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Today we feature something completely new for Ferrebeekeeper–a contest! This challenge will test your acumen, breadth of knowledge, and grasp of cultural and biological material. And this is not just for bragging rights (although those are certainly to be had); there is an actual prize–a good one. Hopefully this contest will also simulate the joys of travel and the delight of discovery in this sad & locked-down era.
Here are the rules: below are 13 images of things and 13 images of places. Whoever is first to identify these images most correctly will win the prize–an original, unopened mint-condition box of “Safarimorphs” mix-and-match animal toys which I made when I was a foolish young person who believed that success could be had in America without selling out to a huge monopolistic corporation an entrepreneur. Zoomorphs the company died a hideous death…but not because the toys lacked quality. Even to this day, strangers still hunt me down on the internet trying to find if there are any toys left. [Sean Connery voice] This is one of the very last boxes in existence so think carefully about your answers!
Unfortunately there are some problems with web contests, like Google’s search-by-means-of-image feature (which is for losers, but will probably work). Worst of all, I can’t imagine where to put the answers (my email sometimes plays havoc with unknown incoming messages) so we are going to have to put them in the comments below. If you don’t see your answers at first, don’t worry, I will approve them in the order they come in (assuming you don’t cuss TOO much), but it does mean that other contestants can see your answers too, so consider carefully before posting! Also, there could be multiple right answers–a featureless arid plain could be “The silk road”, or “Kazakhstan” or “a desert” or “The Northern Hemisphere” all of which are right, but some of which are more right. Our highly qualified and morally unimpeachable judges will determine the MOST right answers by means of secret deliberation to which there is no appeal.
The contest ends next Tuesday when I will announce the winner and give my own answers. The number refers to the image immediately below it. Good luck and thank you for playing (and thank you even more for reading). Speaking of reading, there are some hints for a lot of these in Ferrebeekeeper…somewhere in those 2000 posts before last week, so maybe you should browse the archives. OK! Here are the images:
THINGS:
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13.
PLACES:
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8.
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You probably know them all already…but at least the images look quite strange and impressive with this white box gallery format. Post you answers below and good luck! Let me know if you have questions and thank you so much for everything.
Welcome back! Ferrebeekeeper’s jubilee celebrating our 2000th post is ongoing until Fourth of July fireworks close out the celebration. Reaching this milestone has made me look back at our first posts from 10 years ago and, boy, things were a lot different back then! For example, back at the beginning of Ferrebeekeeper, one of our main subjects was gardening. In those innocent days, I had an exquisite picture in my head of a magical cloistered garden of beauty and symbolic delight which would be an oasis from the madness and stress of New York City. As any of you with gardening experience will recognize, my attempts to create that garden in the real world have never resulted in anything like the glistening platonic image in my head (an ideal picture which has actually changed quite a bit over the years). However it turns out that the years of careful & patient gardening were actually the true source of happiness and peace (even if the &$%# plants cost a bunch of money and died even when I screamed and cried for them to live).
Anyway…the crown jewel of my ideal garden are roses, (which are called “the queen of the garden for a reason). To match this vision in the real world I have planted so many hybrid tea roses, floribundas, grandifloras, and miniature roses. I carefully put these cherished beauties in the sunniest spot of my garden…yet even that was too shady (when I first moved in, there was a single tree of heaven in the neighbor’s yard…but soon another appeared, then another and another and another and now my poor garden is surrounded on all sides by these giant invasive monsters).
Only one rose remains in what is now definitely a shade garden. This last survivor is a complete unknown which was obtained in the following circumstances. A few years ago I was looking around a nursery in Brooklyn during August and I noticed a bunch of pots filled with shriveled brown leaves and needle-sharp thorns. The shop keeper had optimistically placed a sign which said “half off!” over these decidedly dead looking plants which I though might have once been fancy roses. I went over to examine them to see what NOT to plant in my garden when the nurseryman spotted me looking at the only one with a single green shoot and he said, “I’ll let you have it for two dollars!”
Now this was clearly another one of New York’s infamous scams, but I had been wandering around in the nursery for a while without finding a plant, and I felt guilty scoffing at this ridiculous lowball offer for a rose (no matter how dead). I bought the rose and planted it in the last patch of sun, and now it is the last of the roses planted in the garden. The $2 rose is a sprawling ground rose and it is really lovely! Its blossoms are as to the fancy hybrid tea roses what hobbits are to Aragorn, They do not have the same aquiline lines of pure beauty…and yet they are clearly of the same stuff. During June, the $2 rose has little pink double blossoms with slightly rounded petals. They really do look like cute little hobbit children.
I am sorry these photos don’t do it justice–it looks much more beautiful in person,,,but maybe only if you know its story. I was going to see if there were some newly opened buds to photograph today, but a terrifying gully washer tore all of the petals off of every opened flower (the storm was so intense that it left the neighbor’s garden underwater…so I guess I can’t really complain).
The little rose makes me think of happiness, both because it makes me happy (and seems to embody that emotion in color and form) and because of its provenance. None of the fancy expensive roses which I coveted could survive in our physical world of blackspot, bugs, and darkness. The tiny pink $2 rose has ended up as the accidental queen of my garden of shadows (when the cherry tree isn’t blooming anyway). Yet if the Goddess Flora appeared in my door and offered the reddest and most perfect rose from the garden of paradise for my $2 tiny ground rose, I am not sure anymore that I would trade (although I might ask her for some tips).
Ok! We (finally) had our 2000th post yesterday, and the great Ferrebeekeeper jubilee continues apace. I promised give-aways, special posts, contests, and…pageantry. Now I have plenty of weird art and cool toys to give away (provided I can think up a contest), but what do we do for Gothic pageantry (it’s Gothic because, well, what other sort would we feature?)?
Alas, my plans to hire great troops of pipers, marchers, ornate festival birds, and dancers have come undone because of coronavirus concerns (although hopefully you are all enjoying the very special fireworks displays which I orchestrated throughout the nation). Thus, due to, uh, the constraints of this era, our pageant will have to come together in our imagination rather than in the real world. We can list out the elements here though and fantasize them coming together as a sort of parade!
When I thought about what sort of Gothic pageant we would want, my first question was whether those splendid glistening white peacocks are available in Gothic black. It turns out that they very much are (although such peafowl are quite rare)
Next I wanted pipers, and when I looked up “gothic pipers” I was taken straight to Ferrebeekeeper’s own long forgotten post concerning pig bagpipers (which were a popular medieval ornament for reasons which are now subject to debate). Obviously these musical pigs are perfect, so after the sable peacocks lets have some of them.
Following the peacocks, pigs, and pipers, it would be good to have some soldiers (who esteem pageantry on a supreme level that only the most flamboyant showfolks can ever hope to match). I have taken a page from the pope’s book here: my favorite soldiers (for decorative novelty use only, of course) are late medieval/early Renaissance billmen with ridiculous heraldic garb. The pope’s own Swiss Guard are instructive here, although of course pipers in our procession would be wearing magenta, vermilion, and icterine.
I think a legion of such characters would be extremely impressive (especially coming immediately after the black peacocks and the musical pigs).
Next we would need fashion mavens dressed in resplendent gowns covered with lace appliques and dark ribbons. I couldn’t find the right picture on line (and I started to get scared/alarmed by how many dress pictures there are), but this sort of thing should do.
Finally, we would need a parade float to serve as centerpiece. My favorite underrated artist, the matchless Piero di Cosimo, was famous in his time for designing parade spectacles and, although the actual originals are, of course, long gone, I imagine that his floats would be much like the monster in his masterpiece, Perseus Rescuing Andromeda. I would have a similar float to Perseus and the monster, except it would be Cronus mounted upon an enormous flounder.
Sadly, this is how my brain works and I could go on and on like this forever…creating ridiculous fantastical processions which the world will never see, but I think we had better wrap up by putting the entire extravaganza in a great pleasure garden with a Gothic folly tower in the middle.
The The real world example which best suits my taste is St. Anne’s Church in Vilnius, Lithuania (pictured above) which I think is the prettiest building ever, however the master illuminators of Belgium also loved such structures and they drew them without any real world constraints which bedevil architects.
Imagine all of those strange magical animals and people and frogfish passing in front of this, and I think you have imagined the Ferrebeekeeper parade we would have staged…if only we could fully assemble outside right now (and if I were an impossibly rich archduke of fairyland).
The fun of this exercise is really imagining what sort of procession you would craft if you were a grand parade master and could do anything. Tell me your ideas below! Maybe we can incorporate some of your plans into my next parade…as soon as I finish teaching these pigs to play the pipes and sewing all of these orange and purple striped tights for mercenaries.
Welcome dear readers! Happy 2000th post! The number 2000 is special because…uh…[checks notes] it is the largest number you can express with Roman numerals using only two unmodified characters: “MM”. Wow! How about that?
Really though, all kidding aside, the number 2000 is special here solely because of you. Without readers, what would be the point of writing? Even the most lustrous pearl is unremarkable if it is never in the light!
I was going to write a thoughtful post about the future of Ferrebeekeeper–which would really turn out to be an uplifting post about how we can work together to regain some optimistic energy and frame some lofty goals for a brighter future (lately such ideas have been thin on the ground in the ecological, political, and economic dystopia we have crafted for ourselves). Unfortunately (yet perhaps appropriately) my internet connection failed. Comcast came and sort of fixed the problem and told me that using the ancient modem which they rent to me only allows me to access a tiny fraction of the bandwidth they charge $100.00 a month for! As soon as I am done with this post I need to write a complaint to my congressperson about the fact that I live in one of the most densely populated and ethnically diverse neighborhood in the Western hemisphere and yet there is only one (bad) “choice” for broadband.
Anyway, because this post is already late, I am going to save the larger philosophical musings about the future for, um, the future (but the immediate future while we are still celebrating this milestone). To really celebrate the day, here is a gallery of adorable baby animal pictures lovingly hand-stolen from around the internet. That baby otter is especially cute!
Now in the real world maybe I wouldn’t trust that Pallas’ cat kitten with any of these other babies, but fortunately here they are safely held apart by digital means.
Now obviously this is a bit of a softball post so that we can all finish up and go into the garden and enjoy the beautiful June evening while the fireflies are out. Yet in a larger sense this combination of complaining about monopolistic technological hegemony, lauding the beauty of our fellow earth creatures, and then escaping into a paradisaical starlit garden is significant!
What is the significance you might ask? Well I am afraid you will have to keep reading to get the answer! But you should stick around regardless: I promised contests, pageantry, and heartfelt musings to mark this milestone and we are going to have all of those things! Before we get to them though I really want to emphasize how much your attention and comments have meant to me. In our world of millionaires, nanoseconds, and terabytes, a prosaic number like 2000 doesn’t seem like a lot, but writing 2000 miniature (or not-so-miniature) essays makes one appreciate that number afresh. I never would have written so much without you.
Thank you.
And, of course, I will see you back here tomorrow!
Wow! It seems like just a few days ago I was talking about Ferrebeekeeper’s 10th anniversary, but I guess that was actually back at the beginning of April… back in the world before the quarantine. Anyway, in that long-ago post, I mentioned that Ferrebeekeeper’s 2000th blog entry is coming up (if you can believe it) and we would celebrate with some special posts, pageantry, and little treats. Boy I really failed to follow up on that, and now today’s post is already our 1999th…
But there is still plenty of time for a Ferrebeekeeper jamboree (“jamboreekeeper”?)! Let’s start the festivities today with a special gift for you: a free flounder PDF for coloring:
2020 Coloring Flounder with Invaders
If you don’t feel like downloading the PDF, there is the black and white drawing right up at the top of today’s post. It features a timely flounder for 2020–a big invader flounder with dead black eyes and a pitted lifeless surface of desiccated craters and impact marks. Upon the flounder are alien shock troops…or maybe cyborgs? (…or maybe they are more familiar political militia). Space seeds and mysterious cardioids float down from the night sky onto a writhing landscape of burning Gothic cloisters, ruined mechanized battle equipment, and little refugees (and wriggling, beached flatfish of course ).
In some ways, this chaotic picture is not what I wanted for a celebration (where is the lavish garden party flatfish PDF already?), but in other deeper ways it is perfect for this moment of international floundering. Anyhow, you didn’t really want to color more ribbons, jewels, and roses did you? Well maybe you actually don’t want to color at all, but if you do break out your pencils and crayons, send me a jpeg of your efforts at wayneferrebee@gmail.com and we will post a little disaster gallery! And, as always, keep tuning in! There is more excitement for our big MM celebration…or there will be, as soon as I dream it up…
Happy Bloomsday! The entirety of James Joyce’s great magnum opus Ulysses takes place on one day, June 16th, 1904. Thus June 16th is forever celebrated as sacred to Joyce enthusiasts (and to those who esteem the English language and the Irish people).
If you have ever tried to write about Ulysses, you will recognize that it is problematic to grapple with the great tome since it touches deeply on most aspects of Western history, art, science, culture, law, and letters (to say nothing of the fundamental social and existential dilemmas which lie at the heart of both the novel and human endeavors). As in life, these themes are tangled together in such a way that pulling at any thread disgorges a mass of seemingly disconnected narrative and philosophical threads which are actually a single thread…which is everything. Good luck writing a pithy blog post about THAT.
Fortunately there is a miniature odyssey within the greater book which we can concentrate on. It is even appropriate to this year of desperate washing…and the tiny story does indeed echo the novel’s great theme of pleasure (and human beings’ secret lifetime pursuit thereof…even as they desperately and performatively pretend to be engaged in loftier pursuits).
In Chapter 5 (“Lotus Eaters”) The book’s hero Bloom is killing time before a funeral. He reads an amorous letter from a secret correspondent, ducks into a church to listen to a bit of Catholic mass, and stops at the chemist’s to order some lotion for his wife. While at the shop he spontaneously purchases a bar of lemon soap while he thinks about drugs, baths, and flesh.
The clunky bar of lemon soap goes with Bloom the rest of the day (and it is some day!). He wraps it in a newspaper. He sits on it uncomfortably at the funeral. He moves it from his hip pocket to his handkerchief pocket as he escapes the underworld the cemetery. At lunch he fumbles through his pocket and comes across it and moves it to another pocket. Later, at the tavern, it becomes wet (from sweat or potables?) and he is concerned that he smells like lemons. At sunset, after his…episode… on the beach Bloom worries about his failure to go back and collect his wife’s lotion and pay the four pence he owes for the soap.
At the novel’s climax in the “Circe” chapter, the soap exploits the crazed magical transmogrifications of the bordello to temporarily gain the power of speech. It ascends to the apex of heaven as the sun (complete with the freckled visage of the pharmacist):
BLOOM: I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the morning. (He pats divers pockets.) This moving kidney. Ah!
(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)
THE SOAP:
We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I.
He brightens the earth. I polish the sky.(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the soapsun.)
The soap even gets opened and used for handwashing in Bloom’s elegiac penultimate chapter which explains everything with diagrammatic clinical precision (indeed we learn that this is ” a partially consumed tablet of Barrington’s lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered, (bought thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for).” Molly even thinks about soap in her own chapter (as a young woman, she had her own trademark Albion milk and sulphur soap which Bloom had used to wash ink off his hands as a courting pretext.
That’s some journey for a little bar of soap! But why am I writing about this? Why did Joyce write about this? As you can imagine critics have come up with various answers.
Marxist literary critics even assigned a central role to the bar of soap. In their telling, capitalist society fetishizes commodities in such a way that take on a meaning greater than human life. They might be on to something: if you look this soap up on the internet, you will find many opportunities to buy a bar for yourself long before you find essays like this one which discuss what the soap’s journey means.
Yet in obsessing about the cruel goad which we have made for ourselves with labor, the Marxists miss the beguiling carrot which draws us onwards. The soap is a little pleasure. It was purchased because of its delightful smell, and even though it is always in the way, Bloom keeps it with him, moving it from pocket to pocket and worrying about it.
Bloom’s perspectives about his little bar of soap are always changing. He worries about how it makes others perceive him. He worries about paying for it. It is uncomfortable at points…and yet
…the soap has a use value. It dissolves in order to make you clean. It speaks to the sacred and transformative pleasure of bathing (which is as central a theme in The Odyssey as it is in Ulysses). More to the point, the soap represents an idea of private & luxurious pleasure (Bloom fantasizes about the perfect bath as he buys it at the chemist’s shop). Ulysses privileges us with a glimpse into peoples’ secret hidden minds, and although we find lofty questions of being and non-being there, we also find lots of little private side quests for self-gratification and secret fantasies which can, for a moment shine like the sun in the firmament before being moved to another pocket, or forgotten, or occasioning very slight social anxiety. The quest for the truth of people’s hearts is slippery and convoluted!
Today’s post is courtesy of a friend, the renowned silver expert, Benjamin Miller. This is a literal Bohemian Crown (in that it is from Bohemia, the westernmost duchy of Moravia–in what is now the Czech Republic). Manufactured from silver gilt, pearls, and glass/paste “jewels”, the piece is not precious in the ostentatious manner of crowns like the Great Crown of Victory, or the Cap of Monomakh, and yet it has its own winsome beauty. Indeed, the tiny crown reminds me of the garden in the morning when the dew is still on it. The size of the piece is also reminiscent of fairyland: the diameter is a mere 15.25 centimeters (6 inches).
The crown is today in the possession of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Unfortunately, I could find very little additional information about the piece. One imagines that it was crafted as a votive crown or as the ornament for a saint’s statue (although it could have been for a child or for some ceremonial purpose). Such matters notwithstanding, the little silver crown does date back to 15th century, and it is possible that it was crafted before Columbus sailed! Look at how cunning and intricate the articulated silver panels are!
Today we feature an obscure color which used to be well known and frequently written about. Isabelline, also known as “isabella,” is a pale, silvery yellowish-gray. The name for the color is older than most color names in English and dates back to the Elizabethan era (circa 1600). There are several compelling (but non-definitive) explanations of the etymology of the word. My favorite explanation is that Infanta Isabella, a Spanish noblewoman vowed never to change her snow white garb until her husband, Archduke Albert of Austria, was victorious in conquering Ostend, a Protestant stronghold in Flanders. A hasty victory was expected, however, the city’s Dutch defenders were reinforced and supplied from the sea by the English and the siege lasted for three brutal years, by which time the Infanta’s gown was a very organic yellow-gray. The story is probably apocryphal but it is nearly old as the color itself (and it draws our attention to the Siege of Ostend, which was as brutal and bloody as it was historically interesting).
This Spanish connection of the name hints at why the English of the early 17th century were so excited by yellow-gray to begin with. Isabella is a color of horses, an unparalleled fascination for people of that time! In modern horse terms, such steeds are pale palomino or cremello, but the hue isn’t too far off from ancestral grullo (these horse color names all seem to have a late medieval Spanish flair don’t they?). At any rate, even though isabella is a common color for living things, it is perhaps not of not of paramount beauty to the jaded modern eye and the word has been gradually fading from usage. This strikes me as a pity, since it is a much better word for that organic yellow-gray than uh, “yellow-gray.”
There are many mythological creatures which give color to American regional folklore. Champy the lake monster is said to haunt Lake Champlain. Mothman (or a colony of mothpeople) are always reputedly flying over the accursed town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia (a very nice river town with a history of horrible occurrences which would make Stephen King add some episodes to Derry’s history). Bigfoot skulks around the American West and, despite not being real, he is so omnipresent that apparently he (or possibly an 8 foot tall man in a ratty fur coat) threw a hunk of opal ore at my uncle back in 1979! This doesn’t even get into the legends of the Native Americans, who made up truly chilling monsters like the cold hungry wendigo [shudder].
And then we have Florida…
Although a folklorist who looked social media in contemporary America might initially conclude that the Sunshine state’s supernatural monster is the horrifyingly maladroit & depraved “Florida Man”, alas it seems that that particular troglodyte is all too real. Apparently the made-up cryptozooiod man-beast native to Florida is a hairy simian creature known as the “skunk-ape” (a.k.a. the “swamp cabbage man”, the “stink ape”, or the “myakka ape”). The skunk ape descends from a magnificent monster of Seminole legend called the “Esti Capcaki” (which apparently means something like giant cannibal man). The Esti Capcaki was huge, hirsute and ate human beings, but was also known for an overpowering stench. The skunk ape is a diminutive version of the same, who is alleged to hide out in dense swamps and nasty exurbs.
Anyway, to point this post towards contemporary relevance, the skunk ape has acquired a new role in the age of coronavirus! The Florida theme park “Gatorland” has introduced a skunk ape mascot in order to promote proper social distancing during the pandemic. The hairy monster man lurks in underbrush or waste places until he spots park goers who are failing to remain 6 feet apart, whereupon he leaps into the limelight and berates them with feral grunts and unhappy simian body language. Skunk ape’s female spokesperson also appears and reminds visitors to keep their distance in plain and somewhat lawyerly English.
At this juncture, it is unclear what Skunk Ape thinks of masks (I suppose I could reach out to his spokesperson and inquire, but frankly I am not going to do any actual journalism unless it involves actual remuneration). Likewise it is a bit unclear whether skunk ape’s public sanitation drive will work in any way whatsoever. What is clear is that our monsters and our mummers are always lurking around in the psychological shrubs waiting to leap out in moments of turmoil or duress. This is definitely such a time and I hope you are taking precautions to keep yourself safe from the all-too-real troubles which are currently stalking our land. Be safe out there! Don’t make me call in the skunk ape!
You have seen the news. You know what is going on. It is time to do what I have always dreaded. I need to write about a subject which I always swore I never would write about: a festering thorn of toxicity which has been rankling in America’s underbelly ever since the storming of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. I am speaking of course about “The Dukes of Hazzard”
What?? What in the hell?
Hopefully you have forgotten about this terrible TV show. Produced by CBS between 1979 and 1985, it featured the extended adventures of two work-shy yokels who drove around committing low-grade crimes in a vermilion Dodge Charger with the confederate battle flag painted on the top. The authorities in the small Georgia town were weak, stupid and incredibly corrupt (we are talking about Georgia in the American south, not the nation on the Black Sea). The Duke Boys had kinfolk everywhere. Hazzard County (which looked suspiciously like Nowheresville, California) was a warren of back roads and washed-out bridges. Lessons and laughs were few, but canned country music and folksy narration were 100% guaranteed.
I had never heard of this abominable thing until I was 7, but then my family moved from Cape Cod to the Ohio valley. At recess when I wanted to play “Secret Agent” or “Johnny Quest”, my new friends informed me in no uncertain terms that the only game in town was “Dukes of Hazzard”. As the new kid I was forced to play Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane, a bumbling nitwit (and crooked cop) who said lots of things like “hoo diggety durnit!”
“hoo diggety durnit! I’ll get them Duke boys good!”
The game was basically tag, with Sherrif Rosco always being “It” and chasing the popular Dukes. If other kids decided to play, they got to be other characters as appropriate (the husky kid was Boss Hogg, cute girls were Daisy, other nerds were deputies, etc.). Whenever Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane (i.e. me) caught the Dukes (i.e. the other kids) he was obliged for contractual reasons to let them go. He could never win. And here was the problem: I never saw this awful show and I couldn’t understand the logic behind the policeman losing. When I asked to watch “The Dukes of Hazzard” at home, I was told it was louche and not for children (an assessment of surprising acuity), so everything I knew about it was passed on in breathless narration from my new chums. This was a problem because my questions had no reasonable answers.
“Why don’t the townsfolk vote out the crooked commissioner?” I would ask. It was impossible, I was told.
“Why did the police always lose?” I wanted to know. “Because they were crooked cops”.
“Why didn’t outside forces curtail the bad cops” I asked. There was no answer. And on and on…
I did finally see this show as a teenager. Although I was more impressed with the good-hearted Daisy Duke than I would have imagined as a child, I found the rest of the thing to be an enormous let-down. Each episode consisted of the sloppiest clichés hastily festooned with atrocious faux homespun moral lessons. It was patronizing in the worst ways and lazy to boot. And yet my childhood schoolmates had loved it so much! Apparently so did the nation: the show was the 2nd most-popular television show in America in 1981.
The winsome Daisy Duke
And here is the real problem with “The Dukes of Hazzard”: it turns out that to all-too-many red-blooded, blue-collar, white Americans, this is the true national foundational story, and it is moral disaster! Here is a non-inclusive list of fundamental problems with this television program:
Environmental Degradation: The only thing anyone in Hazzard County does is drive around all day in 35 foot long muscle cars
Lack of viable economic productivity: the only economy in Hazzard County revolves around real-estate scams, roadhouse drinking/alcohol, and car culture
Union Busting: (the actors who played Bo and Luke Duke asked for more money and were replaced by appalling scabs for season 5 when rubber-faced pod people “Coy and Vance” Duke temporarily and inexplicably became the protagonists)
Failing infrastructure: Hazzard County is all dirt roads, dangerous washouts and fallen bridges
Institutional corruption: The President County Clerk of Hazzard County Boss Trump Hogg is a colossally crooked imbecile whose crooked schemes drive the plot…to nowhere
Incarceration: The Dukes could never escape Hazzard because they were on eternal probation for moonshinin’
Substance Abuse: aforementioned moonshinin’ (although the show towed the party line about the evil of other mood-altering substances)
Brutal and corrupt law enforcement: That sheriff!
Sexism: Daisy Duke is forced to wear hotpants and serve men all day
A failure to internalize the lessons of the Civil War: the meaning of that confederate flag (and other pro-southern references) were in no way abated by “very-special” episodes when the Dukes would rescue inner city orphans from human traffickers or whatever…
Over-reliance on automobiles & reckless driving: Hollywood definitely made speeding and unsafe driving look super cool. What could possibly go wrong?
Anti-authority: The boss was despicable…yet the heroes clearly had no good ideas about how to run anything or make anything work. Their idea of greatness was stunt driving!
Anti-intellectual: there were no books in Hazzard County
Now, obviously “The Dukes of Hazzards” was slapped together by cynical drug-addled Hollywood producers to appeal to their imagined versions of rural cretins. This post has been gently ribbing this hayseed extravaganza…except…
In the end, the Dukes of Hazzard wasn’t good clean fun. It was nihilistic. There was no way to get rid of the crooked leader or the bad cops. The heroes were criminals (and dullards) who would have killed hosts of children and hapless pedestrians with their reckless driving. Yet it was impossible to root for “the law”. The show venerated rebellion against authority in a way which was not rebellious or useful. It fostered a culture where nobody was right and there was no way to change the status quo. If you rub away the folksy Dixieland patina, the show was a classic 18th century farce where we are laughing at the weakness and depravity of humankind itself. Do you want to be the cruel, preening aristocrat or the harried underling who keeps bumbling into trouble? Well, nobody cares what you want: society’s strictures are set in stone.
My mom was right about this show: it fostered immoral ideas under the pretense of being family appropriate entertainment . If you have read to this point in the article, you have probably noticed that the United States of America, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, now seems disturbingly like a sadder & scarier version of “The Dukes of Hazzard”. I believe we can get rid of our crooked leader and reform our crooked police. But how do we reform our crooked selves? How can we make ourselves want things that are worth wanting? And how do we get rid of the show runners who keep playing this sort of thing just to make a buck?
ferrebeekeeper 