What Is a Fishing License?

What is a fishing license?
You, there. American, living in the 21st C.
What is a fishing license?

<silence for your answer>

How do you know?
Have you held one?
Seen one?
Used one?

If you answered yes, you have first hand knowledge, or primary experience, with fishing licenses.  If you answered no, how is it that you answered my questions? Hmm?

Members of a community share a common knowledge of objects.  Popular culture is an example of this.  The movies we see, books we read, billboards we use to play the alphabet game - all of these items provide images that supply messages.  You used these images to answer my question.

What do we as a culture know about fishing licenses? Let's consult a couple of sources.

Cartoons can reflect public opinion, political atmosphere, ideological trends.  Cartoonstock.com is an archive, a "searchable database of more than 200,000 gag cartoons, political cartoons, cartoon pictures and illustrations by more than 600 cartoonists." These cartoons are both current and historical, just like popular culture, as what a culture knows is a culmination of what has been created, shared, and passed down through generations.  

What do we know about fishing licenses from what cartoons tell us?  Let's look:

All four of these cartoons talk about permissions, specifically, the permission to be in a certain place engaging in a certain activity - fishing.  This sense of the object matched the intent of the object, something that is not always true.  

Another source of current popular cultures is film. When I think of fishing licenses and film, I think of Grumpy Old Men, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathau.  I swear I remember an image of Burgess Meredith's character, Grandpa Gustafson, depicted with a fishing license on his fishing cap.  So I went looking for a picture to back up my memory.  Nothing. 

What I did find was fascinating, however.  Of all the images of the main characters, in a film where fishing is a key activity, not a single image does show a fishing license.  Let's go back to the cartoons. What is absent, or assumed to be absent, in each sketch? 

The license.

So what do we, as members of popular culture know about fishing licenses?  

You are supposed to have one.