A Proper Introduction to Deadwood

As I mentioned shortly after my recent interview with Andrew Grevas, I will be writing at least one article about the HBO show Deadwood, which bridged the first and second terms of George W. Bush’s presidency. Deadwood ran for just three seasons, amounting to thirty-six episodes, but it changed my expectations forever in terms of what I need from dramatic art on television. Like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Breaking Bad, there was television before those shows and television after them, but what came after was very different that what was before. Deadwood is also like that for me.

Truly appreciating Deadwood requires humility, patience, a dark humor and it should really begin with understanding the historical context in which the show is set. Deadwood was a civilization without law and what the show explores is the corruption from purity of a person’s word as their bond, along with the brutality of their knife at your throat should you betray that word,  degrading into servile numbness after society imposes its merciless order upon you. Deadwood is a fall from innocence and yes, a brutal grace.

In 1869, the Trans Pacific Railroad (TPR) was completed in the United States, connecting the East and West Coasts together for the first time in history. The TPR was President Ulysses S. Grant's greatest accomplishment, even more so than leading a victory in the Civil War; the TPR changed the United States more than he could have imagined. That being said, over the next few years, a national scandal broke out which clearly revealed that the President of the TPR had been bilking the government for millions of dollars during the railroad line’s construction, he had been charging for rail that was either never laid or deliberately laid in unnecessary turns and extensions so as the bloat the cost. After all, he was paid by length of rail laid, a ridiculous incentive that invited corruption.

It was a huge scandal and faith in the railroads were shook at the end of an investment bubble similar, if not more severe, than the Dot Com bubble in the late 1990s. Thus began The Panic of 1873 which exacerbated an already growing global Economic Depression. A lot of people lost their asses. A massive number of businesses closed and more of the country lost the ability to produce value in coin for the work they were lucky to find. This quickly became being lucky for the food they were able to find, let alone the work. Great Depressions are no joke and this was the first one America would live through.

So it churned on. Another one of the victories President Grant desperately wanted to maintain was the fragile peace he had established with Native Americans. At the time, the United States Government viewed all Native American people as an amorphous group of non-citizens who, if they banded together, could ignite another war that would decimate the country. Remember that we are barely a decade out of The Civil War here. Well, that fragile peace was established on a huge plot of land in the Dakota territory, land which surrounded The Black Hills, a place of great spiritual meaning and power to the Lakota tribe (one of many tribes now corralled into this large territory).

And in the midst of this Great Depression, from which there was no end in sight, gold was rumored to have been found by poaching miners, right in these Black Hills of another country's land. The potential of what that gold could do for the country (and their own politician’s pockets) starting shining in the eyes and sparking the worst of ambitions throughout Washington, including the desperate President Grant. And he and General Sherman sent the worst possible person into the Black Hills to verify the presence and amount of gold there. General George Armstrong Custer had large political ambitions of his own and the biggest was to win the Presidency after Grant. But he felt he needed one more national win and solving the economic crisis that seemed unsolvable appeared to be a pretty damn good way to do it. Custer was told to report his findings back only to Grant and Sherman, which he did. But he also sent a copy to the New York Times.

GOLD RUSH!!

Starving people now had a chance to strike it rich by squatting on foreign land and murdering its owners if necessary to secure that shining wealth from the ground. Little acts of war have created these United States and Deadwood is filled with little acts of war.

Now we pass into the fictional story of Deadwood the television show as it mingles with the history of The United States in the 1870s. And in this story, two of those early poaching miners are the enterprising Al Swearengen and his strong man murderer Dan Dority. They illegally entered another country, found a spot near one of the largest mining sites, an area about the size of a town with land that looked flat enough to support a small civilization. They found that spot and Al and Dan started chopping down trees. Some of these trees would become the wall and ceiling and floors of The Gem Saloon, the only thing Al Swearengen ever loved more than money up to that point. The Gem will be the castle in which he crowns himself King. And like a Shakespearean King, Al is strutting and preening when we meet him in the pilot episode, no idea of the shit storm blowing his way and how it will break him of his hubris, the myopia of his ambition, and the frailties of his compassion.

Before we leave the actual history that surrounds the pilot episode of Deadwood and what unfolds after it over the next 36 hours of television, it is important to note that Custer rode back out to to this territory one more time. Sitting Bull refused President Grant's offer of several million dollars to buy the Black Hills (it was worth hundreds of times more). That refusal meant war and Sitting Bull and his chief warrior Crazy Horse knew this; it was only a matter of time. Meanwhile, the city of Deadwood was being born from the stolen lumber of thousands of clear cut trees. One day at the end of June, 1876, Custer and his entire 7th Cavalry was slaughtered at the Battle of Little Bighorn. He was two times outnumbered and divided his forces into frontal and rear assaults, one of the most foolish tactics ever employed against a superior force in what eventually became modern warfare. General Custer died in the last week of June, 1876. The pilot of Deadwood kicks off a few weeks or maybe a few months later.

So now you have the historical context of what you are about to experience, which is a tale of moral corruption carried into the hearts of men, women, and children, carried there by the “civilizing” force of social order as it was in the Summer of 1876 and the year that passes after it. What happens in the hearts of Al Swearengen, Seth Bullock, and all the other citizens of this dirty, dangerous, and lawless town during this time is the same corruption happening in the hearts of human beings as this sentence is being composed. It’s still happening right now.

Now, imagine you are in a rickety wagon, stuck in a terrible mountain traffic jam in 90 degree sweltering heat. Flies are everywhere. It smells like horse shit. You are sweating and dirty and mad. Out of the crowd, you hear a woman’s growling voice shout, “It’s only ‘fuckin Wild Bill Hickok you got stuck here in the muck!”

Welcome to Deadwood. It’s a hell of a place to make your fortune.

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JB Minton is the author of the upcoming book “A Skeleton Key To Twin Peaks: Experiencing The Return” and Co-Creator of The Red Room Podcast.

On America Being Great Again

I recently got into a fight with someone on the Internet about how great America is in the Summer of 2018. I did this because I love to be punished by strangers in front of other strangers for having an opinion that I'm willing to express in a somewhat sensible manner. According to them, pointing out that what our President is doing every day is practicing fascism, to them meant that I didn't support protecting our borders and that I was therefore, “The stupidest son of a bitch,” as a result.

Here is my actual response, in two parts:
 

Singling an amorphous group of people out and then pointing under-educated working class citizens to that group and repeating over and over again that they are the reason for the anger you feel, the sleights that have been given to you in your life, the ones stealing your future; they are to blame for the reason you feel empty inside...and I’m going to get them for you. Yeah, that’s fascism and it’s worked on ignorant human beings for a very long time, just like it’s brainwashed so many Baby Boomers and poor and middle class white people into thinking a billionaire criminal is going to do anything for them. But didn’t insulting a stranger on the Internet make you feel better than the truth? Just imagine if I was an immigrant with brown skin. That feeling? That’s fascism and it might be growing in your heart.

 

The good news is that Americans are at the core people with good hearts and I do not believe that fascism is going to stand the tide when it meets the collective spirit of this country. America can be great again, but it begins by opening our arms to embrace the best of what’s inside of us before the worst consumes us all.

I believe this. And so should you. America, at its best, is a concept that any human being with a desire to create a life of peace and relative safety for their family can come to this country and invest in themselves, while seeking investment by others, to create value for other human beings that will fund their future happiness and prosperity. That is America at its best, when it's been dolled up with all its makeup on and a push-up bra with a stock stuffed in its jeans. That's America, riding in a Corvette on a sunny Summer day while Don Henley plays through high end speakers on the Sirius satellite radio.

But America, from the early 1500s when Christopher Columbus terrorized and mass murdered the Arawak Indians, America was born from genocide, fueled by religious hubris and ungated greed, the same unstable fuel that destroyed the Roman Empire and powered the expansion of Western Civilization day by bloody day for centuries now. That too, is America. In fact, because that little investment of Columbus's didn't turn out much gold (except for what they stole from dead Native West Indians), he had to turn to another source of secured revenue, human capital. Slaves.

And thus another great sin of America was born and thrived for hundreds of years, while another kind of awakening was starting to take shape. It was called The Great Awakening and nothing like it had happened before that point in our history as an American People. Common people, whose spirits were being remade in the fires of a new idea of what human freedom could be was merging and morphing with a deep, emotional understanding of what our sacred duty is to each other in this waking world of human society that we create by the second with one another, as we move through time together on this precious little rock of ours.

And during this time of slavery and injustice, ideas started to spread, while colonial citizens began educating each other about what this new world could be, inciting and exciting each other and eventually, a decision was made to break with Empire and tradition, to reach for that Golden Fleece that could have easily been just a mirage.

During this time were written the most perfect three sentences ever composed and placed next to one another by a human being, or a deity created by one:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That, whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

These sentences speak to our souls as human beings, before we don the attributes that divide us, be they our skin color, the orientation of our physical affections, or the beliefs that kick around our head trying to convince us they have substance in the real world. Before any of those things can become chants at a political rally, there are quiet moments where only observation exists, where the thing we see is the very motion of our being as it is moves in real time and this is where true sacred silence is born and where the real security of humanity lies. This space between thoughts is where America is great again, at the level of the soul. No wall can protect it and no Lock Them Up chant can reach its ears. 

I believe that we as a species are on the precipice of another Great Awakening, one that goes beyond the idea of country and war and even the petty gods with their long books that we love to argue endlessly about. Try waking up tomorrow and opening your arms to the day and to the fellow human beings you meet on and offline. Speak to the soul and the soul will begin speaking back. And this is how we make humanity great again.

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I've taken to calling certain behaviors "Un-American" lately. It's an interesting way to start a conversation, because it automatically puts anyone undertaking the behavior on the defensive; this is exactly why what Joseph McCarthy did in the 1950s was so effective. But really, the best thing that could happen is that someone responds with the question, "Well, what is American?"

To this, it's nice to quote Ronald Reagan's goodbye letter to America, if you can believe that:

"The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still."

America is open arms on a wall with a door and America is a hard look into the eyes of the person knocking on the door, asking to be let in. This American Stare demands either trust or action, while the collective will of the American People is ready for either situation to jump off.

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JB Minton is the author of the upcoming book A Skeleton Key to Twin Peaks, and POETRYSEXLIFE. He lives in Ohio. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

My Plea For You To Watch Sons of Anarchy

Sons of Anarchy is a meditation on violence; it is a passion play where the cross of crucifixion become the very road that society's outlaws once believed led to freedom. Sons of Anarchy is a modern day Hamlet. But besides all of that, it's just a great effing show!

When we first meet Jackson Teller, he is a young and handsome man in his 20s with a baby problem; his old lady is shooting up heroin and she's late in her pregnancy. We also learn that he is Vice President of an Outlaw Motorcycle Club named the Sons of Anarchy. The first scene of show is not the drama that unfolds around Jackson's ex-Old Lady Wendy and his soon to be born premature son Abel; the opening drama is the sabotage and explosion of a warehouse holding the illegal automatic firearms that the Sons relies on as its primary source of income, an explosion set off by a rival biker gang, The Mayans.

This explosion sends the Sons President (and Jackson's step-father) Clay Morrow into a battle rage, which likewise puts Jackon's mother Gemma Teller Morrow into a protective flurry of activity, one of those actions potentially being delivering the very heroin that may have just killed Jackson's baby. It turns out Gemma doesn't really like any of the girls Jackson hooks up with, leastwise his “junky whore” of an ex-Old Lady.

But luckily, Jackson's true love Tara has recently come back to Charming to settle her dead father's affairs and she just happens to be a pediatric surgeon who is on-duty when Wendy and the baby are brought in. Tara is able to save the day, successfully separating both baby and mother (who will live to tell her tale, maybe) and Tara and Gemma start clashing immediately while Tara and Jackson pick up where they left off so many years ago, when Tara broke Jackson's heart because she was either going to get away from Charming and the Outlaw life or she was going to become another of its casualties.

Jackson's best friend Opie is also dealing with drama balancing his Outlaw roots and the wife and two children he is charged with protecting. Opie just got out of prison, doing time for the club out of deep loyalty, which is all well and good but a promise to his wife that he will leave the life forever is causing major heartache as he gets drawn back into the drama of the club and the lure of fast (but not easy, nothing's easy about that kind of gun running) cash.

Also, the White Supremacists are teaming up with that same rival Mexican gang The Mayans to drive the Sons of Anarchy out of Charming so they can set up selling meth and heroin in a city where the Sons and the Police force have joined together for years to keep relatively wholesome. This Devil's Bargain amounts to keeping the evil that men do in the circle outside charming while the police look the other way at what the cost is to make that happen.

And as  if all t his wasn't enough, Jackson found his father's old journals while looking for his baby clothes in his mother's storage locker. And in those journals is a manifesto his father wrote titles, “How The Sons of Anarchy Lost Their Way.” As Jackson starts to read his father's words about the intention of the club when it was created to live freely on the fringes of society and how it became corrupted when the violence of running guns took over that freedom, Jackson begins to change inside as it dawns on him that there are unanswered questions about his father's death, questions that may cause his loyalties shift as he ponders how Anarchy and Freedom may not be aligned on parallels after all . And of course, this leads to a meditation on the very violence that America finds itself enmeshed in this very moment like blood beaded barbed wire - How can we possibly get out of guns and find true freedom?

And that, my friends, is just the Pilot episode. Sons of Anarchy is a hell of a ride. What follows are seven seasons of escalating violence that details with horror, tragedy, and sorrow, the price that must be paid to back out of the darkness of violence when it is the only common language we have left as a society.

The Reaper only accepts one currency for payment and it bleeds red.

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JB Minton is the author of the upcoming book A Skeleton Key to Twin Peaks, and POETRYSEXLIFE. He lives in Ohio. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

The Redemption of Luke Skywalker And The Resurrection Of The Jedi Order: WHY THE LAST JEDI IS SO IMPORTANT

In 1977, a towheaded boy sits in a theater in Central Illinois and his uncle reads the words to him which appear on the screen. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

Fast forward 40 years and the man who grew from that boy is in another theater, hundreds of miles away from the first, his own children and wife sit next to him and he doesn’t try to hide the tears that stream from his eyes as two moments in time synchronize and the years fold into each other, creating a rare moment of transcendence through Art.

Like the rest of America in 2017, the Star Wars community is bitterly divided after Episode VIII: The Last Jedi was released in December. The Internet immediately exploded with opinions on both sides; some saying the film was a “dumpster fire” of needless side stories and gap-filled character arcs, others saying it was the greatest movie-going experience since Return of the Jedi. 

The Last Jedi is the most important film to date in the entire canon of Star Wars, because the mythological arc of Luke Skywalker's Hero's Journey has come to a successful completion. Since the original film was released in 1977, every character and plot line from Jar Jar Binks to the midichlorian prophecy of “The One Who Will Bring Balance to The Force,” has lead to the moment where Luke Skywalker walks out onto the salt plain battlefield of Crait.

George Lucas explains why Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" was instrumental in finishing writing Star Wars.

In order to put the importance of Luke Skywalker's Hero's Journey in perspective, consider years ago, when George Lucas was struggling to finish the manuscript for Star Wars. During this time, he came across the seminal book by master Mythologist Joseph Campbell The Hero With A Thousand Faces, where Professor Campbell lays out the single story of the Hero told over thousands of cultures throughout history. From this commonly repeated cycle, George Lucas approached his protagonist through new eyes and created Luke Skywalker's Hero’s Journey, which would take forty years, nine films (and counting), hundreds of hours of television, and dozens of book to tell.

According to Professor Campbell, every Hero's Journey contains the following elements:

DEPARTURE:

1. The Call To Adventure (Luke standing looking at the Tattoine Suns, an empty feeling in his heart…)
2. Refusal of the Call (Luke tells Obi Wan, “I’m not going to Alderaan. I have to get home. I’m in enough trouble as it is…”)
3. Supernatural Aid (Obi Wan is going to teach Luke the ways of The Force so he can become a Jedi Knight like his father…)
4. The Crossing Of The First Threshold (Obi Wan cuts the arm off the criminals who try to kill Luke in the Mos Eisley bar…)
5. The Belly of the Whale (The tractor beam pulls The Millennium Falcon into the Death Star…)

INITIATION:

1. The Road of Trials (Destroying the first Death Star and then Discovering Darth Vader is his Father…)
2. Atonement with the Father (Luke rescues his Father…)
3. The Ultimate Boon (Luke and Vader together defeat the Emperor while The Rebels Destroy the Second Death Star…)

RETURN:

1. The Refusal of The Return (Luke fails to allow for the balance of Dark and Light in his star pupil, refusing to pass on what he has learned from his own father, and in doing so assists Snoke in creating Kylo Ren. Luke then passes into hermitage and seclusion in his shame and self-loathing, denying Rey when she comes to recruit him back to the Resistance…)
2. The Crossing of the Return Threshold (After opening himself back up to The Force, and palavaring with Master Yoda, who tells him his failure to bring balance is exactly the lesson he should have taught Rey, Luke confronts his own dragon of the shame of his failure. He summons all the power he can from The Force to project himself across the Galaxy and stands before Kylo Ren to apologize, giving what's left of The Resistance fighters the time they need to escape…)
3. Master of the Two Worlds (Luke owns his failure and forgives himself and Kylo, while informing him the war is just starting and the Jedi are reborn along with the Resistance…)
4. Freedom to Live (Luke passes from this life while also passing the torch of a New Jedi Order to Rey, who is taking the first steps in her own Hero’s Journey, one free from the Skywalker curse, balance restored to the Force as one powerful Jedi and one powerful Sith square off against each other in the battle to come. Perhaps Rey is humble enough to allow for the Dark and the Light to balance inside her as she seeks to bring peace and harmony to the Galaxy.)

When Luke Skywalker collapses in The Last Jedi, looking up at the Twin Suns of Tattoine burning in the sky of Ahch-To, a magic time portal opens up for every viewer, no matter their age. That towheaded two year old, whose eyes first fell upon that young man staring into those same twin Suns in Episode IV, pondering the Call to Adventure he felt in his heart, is also the forty-two year old man watching that much older hero take his last breath while staring into those same twin Suns, forty years later and a lifetime’s journey for all of them, the boys and the men, the women and the girls, each of us, alone and yet together. 

When Rey approaches Luke, his father’s blue light saber held out in her hand, a look of longing for a father figure on her face, Luke is a broken man who has shut himself off from The Force, a miserable hermit waiting to die, a lesser man than even his own master Obi Wan was when he and Luke met through fate in the Tattoine desert so long ago. But Luke's journey was not yet complete; there was one more dragon he had to face-the one inside his heart, where he would be forced to stare into the abyss of his own failure and, like those characters in Stephen King's greatest novel, to Stand in spite of his own fear and shame, to stand true in the face of his greatest enemy, the same one he fought in the cave on Dagobah all those years ago-himself. But stand he did.  

The author as a boy receiving Bossk the Bounty Hunter, the same look he has the first time seeing any new Star Wars film in the theater.

In the end, Luke Skywalker gave everything he had so the Jedi could be reborn, and so the Resistance against The Empire and it’s terrible child The First Order could be defeated with the hope that for the first time in a long time, the galaxy could be ruled by Democracy working in the interests of peace and the freedom of all people. Luke Skywalker gave everything he had to bring balance back to The Force, just like the prophecy proclaimed so long ago, his Hero's Journey completed in that moment where the Twin Suns became the final sight his old eyes would ever gaze upon, a moment that found that towheaded boy 40 years older but staring at the movie screen with the same wonder as when he first saw those Suns so many years ago. What a magical moment this is for every Star Wars fan, and for every human being, because it speaks to each of us in this time of great peril within our own civilization, as we are each being called to stand up in our own lives and make that same choice of facing down our greatest fear to defeat that which now threatens us all, what happens after we give in to ignorance, hatred, bigotry, anger, and apathy toward the suffering of those in need.

In the closing of The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Professor Campbell says this about the Hero today:

“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for [their] community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of [their] tribe’s greatest victories, but in the silences of [their] personal despair.”

Luke Skywalker’s Hero’s Journey reaching completion is the most important thing about Episode VIII: The Last Jedi and all the other nitpicking negativity carries zero weight when compared to the importance of what happens on that rocky island at the end of this film, where A New Hope is born and finally an old promise is fulfilled, a promise that a nobody from nowhere can become powerful enough, by listening to their own heart and moving with love as a team doing what's right for everyone, to defeat even the mightiest and most cruel of empires. 

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JB Minton is the author of the forthcoming "A SKELETON KEY TO SEASON 3 OF TWIN PEAKS" and POETRYSEXLIFE, a collection of fiction, poems and arguments. Follow him on this site and on Facebook.