The Trivial State of the States

By Frank Trippett

The envelope, please. And now, for the best performance by an American state legislature in the Much-Ado-About-Little category, the Golden Nit for 1978 goes to. . .

This is the homestretch of the silly season, when state legislatures across the land seem to vie for the imaginary Golden Nit. There is nothing imaginary, though, about the time, effort and deliberation they customarily devote to the trivial, the insignificant, the utterly negligible. Nebraska's legislature, for example, has just dealt with a bill to add, as consumer representatives, two corpses to the state anatomical board: that passes for humor in Lincoln. Rhode Island's senators breezily adopted a resolution praising the hairdo of a female legislator, but the house turned aside a proposal to decree ricotta the State Cheese. In Florida, the legislature recently indulged in boisterous repartee over a measure that would have made it a crime to molest the "skunk ape," a mythical critter occasionally sighted around the state that is said to stand 7 ft. tall, weigh 700 lbs. and smell like swamp gas.

This legislative preoccupation with the trivial, which is confirmed in almost every state capital, goes by the term microphilia. Though the ailment was named only a few years ago (by a justly obscure political diagnostician), it has been in evidence as long as state legislatures have existed--though sometimes upstaged by more dramatic defects such as procrastination, carelessness and venality. These larger historic faults were undoubtedly in the mind of John Burns when he wrote in The Sometime Governments (1970): "We expect very little of our legislatures, and they continually live up to our expectations." In fact, many state legislatures have improved in some respects over the past two decades, attracting members of higher caliber, for example, and tightening up their staffs and internal organization. But their fascination with trivia has, if anything, got worse; microphilia has become chronic and endemic in the statehouses.

In no area does this odd trait show itself as starkly as in the legislatures' ceaseless squabbling over the designation of "official" animals, birds, fishes, minerals, poems, songs and flowers. Last year, after interminable conflict among advocates of barbecue, gumbo and chili, Texas legislators finally designated the last as State Dish. This year a skirmish shaped up in the New York legislature over the selection of a State Insect (praying mantis vs. Karner blue butterfly), and in New Jersey over a State Fish (bluefish leading); a struggle over the wild turkey left Alabama still, alas, without a State Game Bird.

Vermont, in a flurry of accomplishment, designated a State Cold Water Fish (trout), a State Warm Water Fish (walleyed pike) and a State Insect (honey bee). The Massachusetts general court, though moving hardly at all on important issues, considered (and, amazingly, rejected) the adoption of a State Poem with the opening line, "Chickadee, chickadee, chickadee ..." Connecticut, which got along for 190 years without a State Song, obtained one at last when the legislature picked Yankee Doodle--after replacing the word girls with folks. Widely criticized years ago for ending a session in which the designation of the Great Dane was its signal achievement, the Pennsylvania legislature this year bent its energies to the selection of a State Cat (alley cat favored). Success would create the possibility, as one statehouse joker put it, "of the State Dog chasing the State Cat up the State Tree [hemlock]."

Legislative microphilia ranges well beyond an obsession with official totems and artifacts. One classic manifestation occurred this season in Colorado, where legislators climaxed their session with a mighty struggle over the apostrophe in Pike's Peak: for the benefit of constituents who had never come to terms with grammar, they outlawed the apostrophe. In Alabama, legislators reached the session's final day without action on a single major bill--but not without having played, once again, their recurring conflict with the capital city government over parking space for their cars. Idaho lawmakers, for their part, indulged in a six-week-long brouhaha over whether to ban the use of radar by highway police; the senate passed a bill prohibiting it on the ground that radar endangers heart patients with pacemakers, and the house set aside the bill only after the sponsor admitted that there was absolutely no hard evidence of such a risk.

Resolutions of commendation, which pumped promiscuously out of most legislatures, got so overdone in South Carolina that one member this year exposed the absurdity with a resolution intended to commend "all persons, male and female, young and old, tall and short, fat and skinny, who have performed any act or deed during the past five months worthy of commendation." A sort of subdued microphilia was evident in Concord, where New Hampshire's solons spent several months intensely debating the question of whether they had any reason to be in session at all. In such an atmosphere it is not surprising that a. typical legislative leader. New Jersey Assembly Speaker Christopher Jackman, could be recorded as telling his followers: "I don't want anyone asking me any questions and expecting me to give any answers."

When it takes a virulent turn, microphilia provokes that streak of rowdiness for which state legislatures have always been famous. Such episodes may not often match the one achieved some years ago in Austin, where Texas legislators indulged in a fist-throwing free-for-all best remembered for the four lawmakers who occupied the rostrum and sang I Had a Dream, Dear while their colleagues slugged it out. And yet buffoonery such as the throwing of food (in Illinois) or of wastepaper (in Maryland) occurs frequently enough to show that the nation's microphiliacs have at best only a tenuous hold on dignity. In the Oklahoma house, members keep tiny American flags at hand to wave when the speaker happens to be Representative John Monks--who won fame of a sort for having once got an anticockfight bill killed by arguing that it was Communist-inspired. In Rhode Island this year a certain inordinate liveliness resulted when, on St. Patrick's Day, the members' water pitchers were filled with creme dementhe--as when, on the subsequent St. Joseph's Day, Italian members, countering the Irish, wore red hats and handed out pizza. In the Georgia legislature, decorum so deteriorated at one session that a member flung to the floor by an epileptic seizure got no immediate help because no one thought anything was wrong.

While the outcroppings of microphilia are plain to see, the cause of the condition is not so conspicuous. Actually, the legislative obsession with trivia is best understood in the same way a psychologist understands the compulsive quirks and tics of an individual--as a signal of unresolved inner frustrations. The main one of several unresolved twists in the legislative psyche is a baffled, often stifled, creative urge; thus action on trivia be comes a substitute for action on substantial matters. Viewed just so, microphilia can be seen as a symptom of the legislatures' historic and persisting aversion for using their powers, a trait, students of the species have long noted, that accounts for the fact that state government is the weakest link in the chain of American federalism. The same institutional frustration underlies many of the other dubious but widespread legislative characteristics that have put state legislatures right where University of Pittsburgh Professor William Keefe once located them: "On the outskirts of public esteem and affection."

Only a grouch would regard all legislative levity with a solemn eye. Yet it is fair to marvel that these grass-roots law makers manage to do so much that is scarcely worth doing while assiduously avoiding so much that cries out to be done. Undoubtedly there are quite a few among the lawmakers them selves who may feel as Senator Jim Walters did when his Mississippi legislature went home this spring. The session's highlight, said he, was "that we didn't do any more damage to the people than we did."

Perhaps even that deserves thanksgiving. Surely by now Americans are accustomed to being grateful for any favors --however small-- from the statehouse.

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