Virginia Tea Partiers push for Don’t Tread On Me state license plate

Delegate John O’Bannon, portrayed by Ben Affleck in the classic Richard Linklater film Dazed and Confused, has introduced a bill that would create a Virginia license plate picturing the Gadsden Flag’s rattlesnake emblem along with its well-known slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me.” The plate is being promoted on the website of 912 Richmond, a group whose name harks back to that halcyon day when no enemies had tread on the commonwealth in nearly twenty-four hours. According to the Pilot, one Tea Partier who aspires to possess this plate is Ken Cuccinelli.

The government just won’t quit treading on that poor man.

Hisssss (at the lack of sans-serif)

The irony in this article crashed my web browser. I’ll have to invent what it says from here on out. Nothing I concoct will be more ludicrous than the truth, which is that legions of Tea Partiers mean to register for specialty plates that will give the government funds above and beyond the dollars these folks already donate for the sake of constructing and maintaining our socialist road system.

Or maybe those dollars don’t go straight to maintaining roads. I actually don’t know where the money for license plates goes, but it’s undoubtedly a tax, and it’s at least indirectly related to road maintenance. It’s also a higher tax specifically for those drivers who do choose specialty plates, which means Don’t Tread On Me plates will be owned by taxpayers who voluntarily pay more than those of us who choose to forego them.

There’s little in government more openly socialist (that is, opposite the alleged Tea Party philosophy) than our road system. Americans overwhelmingly want more and better roads, as evidenced by their eager payment of various taxes on automotive transportation that are levied virtually without objection. If Tea Party aficionados like Texas Governor Rick Perry expressed a desire to opt out of highway funding the way they hope to say “no thanks” to Medicare, I might consider their overall platform to be a coherent system. That is, I wouldn’t vote for it, but I’d trust that the politicians who espouse it believe in it.

My subjective response to the Gadsden flag, with its yellow background and ungainly sans-serif lettering, involves some aesthetic displeasure, but I don’t object to its sentiment. Its basic symbol—the rattlesnake—mimics the subject of a woodcutting by Benjamin Franklin during the French and Indian War. My favorite encyclopedia quotes Franklin as believing that the rattlesnake presented “a strong picture of the temper and conduct of America” because “she never wounds till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy.”

I realize Glenn Beck likes to name Ben Franklin as a forefather of the Tea Party, as if he shares an iota of its sensibility. The above quote is construed by Beck’s ilk as aligned with a desire to wage forever war against the Middle East. But Franklin said too that “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” He said “There was never a good war or a bad peace” and that “All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones” and even that “The system of America is universal commerce with every nation; war with none.”

In other words, there’s some cognitive dissonance in the Tea Party’s draping itself in the Gadsden flag.

To anyone who cares about that flag’s symbolism and its meaning, this should be as bothersome as the Iraq War chickenhawks’ appropriation of the American flag throughout most of 2002 and 2003. It took Fallujah and Abu Ghraib seared into our consciousness before the fifty-cent flag magnets began coming off the bumper stickers of SUVs that had been burning Middle Eastern oil at an average rate of sixteen miles to the gallon. That was six years ago in 2004; now, it seems, the belief disconfirmation paradigm is here again and the skies above are clear again so let’s—well, you know the tune.

(Of course, not every prominent Tea Party politician is pro-war. Senator-elect Rand Paul, notably, has spoken about taking money away from the Defense Department, and this month the Cato Institute’s website links to a plan that would shrink the Pentagon budget by a trillion dollars over ten years. But it’s hard to imagine these voices won’t be drowned out by louder ones.)

I hope license-plate pride won’t discourage Tea Partiers from taking light rail when it gets running next year. Here’s hoping transit supporters devise a method whereby Cuccinelli and his acolytes can ride the Tide while wearing on their person some display of their favored plate—e.g. a lanyard disguised as a rattlesnake, to which a monthly transit pass can be affixed in the form of a yellow card that says “Don’t Tread On Me Until [Expiration Date].”

Incidentally, there are approximately three thousand kinds of specialty license plates in Virginia, so it might seem silly for me to get up in arms about this one. I’m not saying the Don’t Tread On Me plate should be disallowed, especially given the existence of the Choose Life plate and the Fox Hunting plate and the Parrotheads plate. It’s just that it’s the one discussed the paper this morning, which means it’s also the one I happened to notice seems rather ridiculous.