Suck of the Draw

Maryland’s new official license plate, which will be issued through June 2015, pays tribute to the Free State’s role in the War of 1812. Which seems just perfect to me.

Maryland isn’t exactly a high-profile state. California excites the public imagination because it’s big and contradictory and unwieldy. New York is brassy. Massachusetts symbolizes liberalism. People make fun of my birth state of New Jersey, but it’s on everyone’s radar. Mississippi is ranked 50th in everything. Texas dares people to mess with it. Even out-of-the way states like Montana and Idaho have the anti-government crazies and, in the latter’s case, the Aryan Nations racists to raise a national hubbub. Virginia is for lovers. Maine’s got moose.

But, Maryland? Americans don’t give it a second thought. Like the gray Dakotas, the tiny Delaware and Rhode Island, and the bland, hot Southwestern states, it’s somehow indistinct. (OK, Arizona’s currently in the news because of its immigration law, but this, too, shall pass.) And the truth be known, Maryland’s anonymity suits me. To those who know it, it’s a lot of things—centrally located, historically corrupt, relatively progressive for its border-state, slaveholder roots—but it’s not pretentious. It doesn’t preen for the attention that eludes it.

And now this. Not only the license plate, but this recent headline from the Baltimore Sun: “Maryland Prepares Grand Salute to War of 1812.” What truly captured the essence of what I’m trying to get across was the subhead of that article: “Key Battle Sites Recognized in the ‘Forgotten War’ That Ended on Maryland Shores.”

There it is: “Forgotten War.” Forgotten why? Because, much like another second-tier conflict in American history, the Korean War, all the War of 1812 did was maintain the status quo. The United States was a recently independent nation before that two-year conflict, and so it remained afterward. The British pushed us around, then we pushed them around. Things ended up where they began, and a treaty put the stalemate in writing. Just like American-led troops in the three-year Korean “police action” almost lost that conflict, then almost won it, but ended up with a treaty that kept the peninsula divided at the 38th parallel.

Now, I’m not saying these weren’t wars worth fighting, that the brave soldiers who gave their lives shouldn’t be honored, and so on. (And the Korean War later yielded M*A*S*H, a fine film and TV show.) What I’m saying is that saluting a war about which nobody in this day and age gives a stray hoot is So Maryland, So the state few Americans could find on a map.

The perfection of this fledgling bicentennial extravaganza, which presumably is starting in 2010 to give the giddiness time to build, is crystallized in the license plate, which could not be blander or less impressive. Its minimalist, oddly modernist design purports to show Fort McHenry on the left side, with a big American flag popping up from its roof. The words “War of 1812” appear just below the state’s name at top center of the plate, and a Web address at the bottom center (starspangled.org) nudges non-residents to make connections most won’t—that our national anthem was written by Marylander Francis Scott Key about a battle waged in Baltimore Harbor in 1814 that was won by we Yanks, ensuring we’d all grow up with our stupid regional accents rather than infinitely cooler British ones.

I say that the plate “purports” to show Fort McHenry—which in fact is a wonderfully evocative battlement whose hills I’ve climbed many a time—because the artist’s rendering is boxy and (there’s that word again) indistinct. It could just as easily depict a big-box retail store as an early 19th-century protector of our national shoreline. And what, I ask, is blander, what less excites the imagination, than the evocation of a Wal-Mart or Best Buy—forgettable in design and identical from coast to coast?

This is what I mean when I pronounce Maryland’s choice of license plate the perfect marriage of state and object.