Sure liked The Dukes of Hazzard when I was a wee child. Beautiful man voice theme song, talkin about those beautiful boys that never meant no harm. They just wanna fly their pretty orange car over random rivers, pursued by unscary little comic relief policemans. One of them had a floppy-eared dog. Sometimes there was a pretty lady there. When stuff got too wild, beardy uncle would settle it down. If I remember all that right.
I loved the shape of a muscle car, the perfect combination of boxy and curvy, the dark grill reminiscent of the intakes on jet engines, the feeling of power and possibility. They stopped making cars shaped like that and I always wished they’d bring them back.
Well, around pandemic time, they actually did. Muscle cars exist again, happy day! But I’m not four years old anymore, don’t live in a world where fast driving never kills or disfigures people, don’t live in a world where gratuitous fossil fuel use is a harmless lark.
And just everything about that piece of shit tv show has aged equally well. It put a shiny sexy funtimes gloss on the worst shit imaginable, just the worst crimes in human history. Hundreds of years of monstrous evil defended to the dying breath under that fucking orange flag. The way the flag’s renewed popularity in the 20th century had always been a banner for the proud perpetuation of dehumanization and oppression, of lionizing the villains of history that Hitler himself was inspired by.
General Lee, fuck your memory and fuck the people who tried to sing it sweetly to tiny children. Fuck whatever ancestors of mine that put our surname on generations of their rape victims, their human “property.” Fuck ameriKKKa for clinging to the idea of our virtue on the blood-drenched soil of this land, echoes of absolute horror in every ruined plot and parking lot from sea to polluted sea.
Unrelated, fuck street racers, who care so little about the lives of others they endanger them every day for cheap thrills. Rest in pieces you criminal fuckers. May all your buddies mangle only their own flesh, may they fly past the innocent and burst into flames alone.
Shame shame shame, a little song of shame. Then I return to idle fancies and daydreams in my usual way. A floppy-eared dog hanging his head out an unproblematic car, flying merrily through a consequence-free world.
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had a dream the other night i was some gal’s gay best friend, so i had an excuse for not knowing how to drive, hey, same excuse i have irl, except i have no hetero bff here.
anyway, we went to a little movie theater where you reserved your seat by taking a slice of cake, the colors of which corresponded to the movie you wanted to see. but the only slices remaining were the white ones with rainbow splotches, corresponding to the cg smurf threequel, so we took no cake and watched nothing.
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Perfect recount of that pathetic show. I fell into the same innocent, puerile trap you did, outgrew it just as quickly — my 45-year-old uncle went on to have his truck painted “General Lee” style and bought all the VHS box-sets he could get his hands on. And yes, all these years later he’s still a dyed-in-the-wool MAGAt.
I watched that show. But I am from Alberta, Canada.
There was absolutely NO cultural stuff that made any sense to me.
and some of the characters may as well have been speaking Chinese.
dennis – u kno wassup
chigau – i heard alberta is the texas of canada. even then, not quite?
The memory is faded but I vaguely recall deciding to watch that when it started airing as a kid. It was unusual because my mom actualy asked my brother and I what we thought. She mostly didn’t do that before then and she mostly didn’t bother with it later in my life either. I wanted to try watching it because The Dukes of Hazard sounded a little weird but it also sounded like a fantasy or Medeival story.
I was quickly disappointed. But frankly I think my not-yet-10-year-old self was their target audience. I’m not sure there was much there for an adult other than occasional sex appeal.