LONSBERRY: Andy's Plates Are Garbage

Fredo’s brother wants to sell you a new license plate.

He did so well with the last one, he wants to try again.

Andy Cuomo, who has Stage 4 megalomania, has found a new way to get into your pocket and into your head.

His administration has announced that next year, New York license plates will be redone. From an old-style blue and gold – the state colors – to some sort of image. What sort, exactly, will be determined by a vote of the people.

A stacked vote of the people leading to a predetermined outcome.

But more on that later.

First, what’s this about?

Well, like everything in the Reich of the Second Cuomo, it’s about impoverishing you and worshipping him.

Or his daddy.

But, again, that’s the second point. The first point is something north of a hundred million dollars.

In New York, there are 4,563,035 registered vehicles. Disproportionately, they are upstate and owned by Republicans, and their number does not include the opt-out vehicles increasingly popular in the-law-doesn’t-apply-to-me urban neighborhoods where Democrat voters predominate.

These registered vehicles are easy to identify because of the illegible license plates, part of two separate state contracts that have left New Yorkers with peeling, unreadable, embarrassments screwed fore and aft on their minivans. Forty-nine other states can get license plates right, but in a state where contracts seem most typically to go to the highest donor, ours don’t work. Illiterate convicts in the 1930s could make license plates, but modern New York state contractors can’t.

It’s probably Trump’s fault, or maybe extreme conservatives.

At any rate, on top of whatever else you have to pay to get a license plate, those poor saps who actually register their vehicles will have to pay $25 for a plate transfer fee. And that, through the clever application of multiplication, puts $114,075,875 into Andy’s pocket.

Unless you want to keep your number.

If you’ve grown fond of your license plate number, or if it’s a vanity plate you want to retain, that will be $20 extra. On top of the regular plate and vanity fees.

This is more than a hundred million new dollars coming out of the pockets of New Yorkers. This reinforces New York’s position as the most screwed over state in the nation.

To keep us from spending too much time thinking about the cost, the roll out of the new plates is wrapped up in some sort of statewide vote on what exactly they will look like.

The original wording was: Would you prefer to be stabbed by a red knife, a blue knife, or a green knife?

They later changed it, however, to a poll of five prototype plates – four of them feature some aspect of the Statue of Liberty and the state motto “Excelsior.”

And what is the fifth?

Andy’s monument to himself and his daddy. The Governor Mario M. Cuomo Memorial Bridge. Or, as homophobe racist white supremacists say, the Tappan Zee Bridge.

Four statues of Liberty splitting the vote, and a picture of a Fredo’s brother’s daddy’s bridge.

Now, not that I know much about the minutia of bridgery, but if you were going to put a New York bridge on a license plate, wouldn’t you think it would be the Brooklyn Bridge?

Historic, meaningful to millions, iconic of America’s largest city, and very cool looking?

 But no, the Brooklyn Bridge is a monument to a people and their city, not a Cuomo, so it’s not in contention. Instead, it seems that the voting is rigged to put The Governor Mario M. Cuomo Memorial Bridge on every license plate in the state.

Which begs the question: How effed up is this guy, really?

And how much does he despise and loathe his subjects that he comes up with this stuff? And if he makes the license plates an homage to his daddy, will he at least make them so they don’t peel?

Perhaps The Governor Mario M. Cuomo Memorial Bridge license plates are a state-specific mark of the beast, a brand Andy can put on his chattel. A visual reminder of who owns us and what he does with our money. A compulsory speech which requires us to drive around advertising a master we hate.

And because of the rigged vote, he will call it the voice of the people, our choice not his. Imagine the erotic thrill that will bring him.

Or perhaps it’s not that at all.

Perhaps it’s just to show us what a bridge looks like that isn’t crumbling from years of neglect. New York is a state strangled by decaying 1950s infrastructure, and we’re not accustomed to new and shiny. Most of us can’t have safe bridges, but at least we can have a picture of one.

Final note: Has anybody else noticed that the only other world leader to build a massive monument to his father is Kim Jong Un?