Racist massacre flags up issues about good ol’ boys and bad TV

WHEN something that has driven you nuts gets exterminated, it’s time for fists in the air and wild whoops of glee. 

The something that drove me nuts, for perhaps five years, was a television programme that seemed to set out to prove the first natural law of TV, which is that the crappier the series, the more likely it is to succeed.

There are exceptions, but that’s the tendency, and the shining exemplar of the rule, up there with The Flintstones, was The Dukes of Hazzard. It was shining because it was soaked both in primary colours and in sunshine beating down on a location somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line that could have been called Trailer Trash HQ.

The series had action and noise, but neither plot nor characters. It had a few caricatures, instead, painted with brush strokes as broad as the Bog of Allen and just about as aesthetically pleasing (no insult to the Bog of Allen).

I remember a fat sheriff with a big white hat, who was up to no good and who smoked cigars, but the action centred on two young men, named, I think, Beau, and something else, who were good ol’ boys, a term of endearment in the southern states of the US.

Correction. Fact-checking reveals the lads were Bo and Luke, which goes to show that complicated French spelling had no part to play in this extravaganza.

You couldn’t miss that they were good ol’ boys, because the Waylon Jennings theme song said so. Its first verse went thus:

Just a good ol’ boys

Never meanin’ no harm

Beats all you never saw

Been in trouble with the law

Since the day they was born.

Now, I put it to you. Have you ever come across a five-line verse that so fearlessly combines so many errors of grammar, syntax, logic, and sense? Me, neither. Which didn’t stop me loving it.

The Dukes of Hazzard was on in the early days of my marriage, when the man in my life was converting me to country music on the constant immersion principle. The theme song had everything going for it as an earworm.

That’s the tune you hear in your head as you get out of bed in the morning, the one that stays with you all day like a mad anthem owned by your amygdala.

That’s an earworm, and once you hear The Dukes of Hazzard theme song, it sticks in your head until sleep time, as if super-glued to your synapses.

Because I was attracted, each week, by the theme tune, the programme was in full spate before my responsibilities as the mother to a small boy kicked in. Turning off a programme of this nature, just after it has established what we’ll laughingly call its story-line, makes you as popular as plague.

It wasn’t that I was bothered by the chopped-off jeans of a young female character named Daisy, although Marian, the girl who chatted up Bosco on RTÉ at around the same period, looked pretty damn good in denim overalls that went to her ankles and had a hem.

It was that the programme centred on driving a beat-up orange car in a spectacularly dangerous and palpably illegal way, although the child I was trying to protect did point out that most of the risky driving happened in fields, where ordinary drivers would not be endangered. (Even as a toddler, he could win an argument.)

The Dukes of Hazzard exposed a deep fault-line in my marriage. My other half took a more laissez faire attitude to parenting than I did. He had this theory that if you created a reasonably happy atmosphere in the house, the odds were good that your offspring would end up tolerably civil, not spend too much time in prison, and possibly even end up earning a living. I, on the other hand, wanted to uphold essential standards, but was greatly hampered by inconsistency, inattention, and a bad memory, the latter ensuring that every week I’d be singing along with the damn TV theme song before I realised what it introduced.

What passed completely over my head was that the Confederate flag decorated the roof of the car driven by Bo and Luke. I suspect it also passed over the head of the small fan in our house. If he registered it at all, he probably just thought it was a lively way of decorating the bit of a car normally unseen by someone as small as he was. For all I know, he may have believed all cars had designs on their roofs.

Now, here’s the contradiction. After decades of reruns, they’ve finally killed off The Dukes of Hazzard, and I’m good and mad about it.

The withdrawal of the series follows the banning of toy versions of the programme’s car, the General Lee, from retail chains in the US. This is because of the spree killer Dylann Roof, who murdered worshippers in a black church, having earlier posted shots on Facebook of himself posing with the Confederate flag.

The action of the TV network fits into a sudden consensus. Licence plates carrying the distinctive flag have been banned by one state governor, removed from Nascar racetracks, and hauled down from public buildings.

Clearly, a Confederate flag flying over a federal building in any city in the south is unacceptable, not just to black people , but to anybody who knows that flag commemorates states whose economy was predicated on slavery. You cannot choose to miss a flag flying in the middle of your city, but you do not have to watch the 17th rendition of a TV series which nobody has suggested was racist in plot or script.

THE notion that withdrawing an aged TV programme will somehow improve attitudes in the southern states is patently foolish. It will make racists within those states feel further disenfranchised and defiant. As novelist Barbara Kingsolver says — she lives in a small town down south — it ignores the more dangerous current media representations, which portray latter-day Dukes as “ignorant, vaguely incestuous hayseeds”, with reality TV shows digging deep to find “trashy families to reinforce the stereotype”.

The American Parents’ Television Council, which is normally quick to condemn programming it perceives as dangerous for children, held back its approval of the ban on The Dukes of Hazzard. Its president, Tim Winter, suggested it might suit TV networks better if they developed a conscience about current TV series that “glamourise drug and alcohol use”, sexualise minors, or peddle violence to children.

Winter points to overwhelming evidence of harm implicit in such programming. No evidence of harm has ever been proven to result from watching The Dukes of Hazzard. Other than earworms and ground-down teeth.