Before I send some of the Ledger Dispatch readers into a tirade - prompting birdshot to be loaded into scatter guns and truck tires burning out on their naked-women mud flaps - let me just say that, as a California boy, I love the American South.

I've toured enough old, antebellum cities in the "land of cotton" to know that the grand southern legacy includes unbelievable food, staggering art and architecture, and some of the friendliest people you'll meet anywhere in the world.

From the rustic romanticism of Saint Augustine to the Cajun-Creole life-blood of New Orleans, some of my best memories are linked to aging plantations, swinging brass instruments and the muddy banks of the Mississippi. In fact, I should also admit that if my imagination had never met southern writers like Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Truman Capote, I probably wouldn't even be attempting to write this commentary right now.

So I have kind of a love affair with southern traditions and history. This means that when I'm strolling through the city of Key West and I see a confederate flag hanging from the East Martello Museum, I think, "Yep, that's a tribute to the rebellious fighting spirit of Dixie Land."

However, when I'm cruising down Highway 88 in Jackson and see a confederate flag hanging from the new Poor Man's Bronze store, I think, "Yep, that belongs to a dunce."

I mean, it's bad enough that every time I go to lunch my eyes are assaulted by the fake, gaudy assortment of wildlife statues the Poor Man's Bronze has terrorizing the once-picturesque descent into town (Do you really think owning a couple of those will convince people that a ram and cougar are fighting in your front yard, or that giraffes wander near the Kennedy Mine), but the huge confederate flag they're selling is just too much.

While it's true that black and white Americans in the south are still fighting to understand what the confederate flag means today - some claim it's a chivalric symbol for lost causes, while others feel it's an emblem for shameful sins of the past - no one in California, particularly in Amador County, can really say they have a stake in this cultural fault line. If you live in the Gold Country and you're sporting a confederate flag on your pickup truck (and there's a number of trucks doing so) or proudly hanging one in your yard, I have to wonder why a flag that so many Americans take to be a coded insignia of racism is no big deal to you.

It's not that I think any locals who own confederate flags are necessarily racists - we all know the R-word gets thrown around way too much in our society these days - but I do think most of these confederate flag owners are silly, self-centered wannabes with no good historical excuse for stereotyping our community to visitors who already have fantastically backwards notions about rural people.

And let's be honest: It's no secret that there's a lack of racial diversity in Amador. When I was a kid living in Pioneer, a white couple with black children they'd adopted moved onto my street. One of my neighbors - and I'll never forget this as long as I live - actually threatened to sell her house.

 Of course, it's gotten a lot better since those days. But when people call the newspaper and say their black spouse was treated strangely at a local restaurant, or when letter-writers like Gordon Fazzio claim Martin Luther King is not an icon but Charlton Heston is, or when people like the mysteriously named "Gallagher" e-mail or phone my boss demanding to know his ethnicity, it makes me realize how far Amadorians still have to go to prevent a few bad apples from labeling all of us as ignorant morons.

I have to believe that avoiding the redneck mark of Cain is something all of us strive for, whether we're Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, pro-growth or anti-growth, third generation Amadorians or recent Bay Area transplants.

And for the few others who feel the need to strike the "Johnny Reb" flag around the county, you, Fazzio and Mr. Gallagher can have - in the words of the great Southern writer John Kennedy Toole - your very own "confederacy of the dunces."