Even though, when reading the news, it may seem like every day is April Fools’ Day, today is the real deal. Although today, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for many centuries by different cultures, the exact origins remain a mystery. A popular theory is that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582 when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, that was called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes.
I mentioned earlier that, especially in Washington, it seems like we’re living a perpetual April Fools’ Day. Sometimes the line between what’s a prank and what’s not isn’t always clear-cut. When Donald Trump announced he was running for president, it seemed like a prank… maybe it was, but the fact that he ended up winning — is it still a prank? I’ll leave that judgement up to you.
But in 1959 something almost similar happened in Brazil… students in Sãn Paulo, Brazil were tired of the city’s overflowing sewers and inflated prices, so they launched a campaign to elect a rhinoceros to the city council — and won. The rino’s name was Cacareco (Portuguese for “rubbish”) and was already a popular figure in Sãn Paulo when the students launched her campaign. The four year old rhino had moved to the city from Rio de Janeiro when Sãn Paulo’s zoo opened, and was scheduled to return to Rio soon. When the students looked at the 540 candidates vying for Sãn Paulo’s 45 city council seats and feared that none of them would address the city’s problems, they decided to make a point by asking people to vote for the popular rino instead. Cacareco won a city council seat with a whopping 100,00 votes — far more than any other candidate. Of course, she didn’t end up serving on the council because the election board disqualified her. But she remains one of the most famous protest votes in Brazilian history.
Maybe if a rhinoceros is on the ballot in 2020, the race might get a lot closer — or — maybe a runaway. Just remember, April Fools’ pranks used to be pretty easy to spot — today, not so much sometimes. That says a lot about our world… I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. But go play a prank on someone — it is April Fools’ Day….
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