On Tuesday November 14th, an actual United States Senator, Markwayne Mullin (R, OK) challenged another man to a fistfight in the middle of a Senate hearing. The latter, teamsters president Sean O’Brien, had apparently insulted Mullins in the course of an extended social media feud, taunting that he would welcome a physical altercation with the senator “anyplace, anytime cowboy!”.
What is most shocking to me about this is how un-shocked the public seems to be. In the context of our nation’s increasingly hostile, extremely polarized cultural climate, wherein every tweetable public confrontation is instantly documented and amplified through social media, this is, apparently, just another passing titillation. It is even more disturbing that Mullins has entirely escaped punishment. Why is this man not being censured? Instead, he has shamelessly defended his action by claiming to represent “Oklahoma values”. The senator has furthermore compared himself to 7th US president Andrew Jackson, who famously killed several of his personal offenders in duels. Mullins has even wistfully referred to the days when canings happened in the Senate. “Every now and then” he said, “you need to get punched in the face.” (This is a slogan that is as unintelligible as it is loutish. Are we to infer that the speaker himself also needs to get punched in the face every now and then?) Apparently, Mullins does not believe that social mores do or even should evolve over the course of centuries. President Jackson also owned dozens of slaves; would Mullins like to bring back the social acceptability of that good old-fashioned American practice as well?
The Oklahoma senator isn’t the only public figure who has advocated, threatened or used physical violence against another man in public. In fact, that very same day in Washington DC congressman Kevin McCarthy allegedly elbowed his fellow Republican Tim Burchett in the back as payback for voting to oust him from the speakership. Former president Donald Trump deserves some blame for ushering in this new era of normalized physical violence when, at a rally in 2016, he urged his supporters to “knock the crap” out of protestors. Almost 3 years after the violent attack on our capitol, Trump continues to promote violent rhetoric. One of the most high-profile offenders to date is Will Smith, whose unhinged slap attack on Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars reverberated around the world. (At least Smith has been held to account by the entertainment industry). Even the feuding billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have recently been goading each other to settle their personal grievances in a “cage match”, though that disgracefully proposed encounter has thankfully not yet been consummated.
Mullins, however, deserves more scrutiny and reprimand than he seems to be receiving. For one thing, he occupies one of the highest public offices in government, and his cultural responsibility to the American people far outweighs whatever trigger-happy state values he claims to represent. Shouldn’t the office of United States senator carry at least a modicum of dignity and restraint? (Clearly, it does not). The public psyche is already beset by perpetual war, numbingly frequent mass murders and a sociopolitical atmosphere fraught with escalating animosity. If we cannot count on our highest government officials to comport themselves non-violently, what does that say about our culture? What message does that send to the boys and young men of this country?
Mullins’ utter lack of shame is outrageous. Will Smith’s apologies may have come late and awkwardly qualified, but they came nonetheless. By contrast, Mullins seems downright proud of what he did, and his constituents might well be, too. Granted, he didn’t actually strike anyone, but the senator made it clear that he was ready to throw down. If his unrepentantly pugnacious attitude feels strangely familiar, it may be because Mullins looks and behaves like a character plucked from the most popular TV show in the country – Yellowstone.
Taylor Sheridan’s flagship series has spawned a massively successful franchise, now including two prequels (1883 and 1923) and, arguably, one other similar Western (Lawmen: Bass Reeves). Throughout all of his shows, regardless of historical timeline, Sheridan offers a consistently hyper-violent portrayal of masculinity. In his universe it is brute force alone, whether meted out through gunshot, hanging, full-fledged bar brawl or (most frequently) a bare-knuckled fistfight that settles conflicts of any kind between men (and, stretching credulity, sometimes even women).
Yellowstone, like Senator Mullins, is defiantly proud of its conflation of masculinity and violence. While its prequels, which both dramatically portray the legendarily lethal brutality of the “wild west”, effectively offer narrative rationale for how and why the men of Yellowstone have inherited their outlandish propensity for violence from their frontiersmen ancestors, the show itself plainly glorifies this conception of manliness. Far from condemning it, Yellowstone doesn’t even seem interested in challenging it, or at least analyzing it (which, for instance, the comparably violent series Ray Donovan accomplished triumphantly.)
Sheridan is undeniably brilliant at crafting compelling television, but I have wondered if he isn’t doing a grave disservice to our cultural evolution by playing into men’s most primal urge to firehose all of our rage into physical violence. A world that can be broken down into dominance hierarchies governed by force is, in its bleak simplicity, somehow appealing to that ancient caveman instinct within us. And whether it’s the testosterone, the biological imperative to protect, socialized predisposition or all of the above, we men do carry an awareness of the possibility of violence around with us. When, for example, I am walking down a city street with my child, some part of me is physically ready to do whatever is necessary to protect him. When I walk into a bar, I am aware of the possibility of some drunk guy becoming hostile, and so on.
Nevertheless, most men will never have to throw a punch during their entire lives. The vast majority of situations that could potentially culminate in physical violence can be de-escalated through verbal communication or disengagement. The rotten core of the Yellowstone philosophy is the premise that strong men fight and the strongest men win. The moral truth of the real world is, however, that weak men resort to violence while strong men abstain from it. Men who become violent, whether they are abusing their domestic partner, trying to assert their dominance, settling an argument or just venting their unbridled fury on another driver, are the weakest among us. Unable to temper their tempers, to assert themselves intellectually, to verbally persuade another person of their point, to withstand the animal temptation of rage, they succumb to the most animalistic of all human behaviors. No good ever comes of it. No real power is asserted, no lesson is taught nor learned, nobody’s mind is changed, no score is settled.
If, as a species, we have any hope of diverting our evolutionary trajectory off its present course towards eventual self-annihilation, then our task as men is to learn to transcend this bestial proclivity towards violence and find other ways to sort things out. We have to do this individually, collectively and systemically. If we can watch a show like Yellowstone and ingest it as a cautionary tale about what our world is on the verge of becoming, then it will have served a noble purpose. But if guys like Mullins are seeing themselves mirrored in and vindicated by it, we all have another thing coming.
In the real world, men are struggling to keep up with a cultural evolution that seems to be outpacing us. The best of us are striving to embrace, explore and express the broader palette of human emotions which, until recently, were deemed “feminine”: vulnerability, fear, doubt, empathy, sensitivity, sorrow and so on. The Yellowstone world-view would have men channel all of those challenging feelings into the one acceptably “masculine” emotion – anger – and then use the latter as fuel for feuds and fisticuffs. Maybe the secret of the show’s success is that watching all that play out on TV is providing men with a safe, vicarious way to experience the release of that caveman instinct, but it’s not the world that I, for one, wish to inhabit. I therefore desperately hope this kind of programming isn’t programming the minds of men.
Practice is habit-forming. Is it any wonder that of all US Senators, the one who nearly started a fistfight in a formal hearing is a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter? It may not be a binary choice, but ultimately every man has the potential to contribute, through the cultivation of his own character, either to a world that is devolving towards the violent and endless war for dominance that is Yellowstone, or to one in which we imperfect human beings gradually and laboriously raise ourselves up to ever nobler, more peaceful ways of being. The most consequential power that a man (or a woman) wields, greater even than the power of intelligence, is the power of love. Through love, everything that is unachievable through violence becomes possible – forgiveness, healing, reconciliation, compromise, mutual understanding, and peace.
I would love to challenge Senator Mullins (or Taylor Sheridan, for that matter) to a constructive, heartfelt conversation about this…any place, any time, Cowboy.
Previously Published on substack
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