like Cheetos and Li'l Debbie Snack Cakes, "The Dukes of Hazzard" were an evil staple of my childhood. Every Friday night circa 1980, my friends and I would gather around the TV to root for Bo and Luke Duke, that pre-Beavis and Butt-head blond and brunet duo. We'd loathe the perspiring Boss Hogg and his loser lackey, Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane, all the while waiting on tenterhooks for the plot to reach its logical conclusion, which somehow always involved the Dukes' souped-up Dodge, the General Lee, roaring in slow motion over some kudzu-lined creek. Bo and Luke would whoop and grin with erotic abandon; Boss Hogg would grimace and sweat abusively at Roscoe; and though Cousin Daisy never did much but lean over the General Lee in butt-high cut-offs, we 11-year-old white girls got the sense that the American South must be a pretty fun place.

This was in spite of the fact that we actually lived in the American South -- Dallas, to be exact. Once we hit puberty, though, and certain realities about redneck men and loud cars started to sink in, Bo and Luke quickly lost their charm. "But you loved this show!" my younger brother would cry as I'd slam my bedroom door to the sound of the General's Dixie-blaring horn.

The Dukes returned to the spotlight last Friday for a two-hour reunion -- and so, it seems, has one of the primary cultural signifiers of the show: the Confederate Battle Flag. Down in Texas, we have six flags on which to obsess; that made the roof of The General Lee my main, if not only, exposure to the Confederate Battle Flag. I see now that certain things never change. Though Luke's forehead has receded behind the Mason-Dixon line, and Cousin Daisy has finally discovered the wonders of full-length leg coverage, the flag, That Flag, is still there.

This strikes me as odd. I know the Dukes don't get out much, but I would have thought that someone at CBS would have noticed the new War Between the States that's brewing over Confederate symbols. Newspapers from the Boston Globe to the Irish Times have delighted in listing all the incidents of late: Virginia lays to rest the state song that oozed on about darkies and old massa; Maryland invalidates special Confederate license plates; New York removes Georgia's Confederate banner from its capitol hallway. And last November, South ("too large to be an insane asylum") Carolina practically exploded when its Republican governor, David Beasley, proposed moving the flag a few hundred yards -- from the top of the state Capitol to its front lawn.

The battles have now accumulated into a made-for-magazine-analysis bonanza. The April 21 National Review features three articles on "Why the Left Hates the South," illustrated by a darkish hand torching a poster of "Gone With the Wind." And in the April 28 Nation, Jack Hitt makes a wishful proposal to end the battle over "Confederate Semiotics": Blacks should simply appropriate the Confederate Battle Flag as their new Malcolm X logo, turning it into a symbol of "the New South, the integrated South, the South that is and always has been home to both blacks and whites."

Fat chance of that. Simply from its mental association with the Dukes, the battle flag produces a permanent gag reflex in me. I can't even imagine the revulsion it inspires in blacks who lived through the Civil Rights era, when the flag first made its appearance on capitol buildings in South Carolina, Alabama and other states -- in tandem with the creative use of fire hoses and bedsheets all over the South.

There's probably no way the Rebel Dukes could have returned without throwing more gasoline on this fire. But thus far popular culture has served as something of a neutral zone in this debate; maybe the sheer tackiness of the Dukes will enable them to escape the controversy. Battle flag opponents have mostly aimed their wrath at state-sponsored displays of Confederate fervor. And Neo-Confederate patriots seem similarly inclined to fight on the high ground, far from the Hazzard-ous kitsch below.

"(South Carolina Gov.) Beasley and his pals in the state's ruling class care nothing for the identity and heritage of their own state, their own region or their own people," growls a surly Samuel Francis in a typical diatribe on the pages of the Winter 1996 Southern Partisan, the ultimate in quarterly Neo-Con reading.

But kitsch surrounds the flag like swamp gas, and no one can deny it. On the pages following the Francis column, Southern Partisan's General Store offers "I Don't Care How You Did It Up North" battle-flag bumper stickers and Georgia Goodies Muscadine Jelly ("as Confederate as Bedford Forrest's cavalry"). A Web search on the Confederacy will turn up plenty of sites devoted to martyrs who died for the Lost Cause, a valiant effort that also lives on (if you scroll down a bit) through Confederate wind chimes and paper towel holders.

Right now, the Confederacy debate has devolved into a classic '90s standoff between irreconcilable groups of "deeply offended" victims. But a battle over the Dukes could raise the mess to a whole new level, with Neo-Cons defending the free speech rights of Luke and Bo, and the rights of CBS (which filmed "Dukes" largely in California's San Fernando Valley) to profit as unofficial cultural ambassador of the South. Anti-Cons, on the other hand, might find the contradiction between high and low Confederate culture to be the sorest spot in Southern Man's scabby armor; they could then keep poking him there until he wheezes and bellows himself into Boss Hoggian apoplexy.

In a creepy way, the Dukes foreshadowed the whole debate in the first place. There might have once been a way to bridge the divide between the deeply offended legions of Southerners, but now both sides are entrenched in mutually satisfying positions of righteousness, with no bridge in sight. Hazzard County might have some bridges too, but Bo and Luke are never going to figure out where they are.
April 28,1997

Julia Barton is a regular contributor to Salon.