American Voices: Ethan Craft, License Plate Collector. THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY INTERESTING OK SO LISTEN TO IT

Kings of Democracy

SHUT UP! OK SHUT UP! Do you know how long it takes to research and write and record one of these episodes? I just got a new job. I'm busy, i got my own stuff going on.
So instead of that, today we are going to spend some time with Ethan Craft another dude I met on Tiktok and we're gonna talk about License Plates, which he collects. Now I know you are thinking, Andrew aren't license plates just a piece of unnoticed ephemera that reveal a shockingly rich culture of changing material design that also reflects our national transition to an hyper-individualistic society? And the answer is yes, but some of them have bird on them.
Actually I'm really in to this kind of stuff, its actually the exact kind of thing that inspired this podcast. Most of us object to the Great Man of History TM ideas, but the reaction to this has been to assume a kind of photo negative inverse of it. We no longer celebrate how George Washington built this county, we morn how he was the worst. The reality is that the Great Men of History rarely shape your daily life as much as you'd think. It's also the tiny little decisions of material culture. License plates are a perfect example of that. Why are there so many diffrent kinds of license plates? Why are they made in jail? What is the rarest license plate? Where can I get a license plate?

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