Thursday, July 02, 2015

Oye - Bad Ideas Run Amuck

I am going to start with, I think the Confederate Flags should come down across state houses in America.  I explained my reasoning here LINK.
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However, TV Land canceling The Dukes of Hazard, and doing because of the flag on the car is asinine.  I say this with no love of Dukes of Hazard (I haven't ever been able to sit through 1 entire episode and I LOVE bad TV).
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Realistically, no one watched the Duke Boys because of hate.  The flag on the car was minimal, and the Duke Boys actively were anti-racists (as befits TV in that time).  Look at this picture below.  No watched watched the show to cheer on the car!
NO ONE looks at this picture and says "Wow, I wish that girl would move so I can see the flag."
More to the point.  Times change.  You can't ban things that are now offensive because something is offense to someone, always.
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Soap - which I watched to see a gay character - is painfully stereotypical now.  Jody Dallas was gay and dressed up in women's clothes for goodness sake.  The Carol Burnett Show now plays badly because of jokes about drunks, smoking in bars and sexual situations we find squirm worthy.  Yet, it was great.  Hogans Heroes made light of prisoners of war and there were good Nazis.  Aside from Gone With The Wind, I would guess about two thirds of the historical movies in the 1930s southed the South in a better light than the North (Little Foxes, Jezebel, and The Little Rebel with Shirley Temple come to mind).
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Too political correct is too politically correct.  If Dukes of Hazard promoted burning down black churches, ban it.  But they didn't.  They tried to find who did it and help those hurt.  That isn't racist no matter what their car has on it.