I heard about the cancellation of the nostalgia-riffic reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard, and frankly, I felt it was a little wrong. Yes, I recognize that the General Lee indeed did feature the battle flag of Northern Virginia, and no, I’m not a big fan of it. But what if I told you that the Dukes of Hazzard was the symbol of Lincoln’s ultimate wish for national political and cultural reconciliation post-Civil War?

Think I’m full of it? Yeah, well probably as always, but I’m armed with TRIVIA, such as the fact that the majority of the cast were Yankees.

So you think that the Dukes of the Hazzard County represent all that we need to purge from the American cultural lexicon? I get it — I just wrote about that filth-sucking numbskull in Charleston and the flag, etc. And I’m here to submit that the graphical pattern on the legendary car aside, the show actually represented a positive step for national politics, not to mention an entertainment franchise that was supremely successful in terms of culture and commerce, something that warms my still-Capitalist heart.

I was about six years of age. It was 1980, and I was sitting in Claremont, New Hampshire (where my Dad temporarily ran the farm store) with Steve Pearson and his brother Sam. We were absolutely rapt in attention on a Friday night in front of this show sweeping the nation — “The Dukes of Hazzard.” We hadn’t a nano-clue about what was going on, except for the awesome. The set might have been Narnia. Two healthy males around age 29 apparently had no jobs yet lived happily in an agrarian, somewhat 19th-century region of the nation where they spent their days jumping over things, pursued by one or two bureaucrats because of some legal infraction. It wasn’t quite clear if there was really a stable system of governance in this place covered by red dirt, but we did assume that there must be a higher magistrate somewhere in the mix. All we knew is that those were not New England accents by any stretch, and what the hell, that car is “wicked.” Occasionally, Catherine Bach, the actress who played Daisy Duke, strolled by to remind us that while we were currently first-graders, we were indeed heterosexual; place a bookmark here, boys — it’ll make more sense in a few years.

We had absolutely, positively no idea that this was a cultural comic book for a region that, a scant twelve years prior, had been the site of a national trauma replete with burned churches and a dead Martin Luther King, Jr. This had been, in retrospect, sanitized into the purification of the best parts of the South, that which is very distinctly American and even spoke to us hardscrabble Northerners. This was all barbecue and NASCAR, all sassin’ the law and defyin’ the man, all of which is pretty delicious to the American palate. No burning crosses, no hate, no tension. As a boy, I never thought of Southerners as a Hateful Other, just a distinct flavor that was distant yet somehow part of the family.

But check out some trivia about how the Dream Factory made this for us. I’ll start with my absolutely favorite character: Jefferson Davis “Boss” Hogg. The actor, Sorrell Booke was from Buffalo, New York (A YANKEE!), a lifelong actor and never actually a corrupt Southern official. He attended Yale and Columbia (A YANKEE!), and served as a CIA counterintelligence agent during the Korean War. He spoke five languages including Russian and Japanese and died in 1994, which means I’m damn depressed I never got to have dinner with this guy. And he was a killer actor.

His sidekick, Roscoe P. Coltrane? The actor’s real name was Jewel Franklin Guy, better known as James Best, and he actually was from Kentucky. He spent his younger years as military police in the stabilization of war-torn, post-World War II Germany. His most famous role before the Sheriff was as the son of the abolitionist John Brown in “Seven Angry Men.”

Tom Wopat, who played Luke Duke, was actually from Lodi, Wisconsin, and went on to be a successful musician.

John Schneider, who played Bo Duke, hails from Mount Kisco, New York, (outside of NEW YORK CITY) and has had a decades-long career in American music and theatre.

Catherine Bach, who allowed me to select “heterosexual” as my lifestyle choice early on, was born outside of Youngstown, Ohio, was raised on a ranch in South Dakota, and went on to a varied career in television, film, and theatre.

Here’s the deal — I would like to propose a new flag to replace the battle flag of Northern Virginia. I call it, “The Boss and Hogg Flagg.” It features these archetypes of Southern culture that seamlessly mix both north and south without tripping into painful territory. This was an idealized image of the South created largely by non-Southerners, an attempt to bring mythical images to the attention of all Americans. And if I read Lincoln’s attempt to re-instate the South to its full rights as quickly as possible so we can move onward, this is within his set of values.

Do I respect the KKK coming to rep the Old Flag this week, to respond to our natural discomfort around a flag resurrected because of desegregation? No.

Do I respect the reflexive attempt to sidestep Charleston and talk, yet again, about how this is “heritage, not hate?” Not in the slightest.

Yet I see this as an opening. Hate to give up the battle flag, but don’t want to give up Southern symbolism? Fly The Boss and Hogg Flagg. Nobody has ever burned a cross wearing it, yet it reps the South. It has nothing to do with Maine, and it also nothing to do with lynching.

So TV Land — please split the difference, and please put that silly piece of nostalgia back on. It’s the bridge between two cultures, and might be able to get us where we need to go, thirty-five years after its debut.