Class Struggle in Appalachia

& New Jersey, Montana . . .

I’ve been bingeing through the TV series ‘Justified’ (warning: spoilers ahead) for the second time. It’s based on a book by Elmore Leonard, whom I’ve gotten into, late in life. There were slim pickings for TV otherwise, though my favorite series, ‘Slow Horses,’ is back up and running now, as is a sci-fi series I like called ‘Dark Matter.’

A writer I like, Ishmael Reed, took to denouncing the celebrated TV series “The Wire” as suffused with “ghetto porn.” I think there was more to it than that, but a similar charge could be made against ‘Justified,’ though instead of African-Americans the targets are poor whites in Kentucky. You don’t see that too often.

The lead character, Olyphant, is a U.S. Marshal native to the area, known and respected by all, and thus made to mediate between the indigenous criminal community and its enemies. The latter are mostly the ‘Dixie Mafia’ based in Frankfort, KY, and their masters in Detroit. The marshals’ business is mostly chasing fugitives, who have already been determined to be guilty of something. The local marshals’ office would ordinarily have little to do with law enforcement, though the Olyphant character tends to get tangled up in it. The sheriffs tend to be criminals themselves, and the state police are not much involved in the local industries of drug trafficking, gambling, and prostitution.

I have never been to Kentucky. I did drive to Tennessee once. The highlight of that trip was the sight of a young black bear ambling across the highway.

The local people in ‘Justified,’ which includes the marshals, are repeatedly subject to ethnic slurs from outsiders, which they take in good humor for the sake of getting to whatever business is in prospect. Usually their wits enable them to get the upper hand. At the same time, they are able to exploit their local knowledge and connections to get the better of the carpetbagging goons from the city.

The best reason to watch ‘Justified’ was Walton Goggins (right, above), though with this return trip through the show I’ve grown to appreciate a little more the performance of Timothy Olyphant (left). Both have gone on to other achievements, the current ones being ‘Fallout’ starring Goggins and ‘Alien:Earth’ (Olyphant). Both are very well done.

Goggins’s performance features his ability to deliver classic, epic rants exploiting his knowledge of scripture or just sheer eloquence.

A thing that grabbed me early in ‘Justified’ was the anti-capitalist white working class rage displayed by Goggins. (The class hatred in ‘Justified’ goes in both directions.) At first this is expressed in the form of adherence to national socialism and anti-semitism, but the Goggins character is smart enough to move on from that, which for him was half a con anyway. What he is really about, as Olyphant says, is robbing banks and ‘blowing shit up.’ (His time as a coal miner gave him expertise in explosives.) From there he becomes a Christian lay preacher and shortly gives that up as well, to return to this natural vocation: crime.

As in ‘The Sopranos’ or ‘Yellowstone,’ (the latter I liked to call “The Sopranos with cows”) there is enough good in the lead characters in ‘Justified’ to make them interesting, notwithstanding their brutal, criminal habits. It occurs to me that the head criminal in the show, Goggins, is more restrained by specks of honor and morality than, say, Tony Soprano or John Dutton. The latter two usually take up their homicidal needs without regret, though Dutton (Costner in ‘Yellowstone’) spends a lot of time trying to justify himself. As I’ve written before, the Dutton character, stands in for his creator Taylor Sheridan, who is full of shit. Tony Soprano never apologizes.

The series title, incidentally, is a reference to the frequency of the lead character, Olyphant, a dead shot and quick-draw artist, gunning down his adversaries. What I liked about these encounters was the habit of the Olyphant character, a U.S. Marshal, to usually allow his prospective victims a non-violent exit, provided they followed his orders, to either submit to arrest or get out of town. He never draws first, but he is always faster and deadly accurate. All the shootings are thereby ‘justified.’ By contrast, in my vague memories of ‘Kojak’ and my refreshed memories of the Dirty Harry movies, fatal justice was usually delivered quickly, sometimes with enjoyment.

For all the class resentment in the story, there is not the slightest hint of political rebellion in evidence. Given the world of the show in which one is immersed, that seems entirely natural and logical.