Beyond voicing your License Plate opinions through your votes, you can now let the world hear your thoughts in words by emailing us at allthingsnit@gmail.com. Below are our latest reader submissions. The first, complaints from a guy who seems like he loves the DMV. The second, thoughts from a guy who seems like he hates the DMV.
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California has the best plate in America and it was ranked 25th, so this whole bracket is clearly rigged. That said, within the broader disaster there were other issues that made me distrust the American public.
- Utah has terrible execution on a good idea and we let it get ahead of the strong statement and crisp design of DC, and then screwed up again by voting it in over the Founding Fathers of South Dakota? Utah’s plate looks like it was designed by someone getting a C grade on their first project in MS Paint 101. That plate looks like a turd that’s half in/half out of a toilet bowl, and is explicitly disrespectful to the beauty of the arch it’s supposed to represent. Instead, we voted it over two different top-ten plates in America. Unbelievable.
- I get the appeal of the North Dakota plate, because bison are cool as hell, but couldn’t the designer have gotten the focus level somewhere near the proper setting? Why does it feel like we’re looking at this through someone else’s bifocals? A true disaster if I’ve ever seen one. Should have been DESTROYED by Florida and by Georgia, two designs proudly representing their major (and delicious) crops.
- I admire Wisconsin voters’ ballot stuffing, but it’s a grand shame that Alaska was eliminated so early.
- What the fuck are people seeing in the North Carolina plate? If they were really proud of their flying heritage they’d figure out how to put a Camry in the sky. Shameful that the perfection that is the New Mexico plate fell prey to such poor taste.
Sincerely,
The Only Voter With Functioning Eyeballs
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License plates are fascist. Let us begin with that presupposition.
They enable the surveillance state. If not, why would they be blurred on car commercials, as if they were an informant in a mob documentary or a stray nipple?
They fund state and local governments, lining the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats and aldermen.
Let us ask ourselves: what else must we license? Our guns? Our homes? Our selves?
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Having established that license plates are a farce, let us also establish that a state’s license plate is farcical in direct proportion to the amount of cuteness involved.
This applies to children’s rhymes like “Famous Faces, Famous Places.” It applies to idyllic pictures of farmland or pictures of fruit. And it even applies to insincere mottos like “Live Free or Die,” rendered hypocritical by its sheer existence.
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Having established those two premises, the least-bad of all license plates is therefore the simplest. And if simplicity is the measure, there is no simpler plate than Delaware’s.
Lacking embellishment or artwork, the Delaware plate has been largely unchanged for decades. It’s only flourish is a simple and noncontroversial fact presented without bravado.
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The open road is a paradox. In popular lore it symbolizes freedom. And yet our highway system would not exist without a powerful central government. Recall that the greatest highway in the world was built by the worst fascist of them all.
In our civic lives as Americans, we are required to balance this tension. What do we need from our government, and what are we willing to sacrifice to get it? To turn a phrase to serve my purposes: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for yourself.
No state stands its ground more firmly than Delaware in this regard. God bless the First State.
Craig Buettell, March 2020
