One of my favorite people urged me to watch the series Yellowstone, now in its third season. Skepticism in my heart knowing cowboys and Indians sounds very Maga friendly I endured the first two episodes. The third was supposed to be the charm but there was too little charm for us, my wife and I to continue. Spoiler Allert. I’m going to give away a couple of chestnuts.
Yellowstone is the name of the ranch that covers and area bigger “than the state of Rhode Island” someone’s dialogue discloses. We meet the widower rancher and his four children one of whom will have to be avenged before the first episode is over. The Avenging will be between Cowboys and Indians as a two way street. It follows a fight over a heard of cows only in the modern day that have strayed on Res land and are now claimed by an as yet generic Indian Tribe rich on the casino profits from the people who drive hundreds of miles to nowhere to gamble away their money. If it hadn’t been for the crazy Idaho family that rustled up a bunch of allies with guns to keep the feds off the federal land they treated as their own personal cattle land the first episodes battle would have seemed asinine. But maybe not anymore.
The drop dead gorgeous daughter hates horses but runs a corporate board and her bedroom like a Machiavelli and is the bitch that every red blooded American boy can’t wait to see reduced to the tears her testosterone battering personality deserves to shed. One well groomed attorney brother is in the thick of Montana politics in the capital and thus well positioned to aid in hiding bodies from inquiring minds. The youngest son is a tumbleweed married into the generic Indians with a elementary school teacher wife and a mixed race son he keeps away from his laconic but imperious father. He’s a warrior who kills a warrior from his new tribe who happens in soap opera heaven to be his brother-in-law which tests him when his wife says she will love him no matter what secrets he shares with her.
Oh yeah, A dozen linemen scared of a wild horse hire him to tame a horse that is singlehandedly keeping them form their work hire this son who works a breathtaking miracle one minute followed by a dim witted attempt to pull up a tree stump in the middle of nowhere for no reason and to do it with a tiny, ancient rattle trap museum piece tractor that of course falls to pieces. This pisses him off and he fills a five gallon pail with some volatile liquid and blows the stump to kingdom come as well as caring the bejesus out of a wife taking a shower. But, hokey smokes, he finds a beautifully laid out dinosaur skeleton laid out like in a museum despite the fragile fossils lying intact after a couple tons of earth lying above them are blasted to the moon.
The US Senator is a slinky beautiful babe. The attorney son tells his sister who tells him his Dad will never except him as gay smiles and calls himself celibate. The Indian Chief who he says grew up thinking he was “mexican” because his parents told him at least he wouldn’t be hated like he would be if people knew he was Indian…..Latest news is that ICE is sending latinos not Indians to the El Salvador’s Amazon warehouse of a prison so I have no idea who is giving the screen writers their ideas.
There are quite a number of other eye rolls but I’ll leave with a little blasphemy that pissed both my seminary trained wife who has just given two sermons to local schools and me an agnostic who read the Old Testament to better understand todays Republicans after coming back from an eye opening visit to the Jerusalem and a dinner with Benjamin Netanyahu before he was upping the SS retaliation against Dutch and French resistance with ten to one killings with carpet bombing of Palestinians leading to 40 to one payback.
So the avenging, horse taming, Indian marrying, son left evidence of his execution style murder for investigators to find and for the celibate brother to hear about from the Governor’s office because, of course, if things aren’t covered up right there will be hell to pay.
There is a religious investigator who will report the truth because he honors his God. The Rancher has an ace up his sleeve. The local generic pastor/priest of his church also has the true believer investigator in his church. To honor whatever mysterious favor he owed the rancher he delivers a sermon that offended the hell out of me but that given the paucity of knowledge Magaites seem to have about a church that used to sing “He’s got the whole world in his hands” suggesting that all the world are our neighbors… The sermon say the ninth commandment doesn’t mean this at all. Neighbors are not the whole world, They are not the Indians who’s arrogant Mexican Chief wants to screw the rancher. No God wants us to stick by our own kind – our real neighbors. And the screen writer show the troubled investigator taking this blasphemy in as though his conscience has been troubling because he’s about to make life difficult for the community’s leading citizen who is clearly more his neighbor than the Indian who had a bullet in his head execution style.
I won’t be giving Yellowstone a third chance to charm me. There are too many less offensive alternatives for me to binge watch.
I have a column to crank out. This doesn’t merit any proofreading