The past two weeks have been a reminder that there is only one proper way to watch television shows: on DVD.
Yes, I've completed my mad dash through the first season of HBO's spectacular "Deadwood." (Yay for the $15-a-month-all-you-can-watch program at Blockbuster!)
Go and rent it right now.
"Deadwood" reinvents the western. It features characters based on real people and events, and it is set in a lawless South Dakota mining town in 1876, shortly after the country's biggest gold strike and Custer's Last Stand. The main plot line features former marshal Seth Bullock and his business partner who move to Deadwood to open a hardware store. The principled Bullock immediately comes into conflict with Al Swearengen, the brutal, criminal owner of the Gem, a saloon and brothel that takes in thousands of dollars a day.
This is a west that's presented realistically with warts and all -- like the west has never been seen before. It's not just the constant, artful profanity but also the horrific racism towards both Native Americans and Chinese immigrants and the shocking exploitation of the town's prostitutes.
The reasons to watch are the amazing acting, engaging characters, unique dialogue and twisting plots. It's like a 12-hour version of Martin Scorsese's film "Gangs of New York." The hypnotic saloon-owner Swearengen, played brilliantly by Ian McShane, in character, performance and many other ways, resembles Daniel Day-Lewis's Bill the Butcher as a compulsively watchable, 19th-century villain who steals the show.
It's primarily this individual and the aspects of the show surrounding him that are worthy of some political reflection. The primary feature of the town of Deadwood at this point in history was its lawlessness -- there literally was no government.
So what we have is absolute capitalism, unfettered by any kind of government regulation. It's a business community where if any people stand in the way of profit, you can kill them! Anything and everything is for sale, including human beings. There may have been the Emancipation Proclamation, but plenty of women are in sexual slavery -- something still found all over the world today.
Everyone in Deadwood is there for one reason: to make as much money as possible. The miners are mining the gold from the land, and smarter "miners" like Swearengen are mining it out of them with whiskey and women.
So who are the Swearengens of today and where is Deadwood in the modern world? It's not so much people as it is the legal entities created with the same "rights" as people: the transnational corporation in the global arena. Are sweatshop employees in the third world, who live in shacks with no clean drinking water, that different than the prostitutes exploited in the Gem? Is murdering one person quickly out of convenience with a knife to the gut that different from slowly killing untold numbers with pollution?
But just as not everyone in Deadwood making a dollar is a criminal like Swearengen -- most aren't -- such is the case with businesses and corporations. Capitalism is not the villain, but the Wild West capitalism of extreme "free market" ideology is, in that it has led to economic tyranny and suffering on par with its spectrum opposite, the communist dictatorship.
The opposite of communism is not democracy, but capitalism. Both absolutes have proven deadly.
Be as watchful for the seductive answers of extremism as you are for rare great shows like "Deadwood."
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