Odds and Ends 2.27.26

So what is Deadwood about? First, it’s worth recognizing the deceptive simplicity of this question. Deadwood is an audaciously ambitious project. It is trying to be about what it means to be a human being in the modern world; it is, therefore, in a sense, about everything.

That said, it is reasonable to argue that, from the most elevated vantage, Deadwood, despite its capaciousness, is making a specific argument about human nature and human society. And you must understand that argument to understand why Hearst is so important — and so disturbing.

Now, I do not here claim any special powers of divination. Among its many seemingly impossible feats, Deadwood is at once unusually entertaining and exceptionally didactic. If the show were a politician, we’d call it “on message.”

Moreover, Milch, through interviews and his own writings about the show, has been more than happy to explain — with a kind of intellectual rigor that reminds us that he was a star pupil at Yale and spent time as a professor — what he was trying to say in Deadwood, and why.¹

The show is an explanation for why human beings, despite their often selfish and anarchic nature, manage so consistently, and of their own volition, to form together into something we call “society” or “civilization,” something better — something nobler, something more beautiful — than the sum of its parts.

This decade has seen the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in violent conflicts: in the Tigray War in Ethiopia, in civil war in Myanmar, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and most recently in the RSF massacres in the Sudanese city of Al-Fashir, to name just a few. Yet the largest act of mass murder of this decade, and of this century so far, was not perpetrated by militaries or militias, but by the world's richest man in Washington D.C.'s Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Elon Musk's rampage through America's foreign aid programs has largely been forgotten in recent months. Musk went back to his private endeavors, having comically fallen from Donald Trump's good graces into one of his most spectacular periods of X posting madness. The administration has chugged along, ramping up its abuse and serving up fresh scandals by the day. But the termination of American foreign aid has not been forgotten in the developing world, where the sudden absence of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has left death and destruction.

By our count, Ras al-‘Ain is the eighty-sixth village destroyed in the last two to three years. No one knows for sure how many brainwashed, hate-driven, sadistic settlers are now active in Area C. Many of them are adolescents trained to hurt and kill; most of them hope for an apocalypse that will herald the arrival of the Messiah. Netanyahu, in his usual mendacious style, recently claimed in an interview that there are only about seventy of them. He knows better than that. The real number is closer to many hundreds, maybe more; they are not subject to punishment or restraint of any kind. If the government wanted to stop these pogroms and the entire project of ethnic cleansing, the army could do so in a few days. So far there’s no sign of the Messiah. However one looks at the situation, we are witnessing a major moral disaster resulting from numberless crimes against humanity. And then there is Gaza.

The army in the territories, like the police, like the civil service, indeed like most of the institutions of Israeli democracy, has been corrupted by Netanyahu’s government. Officers and soldiers at all levels are firmly bonded with the bloodthirsty settlers. The Supreme Court is fighting for its survival in the face of overt statements by the prime minister, as well as several of his ministers, that they will not honor its rulings. Put simply, the government is now the number one enemy of the Israeli state as we have known it.

To understand the story’s enduring power, you must go back to the source. For some readers, Brontë’s novel is the interminable story of two terrible people determined to destroy everybody around them. (It often features in the answers to social media prompts about the worst book you had to read for school or classic novels you hate.) For others, the novel is one of the greatest love stories of all time. The secret to its enduring strangeness, though, is that it has always been both.

“Wuthering Heights” is a story in which love is an all-encompassing obsession that destroys anything in its path. It is also a story about how love, sustained through generations, eventually redeems that destruction. These aspects of love, the novel tells us, are both fundamental; one is not more truly love than the other. Love is not the foundation of a shared life, or a self-contained (if tragic) story — it is something more real than reality, both intrinsic to and incompatible with human life.