I am driving my son from Washington DC to Charlottesville, Virginia, for a two-day ‘orientation’ at the university he will soon be attending. You can’t go far in this part of America without being reminded of the Civil War, and we detour briefly via Antietam Creek, where in 1862 over 20,000 men died, making it the bloodiest day in American military history. The staff in the gift shop are charming and informative, and the coffee isn’t bad by septic standards, but it has to be said that without corpses and gunfire a battlefield is about as interesting as a golf course.

The last time I drove around Virginia Confederate flags were as common as roadkill, but this time we have seen very few. This may have something to do with the recent shooting in nearby South Carolina of several black people by a white teenager whose facebook page showed him draped in a Confederate flag, and with the South Carolina government’s subsequent decision to remove said flag from all public buildings. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never previously attached much significance to what many here still refer to affectionately as the ‘Stars and bars’. But to a significant percentage of their neighbours it must be as offensive as a swastika would be in Rose Bay or St Kilda. How odd that it has taken this long for something to be done about it.

The opulence of most American university campuses give a bleak, Dickensian frisson to my own undergraduate memories, and the University of Virginia is no exception. Apart from the bit designed by its founder (better known for being the writer of the Declaration of Independence, a framer of the US Constitution and the country’s 3rd president) every building looks new and fit for purpose, the generous spaces between them filled with manicured lawns and wooded groves. The air-conditioned room my son will live in is larger and more comfortable than the one we share at the local Marriott, and even the roommate he has been allotted – a well-scrubbed, personable Californian – is a vast improvement on the smelly, monosyllabic hippy I had to put up with for a year. They hit it off straight away, but when my son is out of earshot I cannot resist telling this young man about my son’s passion for the trumpet and his deep commitment to Jesus.

Notwithstanding the Olympian splendour of their stadium it seems that UVA’s gridiron team isn’t much good. I find this reassuring, having been told that the quality of football played by a US university tends to be inversely proportional to the quality of the education it provides.

The only people involved in college football and basketball who don’t make money out of it are the players themselves, most of whom are dependent on scholarships which are cancelled if they so much as sell a sweatband. Many of these strapping young men also happen to be African Americans, of course, and you don’t have to be a history major to be worried by the idea of poor young black men being paid nothing to do a physically punishing job outdoors and in all weathers to make older white men rich.

Before they had slaves Virginia’s early settlers relied on British convict labour, much like their NSW counterparts the following century, and it occurs to me that if the poms hadn’t lost the War of Independence they would have continued using their American colonies as an extention of their prison system, in which case there’s a good chance they wouldn’t have bothered with Australia at all, and I’d be writing this in French.

If Jefferson was alive today I wonder if he would be pleased to hear that the university he founded is now offering its students Game of Thrones discussion classes. I would have assumed my son was joking, had I not recently read that the rap artist Snoop Dogg has confessed to having watched the first two seasons of GoT under the impression that it is British history. Dragons, dwarves and all.

Virginia is considered a posh state, and Charlottesville one of its posher towns. So my son and I are surprised to see so many people wearing the kind of sleeveless flannel shirts known throughout the civilised world as wife-beaters. Eventually we agree this is more of a political than fashion statement, and that these young men are merely exercising their constitutional right to, er, bare arms.