As of now, I have never seen one episode of the popular television series Yellowstone.  I’ve been to Yellowstone, the actual place, but I have never watched the show.  My wife and I have been looking for an opportunity to take the time to watch it, but as of 2.20.24, have not yet done so.  I’m sure we will at some point.  The main series and offshoots look pretty good.  I think they are great for what America has been going through lately, but honestly, they are too liberal for me, from what I do know of them.  The producers and actors, from my vantage point, are money-hating hippies from Hollywood, where the plot lines are all about the big, powerful money people beating up on the poor ranchers, which are classic Western themes.  A lot of good is talked about in these kinds of shows regarding the value of property ownership and family values, and those are the parts of the show that match the public interest.  But for me, they are all a bunch of Liz Cheney-supporting filmmakers who have built the Republican Party into the lame duck that it has been for far too many years until Trump has come along to bring an expectation of victory to party politics that it didn’t have before.  Classic westerns, and these modern ones, never really developed a proper relationship with money and power that is best reflected in American culture, and that has been frustrating to me, which is why, after all this time, and given the content, I have not yet watched the show.  It comes up a lot because of how I dress, and people think the show inspired me.  In reality, it’s likely the other way around. 

Since I was in the fourth grade, I have dressed the way I do, with a cowboy hat and boots just about everywhere I go.  I’ve always worn a hat of some kind, especially cowboy-style hats.  Many times, I go into public dressed in full gunslinger mode, complete with a poncho.  Especially in my 20s, I dressed ready for a gunfight everywhere because, in a lot of ways, every day was a gunfight.  I walked around the Kenwood Mall in Cincinnati dressed like I was off the set of A Fistful of Dollars, which is the Sergio Leone western with Clint Eastwood that I always loved because those movies embraced capitalism in a positive way, and I always liked them over the American westerns that had lots of socialism sprinkled into them by Hollywood.  And I always wanted to make it clear to those around me that I was not like them.  The cowboy hats were a clear signal that I rejected most of the premises they had built their lives around and that, for me, like a robe in the priesthood, my hat was a sign of an embrace of capitalism and a culture of property ownership and a rejection of European civilization as servitude to kings and aristocrats.  For me, the cowboy hat means freedom from those tyrants and a rejection of their desire to control our every move.  As things started getting more complicated socially in the 4^th grade, I started wearing cowboy hats to let everyone know where I stood, which is still my practice.  I seldom ever leave my house without wearing a cowboy hat of some kind.  It’s certainly not something I have done lately because of the success of the show Yellowstone, as many have asked me. 

Several times a week people tell me I would love Yellowstone because of the character of Rip, who they say I remind them of, because of things I do in my community.  I’ve seen a few interviews from the Yellowstone cast that tell me that a train station is involved and that sometimes those kinds of eliminations of the enemy are part of living life.  When people won’t leave you alone or the people you tend to associate with, you can’t play patty cake with them.  Bad people don’t understand anything else.  So I get it.  And because of these constant comparisons, it has generated interest in me to watch it at some point.  But my wife and I don’t have that kind of time to watch television.  I watch a lot of news, and we watch documentaries, but my lifestyle is just too busy to watch a streaming series.  I read around three books a week and we do a lot of family activities.  I have to pick what I do for leisure pretty carefully.  A few years ago, when Kevin Costner, who stars in Yellowstone, came out in support of Liz Cheney over President Trump, and the creators of the show rejected the idea that Yellowstone was “red state” entertainment, I put the show on the back burner.  I’m not particularly keen on the whole Indian subplot.  I see all references to “Native Americans” as a communist attempt to degrade American culture by putting the nature-worshipping heathens of a primitive culture on a pedestal they don’t deserve.  I have studied Indian cultures and am not very keen on them.  They were collectivists and best represented by mass group behavior.  I have never been much of a fan of Kevin Costner movies.  He has made some decent westerns, my favorite with him was Silverado.  My least favorite is Dances with Wolves.  I don’t like movies that put down Western expansion at the expense of the Indians.

I like Teddy Roosevelt’s opinion on Western expansion and think it was one of the most important things human beings have ever done in the history of the world.  Many of the Hollywood ideas about Western expansion came from European migrants who brought all their socialism with them, and they found in the Indians someone they could identify with.  And at the core of Yellowstone, from what I do know about it, is that kind of reverence.   For me, a good western is where a gunslinging hero makes a lot of money, wins a beautiful wife, and kills all the bad guys.  But these Yellowstone kinds of filmmakers like to cry about victimization and how the all-powerful rich people and their government pawns destroy the little guy, and the little guy has to fight back, always on their heels and looking over their shoulder.   I can’t relate to that mentality.  My favorite westerns were movies like the Dollars trilogy, where Clint Eastwood never worried about being outnumbered or out financed.  He always won his gunfights and nobody was better than him.  And that carried over into other movies he did, like High Plains Drifter, one of my absolute favorites, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Pale Rider.  You can keep The Unforgiven.  It was only good in the last five minutes.  The rest of the movie was a hippie diatribe from a bunch of Hollywood losers.  So, with all that in mind, you can see why Yellowstone still hasn’t been watched in my house.  They may dress the way I do, but that is more of them coming into fashion than me being inspired by it.  They are copying people they have seen in the world, and they put them in a television show.  But there is a lot they don’t understand about American culture, even if what they do get is something that starving Americans wanting to see something good about their country cling to.  I like seeing shows like Yellowstone being successful.  But for me, they are still being made by mind-numbing hippies who have a lot to learn.  Money is not evil; it reveals evil in people who would otherwise conceal their nature from the judgments of the sane.    

Rich Hoffman

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