A Deadwood State of Mind

 

The world is quickly going to hell in a handbasket. Questionable elections are underway. People are walking around, armed and angry in the streets. And to make matters worse, a highly contagious disease is ravaging the population. Some folks are recovering, though not all to their pre-illness state of health. But many others are not, and often they are buried with little ceremony up on the hill, just out of town. 

And then I wake up.

To escape the anxieties of election night, November 3, 2020, we binge-watched “Deadwood”. Timothy Olyphant’s Seth Bullock’s efforts to do right, at least most of the time, in opposition to Ian McShane’s Al Swearnegen’s greedy, cutthroat grasping is perhaps a morality play for our time. That’s right, I had been dreaming I was trapped in Deadwood in the late 1800’s rather than living in Kentucky in 2020.

In an effort to forget the current traumas of 2020—pandemic, election fears in the times of Trump, and confrontations between armed and angry people in the streets— the mud, blood, and liquor-soaked noir we’ve been streaming is not that much different than the reality we’ve been trying to escape.

The real-life events of the gold rush in the South Dakota Hills make a striking setting for Deadwood’s poetic, profane, and vulgar dialogue. If all four-letter words and derivates were eliminated, the script would be half as long. But that dialogue and setting, together with the portrayal of the human struggle for money and power produced an award-winning western drama that, to date, we had not gotten around to watching.

Despite the undisputed charms of Olyphant’s character and the opportunities to strike it rich in those South Dakota hills the claustrophobic Deadwood-dreams in which I found myself enveloped, are more nightmare than escape.

Later, having analyzed the available gender roles in the “Deadwood” episodes we’ve seen, my conscious mind concludes that limited opportunities for women may be the reason the thought of living in the actual town of Deadwood is so frightening. Per the series, it seems a woman in 1870’s South Dakota had few occupational choices: prostitute, supervisor of prostitutes, broom-pusher if crippled, or fine lady required to sit in her room and wait for a man to help and protect her.

With Calamity Jane as the exception. Of course, as a non-conventional-for-the-times woman, she was mocked and derided for dressing in sensible clothes, carrying a weapon to protect herself, and speaking as ruggedly as the men. An interesting side note, in real life, just as portrayed in the program, Jane was credited with nursing back to health many of those stricken by the plague of the day, smallpox.

Though there was not much room for gender equality some 150 years ago in the wild west, I have to wonder if there couldn’t have been a place for a woman to open a café or eatery that served decent coffee and nourishing meals. At least my dream-mind wondered that.

Despite these thoughts of possible entrepreneurial opportunities in the old west, in the morning I’m relieved to find myself in the year 2020. Who amongst us wakes with that thought these days?

Maybe we need to consider the progress we have made in the last century and a half. We may have a contagious, scary disease, but we also have modern medicine and science to help us limit the spread and the deaths until vaccines are available. Even though we have yet to find a vaccine against the coronavirus, amazing progress with gene-sequencing and trials is being made.

Many Americans and talking heads are arguing about counting all the ballots, or not counting all the ballots, depending on whether their candidate currently is leading, all lawful election ballots are still being counted in swing states. We also have government institutions at the federal, state, and local levels and do not live in a lawless territory where those guns actually would be necessary. And we have institutions and Constitutional norms to determine the election of our legally-chosen representatives.

A lot of healing of the divisions amongst us is still necessary. But we all are Americans, regardless of how we voted and we still have more in common than what divides us. Protecting each other from the virus, reviving our economy, and returning to a time where we can celebrate with our friends and loved ones in person are priorities, we should be able to jointly work for. We can emulate Olyphant’s Seth Bullock and try to do right by those who cross our paths and treat each other with respect. Surely, in 150 years we’ve come a ways from the wild west.