Boston’s Stupid Government
The first thing you should know about Boston is that its State House, the capital of the entire state of Massachusetts, contains a thing called “the Sacred Cod.” The Sacred Cod is a large fish suspended within its House of Representatives, which is legally or at least traditionally necessary in order for their House to convene. This is to say, if by means of a stepladder and mischievous intent you were to remove the Sacred Cod, the Massachusetts House of Representatives would be out of order, and could only stand around sputtering about the missing cod. (Government in Massachusetts has literally been suspended in the past due to collegiate hijinks effecting exactly this.)
You might think that Massachusetts would dispense with such a peculiar atavism, but that’s not how Bay Staters think. Quite the contrary. Not to be outdone, the Massachusetts State Senate later created its own Holy Mackerel which serves the same purpose: of being an utterly useless yet wholly necessary provision of its convening to legislate.
My own state has something at least comparably ridiculous. The Great State Seal of Oklahoma (a large, marble circle about nine feet in diameter) is the official, physical site of the state Capitol. Wherever it is. It was originally located in Guthrie, at that time a Republican stronghold, which prompted a wily Democratic governor and a cohort with crowbars to literally make off with it in the dead of night one evening, to relocate it to more politically sympathetic Oklahoma City, where our legislature remains. Theoretically if you could break into the Capitol with a forklift and a clandestine flatbed truck, you could relocate the Oklahoma State Capitol to a state not actually in Oklahoma—like Massachusetts. Then you could steal the Sacred Cod and stash it in Guthrie, prompting a really interesting week in both states.
The Massachusetts’s State House is built on donated land from John Hancock, one of our founding fathers and at the time Boston’s most prominent businessman. Most of us know John Hancock as the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, thus making his name synonymous with writing one’s signature. Naturally, he is a member of the august body of men known as the Founding Fathers.
The man is perhaps a tad more nuanced than we might suspect. John Hancock became exorbitantly wealthy as a smuggler, a profession which by definition pits you at odds with the authorities governing ports. At the time these authorities happened to be British, which at least lends some financial explanation for why he might have been motivated to oust King George’s influence in the colonies. But that could of course be coincidence: you could very well be a bootlegger during Prohibition for financial and ideological reasons simultaneously.
More importantly than his work as a politician in the nascent United States, Hancock funded the operations of the Sons of Liberty, the raucous freedom-lovers responsible for the Boston Tea Party, tarring and feathering Brits, and any number of wholesome exacerbatory activities designed to roil colonists into a proper state of rebellion.
Hancock did not view his political donations as an entirely selfless campaign activity–he saw them more as a loan. He would eventually, quite loudly, remind Congress of how much money he had shoveled into the Sons of Liberty leading up to the Revolution, and intimated that he ought to be compensated.
Thus he suggested that, as recompense, Congress go ahead and name John Hancock “King of America.” Interestingly, many of the delegates in Congress felt that their problem was not so much with the specific king they were fighting, but rather the institution of monarchy. So, doubling down, John Hancock suggested that he merely be given the title of “Emperor of America.”
All for naught, of course. Hancock never even managed to become president, which clearly irked him. That honor went to George Washington, who had been the first commander-in-chief of the army. For at least this much John Hancock detested the man. Hancock so disliked America’s clear favorite that, as governor of Massachusetts at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, he refused to see newly-elected President Washington’s parade into the city.
Hancock’s advisers argued that it was imperative that the governor of Massachusetts turn out to see the new president, simply to make a public appearance and show political solidarity. Hancock responded that he was ill, and under strict doctors’ orders to stay in bed, and so had to politely refuse to participate.
In response, aides carried John Hancock’s bed out of his mansion so that he could, brooding in his pajamas, observe America’s head-of-state process triumphantly through Boston. To add insult to injury, Hancock’s wife would go onto name John Hancock’s son John George Washington Hancock. We can only infer what relations between Mr. And Mrs. Hancock were like. (Or perhaps between Mrs. Hancock and Mr. Washington.)
Not far from Hancock’s old estate is Boston’s former City Hall, a splendid building which likewise sports its own ridiculous artifact, both less stupid yet more infuriating than the State House’s Sacred Cod: a large brass donkey.
You will recall that the donkey is the symbol of the Democratic Party. At one point in Boston’s history, the local Democrats decided to build a monument to their firm grip of municipal power by erecting the statue directly in front of City Hall. Republicans naturally hemmed and guffawed at the sheer audacity of using public funds to build a spiteful statue on the very grounds of City Hall.
So, given the opportunity, they responded by subsequently using taxpayer dollars to place a bronze placard directly in front of the statue with two footprints in it, bearing the message, “STAND IN OPPOSITION.”
All children in Massachusetts should be required to see these two bronze debacles, because they so succinctly explain our country’s two party system: The Democrats and Republicans act like football teams, and regard governance as a secondary matter to beating their rivals. Democrats excel at wasting taxpayer dollars on ridiculous projects. Republicans excel at criticizing them for their sloppy spending, then when given the chance, proceed to likewise piss away tax payer dollars, but at a marginally less audacious level.
