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William Morgan: R.I. celebrates the tacky

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Rhode Island's newest specialty license plate is yet another instance of the state's inability to put forth a decorous image. No wonder that Rhode Island keeps faltering at trying to sell itself as a tourist destination and a place to do business.

Perhaps the parade in Bristol is America's oldest Fourth of July celebration. So what? (This silly plate reminds me of one of my favorite instances of pathetic local boosterism. As you enter Mitchell, Ind., a sign declares: "Welcome to Mitchell. Home of the Mitchell Bees. State Basketball Championship Runner-ups 1948''. Or to echo the 1969 Peggy Lee ballad, "Is That All There Is?'')

American independence is, however, something to celebrate. Despite ongoing unhappiness with Thomas Jefferson because was a slaveholder,  the Declaration of Independence, of which he was the chief author, changed the world positively forever. Why not remember that document and the events it spawned as the zenith of the Enlightenment? Instead, Rhode Island commemorates a parade in only one of its 39 towns.

Could we have come up with a license plate that did not look like the cheapest sort of political bumper sticker, another "patriotic" pimping of Old Glory?

As a design, the plate is as silly as it is illegible. Why add the impossibly small drum with crossed flags (the simple graphic clarity of the Rhode Island Regiment's flag might have served as a template for the overall design)?

 

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The waving field of stars and stripes is simply a distracting mess, while what are presumably fireworks explosions seems to have been borrowed from Maryland's equally dreadful War of 1812 commemorative plate. Never mind that a disastrous, unnecessary war that we lost (Fort McHenry did not fall, but Washington was burned) is the object of identifying motor vehicles boggles the mind. What’s next: a Vietnam War plate? (Its motto might be the legend I saw on a soldier's jacket in 1968: When I die I am going to heaven, because I have already been to hell: Vietnam.)

 

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Official Rhode Island needs to stop trying so hard. With license plates, as with most aspects of our image, simple is best.

William Morgan is an architectural historian, based in Providence. He has written about license plate design for such publications as the Hartford Courant and Slate.

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Amidst kitsch and the drive to show off, a Quaker aesthetic still survives in the prepster Brigadoon

 

The Nantucket Island license plate appropriately displayed on a Land Rover, a classic off-road SUV for navigating Nantucket's cobblestone streets.

 

Can the precious island made wealthy by Quaker ship owners and whalers, but now the purview of Ralph Lauren-clad hedge-funders, stand any more cuteness? Would that the hauntingly beautiful island rebel against yet more trite merchandising of this demi-paradise of cedar shingles and windswept moors. Once, the ultimate status symbol was an over-the-sand permit for the bumper of a Jeep, or better yet, an old Land Rover. Now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has offered another bit of snobbery with a special license plate.

           

 

Even so, the new plate is not nearly as exclusive as the various out-of-state vanity plates that are seen on the island. Imagine the pride of the Mr and Mrs Gottrocks, summer residents from somewhere near the horse country of Morristown, N.J., constantly announcing their second domicile on their Audi "Afrika Korps" urban assault vehicle.

Clearly the appeal is for more than the 10,000 or so locals, and anyone across the state can get a Nantucket Island plate for their car. It is a desirable trinket for those who regard the Far Away Land as nirvana – a place of Nantucket baskets, Nantucket red khakis, red brick sidewalks, and more take offs and landings at the airport in the summer than Boston's Logan. $28 of the island plate's $40 fee does go to non-profits that help children, but one wonders if there were not another way to raise charitable contributions than a design that pimps the island's history

          

  Massachusetts paid a Boston brand consulting firm in Boston to glop up a license plate with several fonts. Thank goodness, the identifying NI and numbers are embossed – other states would have offered a tableau of Moby Dick in full-on Nantucket sleigh-ride mode. But no kudos should go to Nantucket artist David Lazarus for his confusing and complicated logo of a sperm whale superimposed on a detailed map of the island.

Such silliness makes a mockery of the centuries-old Quaker aesthetic that gave Nantucket such a strong design identity,as  in the house below.

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William Morgan is a contributing editor at Design New England magazine and is the author of such books as Yankee Modern and The Abrams Guide to American House Styles.

 

 

 

 

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