The Dukes of “Hazzard”

 

Following the senseless racial murders at a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015, Hollywood’s moonshining Duke boys from fictitious Hazzard County, and more particularly their 1969 Dodge Charger “General Lee,” replete with a Confederate Battle Flag painted on its roof, were placed on the growing list of Southern images to be erased from public view. Not only were scheduled reruns of the popular television show of the 1980s immediately cancelled, but Warner Brothers also recalled all models of the “General Lee” from the studio’s theme shops. To carry this inanity even further, after the Charleston incident Florida golfer Bubba Watson, who had purchased and restored the wreck of the original “General Lee,” joined the anti-Confederate parade and announced that he would repaint the car’s roof with an American Flag. However, the Dukes who are the subject of this piece are not the actors from the imaginary Hazzard County in Georgia. but the very real Duke family from Orange County in North Carolina, and the hazard in this case is the product for which they would become world famous, cigarettes.

More @ The Abbeville Institute