out massive settlements — have maneuvered skillfully to reassert control over the addiction market they’ve created. The goal now is to create a fourth and final wave of the Opioid Crisis: the buprenorphine wave. We will start as many people as possible on this ingenious opioid.

Buprenorphine, the main ingredient in brand names such as Suboxone® and Subutex®, is a so-called partial opioid agonist: It latches tightly onto opioid receptors but stimulates them only slightly — just enough for a person with physical addiction to not experience withdrawal. A person on appropriately dosed buprenorphine is not sedated or high, they just “feel normal.”

…I can’t argue against expanded use of buprenorphine. The data clearly shows that it prevents death and disability. People really do get control of their lives again. Of course, it is also addictive. So, the plan we confidently propose is to treat opioid addiction with this admittedly ingenious and excellent medication, for a monthly price tag, depending on the formulation, ranging from $196 to $1,136… forever. 

What’s not to like? 

Coda: Competing Cats Memes Won’t Cut It

There are so many serious issues at stake. And we’re awash in competing cat memes. Seriously? Sure, a lot of them are hilarious. But we can appreciate that and still insist on a much more serious, thoughtful, and nuanced public discourse.

Whatever our politics, we must recognize that a healthy working- and middle class is the indispensable foundation of any meaningful democracy. We must also recognize that over the past several decades, the working class in Springfield, Ohio, and elsewhere across the country has been treated shamelessly — first, as exploitable, and then, as disposable.

At the same time, the middle class has been shrinking.

Source: Pew Research Center, “America’s Shrinking Middle Class” (May 11, 2016)

Trying to shift the blame for these longstanding dynamics onto immigrants, whatever their legal status, is nothing but scapegoating and demagoguery. It’s entirely possible to attack what has indeed been a de facto open borders policy as a serious problem without demonizing Haitians or other migrants. JD Vance in particular knows way better. His leadership on this issue has been beyond disappointing, and atrocious.

At the same time, the legacy media’s glee at being handed yet another opportunity to replay their stock anti-MAGA tropes (“they’re racists! Fascists!” etc.) is tiresomely obvious. They really do function as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party — and most Democrats seem perfectly happy with that.

And now that the Democrats have become the party of the professional-managerial class, it’s not surprising to see both the legacy media and Party leaders themselves sweeping the long-standing problems afflicting Springfield, Ohio, and other towns like it across the country under the rug.

Still, I have faith in the American people. With better leadership, I believe that most would rally to see more serious political discussion, more promising policy proposals, and more inspiring visions of America’s democratic potential.

We know there’s a lot that’s very wrong with our country and want to fix it. We believe in the presumptive dignity and worth of all people, regardless of social differences. We empathize with immigrants, even if we want to control our borders. We’re small-”d” democrats who still believe in a small-”r” republic. And we deserve better.