MISS MANNERS AND THE MINING CAMP

The right to shock and appall (Frank Rich, International Herald Tribune, March 12th, 2005)

If you can see only one of the shows that he (Senator Ted Stevens) wants to banish or launder, let me recommend the series that probably has more four-letter words, with or without participles, than any in TV history. That would be "Deadwood" on HBO. Its linguistic gait befits its chapter of American history, the story of a gold-rush mining camp in the Dakota Territory of the late 1870s. "Deadwood" is the back story of a joke like "The Aristocrats" and of everything else that is joyously vulgar in American culture and that the new Puritans want to stamp out. It captures what freedom, by turns cruel and comic and exhilarating, looked and sounded like at full throttle in frontier America.

Its creator is David Milch, a former Yale fraternity brother of George W. Bush and the onetime protégé of Robert Penn Warren, whose 1946 novel "All the King's Men" upends bowdlerized fairy tales about American politics just as "Deadwood" dismantles Hollywood's old sanitized Westerns. As Milch says in an interview on the DVD of the first "Deadwood" season: "It's very well documented that the obscenity of the West was striking, and that the obscenity of mining camps was unbelievable." There was "a tremendous energy to the language," he adds, but the reason this language never surfaced in movie Westerns during the genre's heyday was the Hays production code. For some 30 years starting in 1934, Hollywood's self-censorship strictures kept even married couples in separate beds on screen. Today the United States is turning the clock back to the days of Hays.

This is why "Deadwood" could not be better timed. It reminds Americans that even indecency is part of an American's birthright. It also, if inadvertently, illuminates the most insidious underpinnings of today's decency police by further reminding us that the same people who want to stamp out entertainment like "Deadwood" also want to rewrite American history according to their dictates of moral and political correctness.

One wonders whether Mr. Rich also sees slavery, racism, child labor and prostitution, spousal abuse, lynching, illiteracy, anti-Semitism, community alcoholism and a host of other delights from the past as part of every American’s birthright. There was a time, back when it was informed by religion, that the liberal impulse grounded itself in the notion of moral improvement. Today, liberals would rather cherrypick through the more sordid details of history to find precedents to buttress their quest for decline.