I was born in the Big Sky Country. The slogan wasn’t on the license plates back in the days when we drove from Montana to Illinois for graduate school, but the phrase was well known enough that it would garner an occasional comment from people who hailed from other states. “How can the sky be bigger in one place than other?” they would ask. I sometimes responded, “Because you can see more of it.” The truth is that the sky isn’t any bigger in Montana, but clear clean mountain air results in a beautiful hue to the sky and I’ve had many memorable times of sky gazing in that state.
Although we only lived there for four years, the Land of Lincoln seemed like a good nickname for Illinois. We had occasion to visit Springfield and to stroll through the historic buildings and remember the Great Emancipator.
During our seven years in North Dakota, I really appreciated my “Peace Garden State” license plates. Later, after we moved, the state replaced that slogan with simply “Legendary.” I don’t get the new moniker, but I do know about the Peace Garden that is a beautiful tribute to international cooperation – a tiny place that is neither Canada nor the United States perched on the border between the two nations and carefully maintained to be a place of quiet and rest.
It wasn’t all that easy to trade in my Peace Garden State license plates for Famous Potatoes when we moved to Idaho. What’s with famous potatoes, anyway? Who cares how famous your potatoes are? Had they said “delicious potatoes,” they might have had an argument on their hand. I still prefer Red River Russets to the monsters they grow in the southwest corner of Idaho that are bred for French fries. But they never claimed that the potatoes were tasty, or terrific or tender. The slogan was much more of a tribute to the political power of J.R. Simplot, a savvy businessman, who made a lot of money and built a palatial home atop a hill north of Boise sporting one of the largest U.S. flags I have ever seen, despite the fact that he couldn’t vote after pleading “nolo contendere” to an income tax evasion charge. After we left, they decided that famous wasn’t sufficient and changed the slogan to “Great Potatoes. Tasty Destinations.” I think the license plates just say “Scenic,” which is an accurate description of that beautiful place.
Not wanting to be caught with a slogan that is too short, we now live in South Dakota where the words “Great Faces. Great Places.” stretch across our license plates. They are written a bit too small to be easily read without rear-ending the car in front of you, but the current design puts the words right at the bottom of the plate where they are partially obscured by a license plate frame. You have to be from around here to recognize the faces from Mount Rushmore in the less-than-perfect picture on the plates.
As much as I complain about the slogans of the places I have lived, I have to admit that the proposal for a new slogan for Kentucky makes me glad that I do not live there. There are folks there who want to rebrand their state in a striking fashion. I would submit that their proposal is for mature audiences only and then only for audiences that can take a bit of vulgar language. I guess that I can use the phrase, as it does appear in the Oxford English Dictionary and I have frequently touted the OED as the gold standard when it comes to giving definitions to the words of our language. The OED gives this definition: “to act roughly or aggressively; to be powerful or assertive.”
The proposed slogan is “Kentucky Kicks Ass.” I guess Kentuckians want to appear to be rough and risqué at the same time. I’m not sure how attractive the slogan is to prospective tourists who may not think of receiving a swift kick to the rear as a pleasant vacation activity. I don’t think that the citizens of the state famous for bluegrass and quarter horses have an opening gambit of a chess game in mind when they think of the proposed new slogan. I do suspect that they want to shed a bit of the caricature that northerners have of always-polite southerners sipping mint juleps and never saying a harsh word while thinking and acting in a manner that is passively aggressive. There is nothing passive about the proposed new slogan.
I can imagine that the makers of bumper stickers and t-shirts are pleased with the slogan. After all it is acceptable enough in society to be used by the President. Asked by an interviewer during the Gulf oil spill whether it was time to “kick some butt” in order to solve the crisis, President Barack Obama ratcheted up the metaphor by replying that he would find out “whose ass to kick.” He wasn’t the first President to use the phrase. His predecessor, George W. Bush, recalled in his memoirs how he resolved to find the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks and “kick their ass.”
I don’t see the attraction of living in or even visiting a state that treats people the way a president intends to treat those who attacked the United States on its own soil.
Of course the proponents of the slogan don’t mean that at all. The phrase has so many different meanings in our society that we don’t know whether it refers to a movie title or motivating a horse to move out of the barn.
If the purpose of a state slogan is to attract tourist money to that state, Kentucky Kicks Ass might rank up with New Hampshire’s Live Free or Die, but falls a bit short of Virginia is for lovers in my opinion. When it comes to t-shirts, it is hard to beat the famous I love New York with a heart for the word love and the letters N and Y for New York. That iconic image is certainly memorable.
For now, I’m content to live next to one of those famous places with four famous faces and let the people of Kentucky come up with whatever slogan they choose.
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