Remember Cooter from The Dukes of Hazzard?
Of course you do. He was played by actor Ben Jones, who later served in Congress.
Jones is also an advocate of Confederate heritage, having participated in the fight to preserve the old General Lee from being obliterated by the evil forces that be in Yankeefied NASCAR. This cost him some friends.
Well, guess what he’ll do now?
It just gets better every minute.
Crossroads 
Well the new SCV CIC is off and running
I think the idea of Brandon Dorsey serving as spokesperson impressed SCV leadership as a disaster. Even Dorsey modified his initial screed in response to WLU’s closing of the chapel. He now says: “However, just at the Civil Rights leaders had to be harassed by the powers that be, degraded, and attacked, I think we can survive this quite well.”
I think CIC Barrows will find he has many loose cannons to deal with.
I’ve never understood why the Dukes of Hazzard is such a cultural touchstone for people. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that much of the current generation of True Southrons were about the right age to be its target audience back in the day, and it’s largely a matter of personal nostalgia.
Whatever the case, the show played every southern stereotype up for cheap yucks. It was a live-action Li’l Abner, with stock cars. I’ve lived in the South all my life and have yet to meet any person who went by Cooter, or Cleetus, or Lulu. Have they forgotten that the full name of the show’s villain is Jefferson Davis Hogg? Yeah, that’s respectful.
I love the old show, some channel plays re-runs and I Tivo them…brings back good memories from my childhood. But it is amazing to see the cheesiness of the acting and stereotypes that passed by me when I was a kid. Oh and I wanted a car like the general when I was young…flag and all….oh my.
I love me some cheesy old teevee reruns, too. But I wouldn’t consider Hogan’s Heroes a sacrosanct monument to the “Greatest Generation.”
yeah, but Hogan’s Heros was a much better show than Dukes of Hazzard.
I
always thought it was therapy for the many Jewish cast members who had survived the Holocaust, many cast members had either been in concentration camps or fled Europe because of the Nazi policies.
Robert Clary (LeBeau) wrote a book about his time in the concentration camps, it’s not pleasant to say the least.
Also Werner Klemperer (Klink) had it written in his contract that the Germans would never win.
While the show didn’tget into the realities of the war it was a vehicle for
the cast members who had harrowing experiences to deal with it through comedy.
It’s strange that Ben Jones gets uptight about this and a TV show called “Party Down South” (http://www.savingcountrymusic.com/ben-cooter-jones-pens-open-letter-to-cmt-over-party-down-south) as damaging to southern culture but was on a show that made all southerners look like stereotypical rubes and hicks for a nice salary and before massive TV audiences.
I admit that I loved this show as a kid, mostly for the 1969 Dodge Charger R/T (still love Mopars to this day). Now I look back at the show as nothing but patronizing and stereotyping the American south.
The show was filmed during a time where cities like Atlanta were experiencing massive growth and trying to distance itself from the backwardness and bigotry the country came to associate with the South. This show didn’t help their cause of shedding the backwardness stigma.
It also lead to the destruction of roughly 500 1968-70 Dodge Chargers and encouraged clowns all over the country to paint their Dodge B bodies to resemble the stupid livery of the Dukes’ car but that’s another argument for a different forum!
I also don’t believe the producers were glorifying old Dixie as much as the Southron crowd may think. As I said it played up a lot of stereotypes. If I remember correctly, there was an episode where it turned out the corrupt and crooked Boss Jefferson Davis Hogg had a good twin named Abraham Lincoln Hogg. Go figure, I wonder what the Good Old Rebel movement would
say to that?
If I were in the Confederate Heritage/Southern Pride movement I would be offended by this and other swipes at the region and not the removal of reproduction flags out of the Lee Chapel, especially when the real articles will be on display in the chapel museum. But let’s be honest, most of the people in the Heritage crowd want to be like the Duke boys, Daisy or even Boss Hogg and couldn’t care less about actual history.
These people claim to be proud of their region, but I think they actually in my eyes come off as the biggest group of self-loathing people on earth if this and other schlock is what they purport to be representative of their culture.
More’s the pity.
Andy,
That has a lot to do with the “Hillbilly” dynamic of using the hillbilly clown as a mirror in which to project cultural aspects of the time. The 1960s and 70s romanticized the frontier primitive as “Good Old Boys.” Thank about Smokey and the Bandit where Jerry Reed’s truck, illegally running liquor like the Dukes, has an artist depiction of Jesse James holding up a stagecoach on his rig.
A lot of these movies are rip-offs of Thunder Road in a way. It was the first movie to link moonshine to fast cars. The difference is,after that movie, the hillbillies are no longer tragedies but are country clowns where their cars detach them from their community. The landscape in those movies is a symbolic fool’s paradise, and populated with symbolic fools, where no one gets hurt. In some ways, these “Good Old Boys” were the harbingers of the Reagan Revolution.
Recall Hee Haw as well. Even Andy Griffith/Mayberry RFD fit.
Maryberry RFD? Blasphemy!
I recommend J.W. Williamson’s Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains & What the Mountains Did to the Movies
Incredible look into the hillbilly stereotype in cinema. I actually designed a college course for Appalachian Studies at North Georgia, we are using that book for the text.
Not getting the Reagan Revolution bit. But romanticization is pretty much universal nowadays. Bonnie and Clyde were called Clyde and Bonnie (he was the mastermind and she merely his lover) before the ’67 movie hyped the femme fatale aspect, pure fantasy. And being detached from “community” is the human condition, and is as old as dirt and art. Though the Southern Romantic may a major topic in a CW blog, let’s not kid ourselves that the romantic aspect is in any way unique. Welcome to reality of modern life. If we don’t see the romantic aspect of a given aspect of our lives, its probably because we’re living it.
Thank of Reagan’s image in the 70s and 80s. He ran as a “Good Old Boy.” Who would have though the he’d also be the clown in a fool’s paradise?
Off topic Brooks, but how did you get rid of the sidebar when you open your blog posts up?
…captivates? Dukes of Hazard? Really?