Tag Archives: Montana

Yellowstone Offers a MAGA-era Rorschach Test

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Paramount Network’s television series Yellowstone is a huge hit, and I’ve been pondering why.  After all, raising cattle is not something that one would guess most contemporary Americans would likely find particularly riveting.

It strikes me that there are two very different ways to view Yellowstone.  To many like me, it’s consumed as a mafia story. Mafia families use extortion, violence, and other criminal methods to make money and preserve power and privilege, and that is precisely what Yellowstone’s Dutton family is all about, episode after episode.

There’s a lot to like about Yellowstone. It is entertaining, beautifully shot, and well-acted.  As with many a mafia story, the story about what will become of the family members pulling out all the stops to maintain their power and privilege has been worth watching.  Before watching it, I might not have believed that a Montana-based Sopranos yarn would work, but it does for me.

It’s far from perfect. The story line gets preposterous at times, the trash-talk scripting often feels particularly contrived, the level of violence displayed is gratuitous, and the simplistic characters seem mostly unwilling or unable to see gray areas in the situations they encounter.  Talented actresses like Kelly Reilly could have been even more interesting to watch with scripts that weren’t so simplistic and over-the-top.  

But beyond the familiar mafia formula, there is another very different way to view Yellowstone.  Many viewers see mega-rancher John Dutton and his loyal family as superheroes, not criminals.  They see an ultra-honorable family fighting for what they believe was once great about America – more hard work, more family loyalty, more agrarian lifestyles, less “politically correct” nonsense, and a might-is-right approach to ensure you always get your way. 

In this case, the superheroes’ superpowers involve guns-a-plenty, humiliating trash-talking, bullying of dissenters, corruption of state and local government, and an unflagging certainty that it’s their God-given right to control anything they damn well want, despite what “the others” – urbanites, environmentalists, the insufficiently macho, and Native Americans – do or say.

A lot of people seem to see Yellowstone this way.  Go to any rural or small town area, and you’re going to see folks wearing Yellowstone gear, just the way people wear Captain America, Superman, and Wonder Woman gear.  These folks not only want to watch the Duttons, they want to be them.

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reported that Yellowstone first became a hit in smaller, more rural markets, not on the coasts.

The show wrapped its fourth season Sunday night with an average 10.4 million total viewers on the Paramount Network, up from 4.5 million in season 1.  The unconventional path “Yellowstone” took to ratings dominance shows how audiences can accrue and change over a series’ lifespan and how regional differences still matter…

Lafayette, Ind., is a “Yellowstone” stronghold. The area around Purdue University had the highest proportion of viewers during season 1 of any small market outside Montana and Wyoming, the region where “Yellowstone” is set, according to Nielsen data on viewers ages 25 to 54.

Loyalists there include Jim Hedrick, 62, whose company Horizon Ag Consulting works with farmers across the Midwest. He says “Yellowstone” mines issues that matter in his circles, such as family cohesion and the development of rural areas.

When “Yellowstone” premiered in 2018, the show ranked fourth in the 25-to-54 age group in the least-populated TV markets, categorized by Nielsen as D markets. In the country’s most populous areas—dubbed A markets, which include New York and Los Angeles—“Yellowstone” didn’t crack the top 50.

Like other superhero tales, Yellowstone sometimes gets pretty unrealistic.  In the real world, no business, including ranching, is immune from criminal law enforcement, environmental protections, eminent domain rules, and political realities.  Deep red rural states trend in those directions, but they’re not nearly as extreme as the Dutton-dominated Montana.

As such, the Yellowstone fantasy offers an escape for viewers who dream of a world where people who look and act like them find ways to control everything. That seems like the “secret sauce” that makes Yellowstone so delicious for so many.

Why are the Duttons viewed by so many as heroes rather than criminals?  For many viewers, the Dutton’s brutal crimes are forgiven – lustily cheered on, even – because of the enemies involved.  The Duttons hate the same people that Trumpists hate — fakey latte-sipping urban dwellers, clueless environmentalist brats, rule-bound government dweebs, hopelessly soft beta male, snowflake cucks, and coddled minorities.

And who doesn’t want to see someone stick it to those guys?

Yellowstone is a kind of Rorschach test that is being seen different ways depending on the individual viewer’s biases and values.  How you interpret it reveals personality characteristics, such as an authoritarian instinct and willingness to rationalize violence and other crimes. 

I have no proof of this, but it seems a safe bet that there is a strong correlation between Trump fans and people who view the corrupt, murderous Duttons as righteous superheros rather than a privileged, power-obsessed crime family.

(By the way, the other way that Yellowstone is fantasy is that the actors like Kevin Costner and Kelly Reilly who are playing right wingers’ heroes are not conservative in their real lives. After campaigning for Reagan earlier in his life, Costner has campaigned for Barack Obama and the Biden Administration’s Pete Buttigieg. And the English actress Reilly is reportedly a Democrat.)

Because Yellowstone has proven so overwhelmingly popular, we surely will see more programming like it. We can expect more “us against them” narratives giving comfort and encouragement to viewers whose fondest wish is to own the libs without pesky laws in the way. 

If I were a right-wing billionaire intent on fanning the culture war flames as a means to maintain and grow my financial power and privilege, I’d bankroll more Yellowstone-like shows to provide entertaining propaganda tools to compliment the news-like propaganda tools that those billionaires already control to great effect.

Everyone likes to fantasize about being a superhero, and shows like Yellowstone offers heroic role models and road maps for white people bending and breaking laws to maintain their privilege in a rapidly changing world. 

And you know what? If the acting, story, scenery, and production levels are as good as they are in Yellowstone, the chances are that plenty of liberals like me will probably watch the coming Yellowstone clones, though through a very different lens.

Cheers to You if You’re Ready for the Next 95 Days.

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With everything coming at us, an unrelenting pandemic, a long winter lockdown and the most berserk election season any of us have ever experienced, I took eight days away to infuse myself with some Big Sky Montana social distance and peace of mind.

It was a valuable respite … that ended, since returning on Monday … with Donald Trump hyping a witch doctor who believes in “demon sperm”, who says that children should be whipped and claims that some government leaders are “reptilians” and space aliens. That in addition to revealing that in eight recent conversations (eight!) with Vladimir Putin he still hasn’t confronted him about Russian bounties for U.S. troops, and saying that those of us living “The Suburban Lifestyle Drem” no longer have to worry about “low cost housing” moving in next to us, and then this morning twitting that mail-in voting is so fraudulent he may have to “delay” the election.

And that, folks, is just skimming off the top. It leaves out Bill Barr seeing no legal reason why a guy running for reelection can’t accept “foreign assistance” … like from say, oh I don’t know, Vladimir Putin … again.

One easy way to become a master prognosticator is by extrapolating out the most obvious trendlines. For that reason I can’t claim wizardly powers for telling everyone who’ll listen, for months now, that we will enter a period of unprecedented chaos prior to this November’s election. And, for the record, I began saying that before the pandemic and America’s thug-like cop culture set off a new round of racial animosities.

If there’s a primary takeaway from the serene moments sitting on the hood of my rental car in a sprawling, mountain-ringed wheatfield, sipping a beer from the cooler, it’s the conviction that chaos is the only card Trump has left to play, and that it, like everything else about his sordid, fraudulent career, depends on … Vladimir Putin.

As hundreds have pointed out, nothing Trump is doing makes any normal, tactical election sense. Every day he hypes witch doctors, shows indifference to the killing of American soldiers, ignores the death of legendary civil rights leaders, bemoans the loss of confederate statues, sends (a la Putin) anonymous “Little Green Men” into American cities to gin up viral social media videos of “terrorists” and “rioters”, he loses another chunk of rational, functionally intelligent voters.

The thing is, by now he knows that simply hardening and “exciting” the always-Trumper base isn’t going to win … a normal, uncontested election. But what it will do is inflame their fundamentally racist, paranoid passions to the point that they will instinctively respond — passionately and recklessly — to his inevitable claim that the November vote against him was “rigged.”

Since no one ever knows what Trump talks to Putin about, (remember, Dan Coats, former Director of National Intelligence, left office without ever being briefed on what Trump and Putin discussed for two hours alone in Helsinki), it seems fair to suspect a coordination of nefarious strategies for election night chaos has been on the agenda.

And, as we are coming to understand, rather than election night, we are looking at something much more like election month, as mail-in ballots are sluggishly counted, contested and invalidated by legal challenges. My prediction being that Trump will declare victory based on in-person results from a handful of red states and then commence, with Barr’s help, a torrent of legal assaults designed to once again push the decision on a winner to the Supreme Court.

I truly wish I could imagine something more honest and straightforward. Something more respectful of “norms.” But this is the world modern Republicanism — the governing vehicle for rancid, know-nothing tribalism, anti-science voodoo hysteria and hyper-micro legal parsing — has ordained for the majority of the rest of the country.

I wish there was another beer in the cooler.

What Spawned Who … Among the Body Slammin’ GOP?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3With Greg “The Body-Slammer” Gianforte’s unequivocal victory in Montana last night there’s a lot of hand-wringing talk about how this is the latest example of “The Trump Effect”, “the fish rotting from the head down”, yadda yadda. And with the statistically demonstrable upsurge in anti-Muslim activity around the country, compounding what is already an intolerable level of racist attitudes by authority figures, it’s hard to make a case that The Donald’s success hasn’t unleashed something pretty sick and unevolved in our “shining city on the hill”.

But come on. Donald Trump, essentially an ideological illiterate, a guy whose trademark is exploiting weaknesses, financial, political and moral, to his personal advantage hardly invented the pig-headed brutishness displayed by Republican candidate Gianforte or his Big Sky supporters, (many of who possibly voted for him before he smacked that “aggressive liberal journalist” to the ground.)

I’ve been on a couple “Fake News” panels in recent weeks and my now standard line is that “fake news”, with all the demagogic recklessness and viciousness attached to it is part of an established, profitable and electorally successful  continuum from — to pick a recent start point — talk radio in the early 1990s, FoxNews in the mid-to-late ’90s, all the crackpot websites of the mid-aughts to Trump’s victory last fall. Point being, Trump exploited the grievance-saturated messaging of all that came before him to draw out a crowd that had been sitting on the sidelines for years and propel him to victory. Whether he personally believes any of what he bellowed at them hardly matters. (In sales, it’s often the bullshit — the not caring if something is true or false — that closes the deal.)

Trump is the product of every “conservative entertainment complex” huckster and every Republican politician who kow-towed to … a collection of radio jocks. They are the head of the rotting fish. Trump is just a guy who applied full caricature to the extant mob mentality and got himself appointed grand marshal of their parade.

This “Anyone Who Kicks Ass on A Pencil-Necked Liberal East Coast Faggot Reporter Is My Kinda Guy” moment in Montana comes simultaneous with Sean Hannity’s on-going, obnoxious exploitation of a young guy’s murder in D.C. — in his cynical, fevered mind a clear connection to Cruella de Vil rat-bastard Hillary Clinton and everyone trying to blockade The Donald’s visionary conservative plan to make ‘Murica great again. While even FoxNews has reversed course on the story, Hannity has persisted, despite repeated pleas from the kid’s family to stop the aggravation of their suffering.

But the carefully strategized, generation-long interplay of low information news, shameless delusion and naked grievance — and oh hell, through in a fat dose of barroom clodishness — has worked so well for Hannity (and FoxNews under Roger Ailes) that it’s impossible to resist. Junkies to the next meth hit, my friends.

By the way, hat tip to pal Jim Leinfelder for alerting me to this classic Matt Taibbi screed at Rolling Stone on the passing of Ailes and culture, of Gianforte-style Republicanism.

Says Taibbi at one point, “[Ailes] is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America’s vicious and bloodthirsty character. We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered. Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans’ worst fantasies about each other. The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network. Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly – ‘I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead’, he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods.”

Taibbi is a modern master of cathartic rants, and that was one of the most invigorating hits of pure oxygen I’ve read in a while.

The takeaway though is that fundamentally, Trump (and Body Slammin’ Gianforte) are products of what Ailes and Rush Limbaugh and all the other self-interested purveyors of grievance and rage have created. They’re the people who primed his audience.

So let’s give credit where credit is due.