Ben Jones — the mechanic Cooter on The Dukes of Hazzard who later served Georgia in Congress — died Sunday at 84, and the cultural machine that spent years trying to memory-hole his show won't give him the respect he earned living two distinctly American lives.
Jones suffered a massive heart attack at home, according to his wife Alma Viator's Facebook post. "He was home resting in his favorite chair waiting for the Braves to come on and whoop the Yankees," she wrote. He was three weeks shy of his 85th birthday.
The man was a working actor who became a working legislator — 142 episodes as Cooter Davenport, then four years as a Democratic congressman from Georgia's Fourth District, where he co-sponsored nearly 140 bills that became law, including the Chattahoochee National Forest Protection Act of 1991. He won his seat by 20 points in 1988, per Breitbart, and lost it only after redistricting cleared the path for Newt Gingrich in 1994.
Tom Wopat, who played Luke Duke, wrote on Instagram: "Ben Jones was a fine friend and a fierce advocate of all the best things we can offer in the entertainment business. I feel like we lost a Duke cousin today."
Georgia Rep. Richard McCormick called him "an incredible man, a dedicated public servant, and a true American treasure," according to the Augusta Chronicle.
Here is what the obituaries will smooth over: The Dukes of Hazzard was yanked from TV Land in 2015 because the General Lee — the iconic orange Dodge Charger with a Confederate flag on its roof — offended the same corporate sensibilities that now police every corner of American culture. Jones defended the show and its heritage until the end. The people who canceled his show are the same people who sanitize every institution they touch — entertainment, education, government — and they will not stop at a car from a 40-year-old television program.
Breitbart noted that Jones, like Sonny Bono, made the rare leap from show business to Congress. The Augusta Chronicle emphasized his legislative record. Neither outlet mentioned the cancellation campaign that drove his show off the air. That omission is itself the story.
Jones married four times, last to Viator in 1992. He wasn't born in Georgia — he moved there during filming and made it his home. That's the kind of American the cultural gatekeepers have no use for: someone who adopted a place and its people and fought for both.
The question isn't whether Ben Jones will be remembered. It's what the commissars will erase next.
