How To Psychoanalyze An Entire Country: Part I

So.

I was talking to my daughter one day recently and somehow we got on the topic of how each State in the United States has a bunch of officially-legislated State Symbols although a better moniker would probably be State Attributes. You know, things like the Official State Particle Accelerator, Official State STI, Official State Mustelid Including But Not Limited To The Weasel, The Stoat, The Fisher, The Marten, The Badger, The Polecat, The Wolverine And The Ferret.

Up here, north of the 49th parallel, each Province and Territory also has a handful of Symbols/Attributes but for the most part they’re pretty pedestrian: flowers, trees, fish, snow tires. That said, I noticed that a few more-sophisticated USA-type attributes have managed to inch their way into the portfolio of each Province or Territory. The technical name for this is Attribute Creep.

Somehow, the notion of all these Official Attributes waiting to be analyzed spoke to me and I wound up spending quite a few hours dissecting the Official USA State Symbols/Attributes site in considerable detail.

Maybe all this would have had something to do with my running out of OCD medication if I actually had OCD. But I don’t. Just saying.

Long story short, I wound up constructing an Excel sheet summarizing all 181 Official Primary Attributes spanning all the States in the USA. As luck would have it, about 60 of these Primary Attributes also had anywhere from one to 18 Sub-Attributes. This made for a grand total of 375 Attributes: give or take a few. That is a shit-ton of attributes if you ask me. But the USA is a pretty big country…

Warning: it may take several posts to cover all that ground…

The first thing you’re going to want to see is the scoreboard. Here it is:

Texas takes the win and maybe you’re thinking that makes sense somehow since it’s the most populous State. But if the number of State Attributes were related to State population then we would have expected California for the banker (win for you horse racing neophytes), Texas for the show and Florida for the place. But instead we wound up with Texas, Tennessee and Massachusetts. Florida was way out of the money in 25th place and California crossed the finish line in 9th place, eating Louisiana’s dirt.

What da heck?

Note: I just finished reading a book about Secretariat, the amazing horse who won the Triple Crown in 1973 and is remembered for winning the third jewel in the Crown (aka the Belmont Stakes) by 31 lengths running each furlong faster than the preceding one. This performance has never been equaled, not that I’m maudlin or anything.

Anyway, all majestic horses with hearts like lions aside, the following scatterplot drives home the point that there is a pretty lousy correlation between the number of Official Attributes and the population, for any given State.

Once I saw that, I said to myself Hmmmm. Maybe it’s a political thing. So then I made these box plots according to State Political Preference:

It looks like there is a tendency for Red States to legislate in more Attributes compared to the other States. Red States tend to be less densely populated and there is a theory that says: fewer people: fewer regulations. Therefore, because the Representatives in the Red State Legislatures have fewer regulations to dream up and fewer Bills to pass, they spend most of their time debating about State Attributes.

Take Pennsylvania for example. It has no State Cookie because the legislators are having trouble deciding between three contenders. I swear on the red waistcoat of Ernie the Keebler elf that I’m not making this up.

In 1996 a group of 4th-grade students at Caln Elementary School in Coatesville, PA, with the help of Sen. Robert Thompson, initiated efforts to get sponsorship for a resolution designating the chocolate chip cookie as the official state cookie of Pennsylvania.  Thompson did so to help show fourth-grade students how a bill becomes a law, However, the legislation to adopt a state cookie was held up for several years as lawmakers struggled to choose between the legendary chocolate chip cookie, the Nazareth sugar cookie (House Bill 219), and the lesser-known oatmeal chocolate chip cookie (House Bill 2479). 

Apparently there was some bitter infighting going on and in 2003 Sen. Thompson told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that he blamed State Government Committee Chairman Charles Lemmond for the lack of progress saying, “Sen. Lemmond supports the general idea of a state cookie but he’s allergic to chocolate, so he never lets my bill out of committee.”

Later on in 2003, Senate Bill 320 made a valiant attempt to designate the chocolate chip cookie as State Cookie by pointing out that snack food production “is a key element of Pennsylvania’s number one industry (agriculture) and that naming an official cookie of the Commonwealth would recognize the steadfast and loyal devotion of the citizens of Pennsylvania to the chocolate chip cookie.”

It was a nice try but I guess nobody could sink their teeth into it. It never passed. As far as I can tell, Pennsylvania is still State Cookie-less.

Speaking of sinking your teeth into something, only one State, Rhode Island, has a State Appetizer. That appetizer happens to be calamari, by the way.

So your first question should be: Is Rhode Island infested with Greeks?

Answer: No. The Greeks comprise only 0.67% of Rhode Island’s population as of 2022.

(Note: My mother was Greek, so I am entitled to Greek stereotyping rights.)

Your second question should be: Why did Rhode Island choose calamari and why is it the only State with an official Appetizer?

Answer: The first part is easy: “The bill honors calamari as Rhode Island’s official state appetizer due to both the dish’s popularity in the state, as well as the importance of the squid industry to the state’s economy. ”

Nobody seems to know why no other States have an Official Appetizer. I for sure would have bet that Louisiana would have a State Appetizer since they have a State Doughnut-the Beignet. I have a theory about why there are only two States with a State Doughnut but I’ll save it for Part II.

Where was I? Oh yeah! Your third question.

Your third question should be: Where is Rhode Island, even? And do they have a State After-Dinner Mint?

Answer: No, but there’s always hope. And after all, “Hope” is the State Motto of Rhode Island. “Hope” is also a pretty short motto, in my book. Currently, the Rhode Island State Nickname is: The Ocean State. I think they should change it to The Terse State.

A few years ago, I was seized by an urge to write about the glaring need for a Grand Unified Theory of Dance Competition Medals because of the stew of confusion around what metal the first place award should be named after: gold, titanium, platinum or God-forbid, ununennium.

Clearly, there is an similar, glaring, unrecognized need for a Grand Unified Theory of State Attribute Categorization and Streamline-ification. Somebody has to do it. It might as well be me.

Theodore Roosevelt agrees:

Part of the problem is that there are just so many interesting nooks to explore in the vast Universe of State Attributes!

Sam Baldwin shares my enthusiasm:

“These are things I’m willing to get to the bottom of.”

-Sam Baldwin aka Tom Hanks, Sleepless in Seattle, June 23, 1993

I could go on by I’m going to wind this up by quoting Porky Pig. If you are over the age of 50, this is basically burned into your brain:

“Doo,doodly, doo, doo, doo, doo, doodly, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.”

Porky then pops out of a big bass drum and says. “Th-Th-The, Th-Th-The, Th-Th… That’s all, folks!”

P.S. At least until Part II in which I move on to discuss more Official State Attributes including, in no particular order: Buckminsterfullerenes, Dessert, Fly-Fishing Flies, Glacial Erratics and Marsupials.