Spend a long weekend in Detroit and it becomes evident the United States of America is indeed a union of the car. Sculptor Mike Wilkins created his work Preamble to celebrate this very disposition.
If you’re well-versed in license plate speak, you won’t need more than a couple of seconds to realize that Wilkins’s work is the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America, rendered with a plate from every state of the union. Translated from platespeak, it reads as follows:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
America has certainly come a long way since this document was written by the delegates of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Delegates who inhabited a world of zero states in the Union, a number which would still be 41 short of the current 50 at the time of the Constitution’s ratification on June 21, 1788.
A world of no paved roads, no internal combustion engines and—if rumors are to be believed—no Corvette Sting Rays.
You can see Wilkins’s original at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. If you’d like to hang a copy in your living room, AllPosters.com has 24"×36" prints available for 20 bucks.
Source: Ordinary finds