Yes, but they win, because they don’t have to deal with out of state license plates, and nobody can identify a Hawaii driver on the mainland. So we wind up blaming Nevada or Washington, or whatever state the rental company plates are.
Both of these are states I just sometimes kinda. . . forget.
You know, like that room in your house you never look at and it just gets progressively messier and messier, but, like, if you don’t see it, you don’t think about it? Until one day you need something from in there and oh god how did it get like this.
I think at some point the metaphor strained and broke.
When I moved to New England from Classic England the state license plate thing was a godsend for identifying exactly what kind of lunacy I was about to see on I95 and I91.
New York turns out to be a complete crapshoot, because it could be some maniac who drives in the City every day or it could be someone from Piffard who’s desperately lost, seeking a way off the highway so they can climb into the backseat and start crying.
New Jersey can be summoned like a Genie. Just leave a space to the car in front that’s fractionally longer than one car length and there’ll be a NJ plate in it inside of 15 seconds.
New Hampshire have “Live free or die” on their license plates and all of them are trying to proceed from one condition to the other by being completely oblivious to the existence of other cars.
On the rare occasion that you can time New Hampshire’s seemingly random swerving and overtake their Subaru Forrester it can appear to be a driverless car. In fact the driver is simply bent over out of sight reaching into the passenger footwell to retrieve a Eurythmics tape.
Massachusetts - the lettering on the license plate is made with actual blood.
Far and away the worst drivers are a mystery because I can’t even find their state on the map. I’m not sure what sort of blasted post-apocalyptic landscape they come from but they all drive like homicidal sociopaths and their stark white and black plate just says “Dealer.”