PETER S. FOSL
Here in Kentucky, we love our families, and we’re devoted to them . . . most of the time. Season Two of Justified (the whole series, really) presents an extended meditation on family, though the kinds of families it portrays aren’t exactly what you would call ideal.
The season’s narrative begins (“Moonshine War”) with a father’s failed attempt to protect his daughter, when Walt McCready makes the fatal error of calling the police to keep convicted child molester James Earl Dean away from Loretta (though, come to think of it, that phone call is what ultimately saves her from Dean).
The second episode (“The Life Inside”) tells the story of parents selling their child for cash and liberty. We get to know Rachel’s family and its history of violence in “For Blood or Money,” when her brother in-law (who was responsible for her sister’s death) demonstrates in rather vivid ways what’s wrong with the principle that you should do everything you can for your children. At the end of that episode, Rachel, Tim, and Raylan, sit down to share a bottle of Kentucky bourbon along with stories about how messed up each of their families is. (Art presides from outside their circle. He is in a sense the father of their little, substitute marshal family, perhaps the only family any of them have at the moment.)
“Blaze of Glory” shows us, in Frank Reasoner—great name—an old bank robber prepared to desert his loving wife for a last score—a man, that is, who puts money before family. “The Spoil” explores the downside of families exacting their own brand of justice, when the relatives of a man killed by illegally dumped “spoil” seek retribution against the government and the companies that treat them as spoil, too. Each of these episodes, you’ve probably also noticed, prefigure wrongs the Bennett family will commit and suffer.
This Sho’ Ain’t The Cosby Show
At the center of it all in Season Two is the Bennett clan—Mags, Doyle, Dickie, and Coover—ensconced in fictional Bennett, Kentucky, somewhere in Harlan County, not too far from real-world Evarts, where Raylan played baseball for the high school team. Mags is that kind of strong woman we encounter in our commonwealth, if not exactly a steel magnolia, still not one to be underestimated, smart enough to lead her family alone after the men wander off or die, and strong enough to handle steel, when necessary, as it too often seems to be in Justified’s Harlan County. (I love Doyle’s response to Raylan telling him that Loretta’s got a gun; Doyle says in reply, “Who dun’t?”)
In the wake of her husband’s death, Mags has become the family matriarchal monarch, raising her sons, providing for their future, serving up her homemade apple pie—sometimes, on special occasions, even in her fancy killer glassware. At the end of the day, however, she screws it all up.
Mags falls into irredeemable despair, rightly so, when she learns from Raylan that Doyle’s been killed in the Season Two finale (“Bloody Harlan”). But, really, the blow had already been struck when upon confronting the depth of Loretta’s anger and grief, Mags confesses that she and no one else is to blame for Walt’s death, that she—not Coover the brute and not hobbled Dickie—is the one who set the whole sorry train in motion that ends up extinguishing her vain dream of family enrichment and liberation from the travails of criminal life. It took a strong Kentucky woman in the making, more than US Marshall Tim Gutterson’s sharp shooting, to undo Mags Bennett.
The series is, in fact, littered with dysfunctional families. To be honest, families seem so often associated with criminality and dysfunction in Justified that I’ve come to think the show is advancing some kind of symbolic criticism of family per se. There’s the once-and-perhaps-again mighty Crowders, lords of Kentucky weed, petty crime, and white supremacy. There’s the Limehouse clan, hunkered down and bristling with guns like Switzerland under siege in its mountain holler, the kind of ancient homeplace that’s so important to Kentucky families. There’s the ill-fated St. Cyr siblings, too, wanderers and seekers among Appalachia’s lost, longing, and hustling faithful, holding on—barely—through the cunning realism of another steely woman, Cassie St. Cyr. There’s the Crowes, poison to all they touch, without a bottom to how low they’ll sink, though still willing to honor obligations and emotional bonds of family.
Then there’s the Givens bunch. It’s almost too much to call them a family, which Raylan seems to understand in his refusal to call Arlo by any paternal form of address. Raylan says it pretty well in “For Blood or Money”: “I never bore any illusions that my family was the Cosbys.” Ties do certainly bind the Givenses, however, and they’re all drawn back through a shared family history to the beautiful old homestead, to the family cemetery, and to the many family feuds and wounds that alternatively weave them together and tear them apart, despite anyone’s better judgment. As Raylan’s Aunt Helen knowingly declaims (“The Life Inside”) with the type of dry sarcasm that makes the show (and real life Kentucky) so fun: “That would be a neat trick, escapin’ the past.”
I’m a Business Woman, Mr. Augustine
Let’s start with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). He argues that the earliest families were matrilineal, meaning that people identified the family to which they belonged according to who their mother was, possibly because of the biological fact that it’s easier to identify a mother’s children in conjunction with the social fact that society’s material resources were in ancient times shared communally.
The establishment of private property changed things. Fathers wished to know to whom they were passing on the property they had acquired so that it only went to their own offspring: and therefore they needed to control sexual relationships. There are, as I’m sure you’ve already considered, some downsides to this strategy, especially for women. “Mother-right,” says Engels, was overthrown in favor of “father right”; and monogamy was established, at least for females. For reason of coerced monogamy alone, relationships came to be no longer entirely free. It’s not only the institution of monogamy that undermines freedom, however. More fundamentally it’s the relationship to wealth underwriting monogamy that’s the culprit, according to Engels.
Under the property-based system, whether to enter, maintain, or end a relationship comes to include calculations concerned with how the decision will affect individuals’ access to wealth and ability to transfer it to their offspring. Not only do matrimonial and other family relationships become infected by economic interest, but pseudo-personal relationships that are essentially just economic—such as prostitution—also develop. In brief, money (or, anyway, private property) messes up a good thing. Ending private property might, therefore, Engels speculates, reverse the pathology, making it possible to reconstitute sexual and family relationships as matters of free choice and affection alone—perhaps even ending monogamy. Engels writes in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884):
We are now approaching a social revolution, in which the old economic foundations of monogamy will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose through the concentration of considerable wealth in one hand—a man’s hand—and from the endeavor to bequeath this wealth to the children of this man to the exclusion of all others. This necessitated monogamy on the woman’s, but not on the man’s part. Hence this monogamy of women in no way hindered open or secret polygamy of men. Now, the impending social revolution will reduce this whole care of inheritance to a minimum by changing at least the overwhelming part of permanent and inheritable wealth—the means of production—into social property. Since monogamy was caused by economic conditions, will it disappear when these causes are abolished?
Mags is no man, but she’s stepped into and performs the patriarch’s role of acquiring and bequeathing wealth as the central purpose of family life for her and for the younger males she is grooming. Mags wants the Black Pike deal to go through not simply for her own gain but so she can pass on the wealth to Doyle and her grandchildren through him. The name ‘Black Pike’ is an amalgamation of Black Mountain, which runs through Harlan County and at 4,145 feet is the highest mountain in Kentucky, and Pike County, north of Harlan. There are companies that wish to mine Black Mountain by mountaintop removal, effectively destroying Kentucky’s highest peak. So far, environmental regulations related to the impact of doing so on watercourses have prevented it.
Coover is a lost cause to Mags, and she just doesn’t seem to like Dickie very much. She cuts him off (“Debts and Accounts”) after Coover’s death because in her mind he’s betrayed the family by giving up to Raylan Coover’s location after he abducted Loretta: “You went against the family,” she says, “and not for the first time.” “You shoulda taken it!” she screams at Dickie when he tries to excuse himself by invoking Raylan’s torturing him as an excuse. (Frankly, though, I think she would have cut him off anyway.) Nevertheless, despite the betrayal, the weakness, and the general disdain, Mags does make sure Dickie will have a steady and ample stream of income from Harlan’s pot industry. She may hate “those damn boys” (“The Life Inside”); she may physically and emotionally abuse them; she may control them and subordinate them. But she won’t leave them without wealth. Dickie’s inheritance ain’t the Black Pike money, sure, but it does amount to a whole lotta productive capital that he can control and exploit.
Indeed, marijuana production in Kentucky really is an industry. Many have estimated pot to be Kentucky’s largest cash crop—bigger than tobacco, corn, or soy. For example, in Francis X. Clines’s 2001 report titled “Kentucky Journal: Fighting Appalachia’s Top Cash Crop, Marijuana” in the New York Times, he notes that “Winter is easing in the rolling hills and hamlet hollows, and all the prespring indications are that marijuana will have another big year and remain this state’s No. 1 cash crop, just as it continues prime in West Virginia and Tennessee.” Marijuana is “Bigger than tobacco,” says Roy E. Sturgill, director of the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, “the only one of the nation’s thirty-one federal antidrug regions focused on marijuana.” The estimated value of the crop in 2001 was over $4 billion; and it’s a sustainable resource to boot. Maybe Dickie actually got the better deal.
As for the rest, Ellstin Limehouse seems to be amassing capital, too, in order to pass it on to his offspring and his larger family’s offspring. He’s not only apart and neutral like Switzerland; he’s loaded like a Swiss bank. It’s one of the many markers of Arlo’s failure as a parent, at least within the modern matrix of private property, that he shows no signs of storing up wealth to pass on to Raylan. Yes, Raylan might accidentally inherit the homestead along with any other money Arlo’s squirreled away, but there’s never any talk about it, even when Black Pike moves to purchase rights to the family property, or after Arlo and Helen’s deaths. The depth of contempt between Raylan and Arlo suggests that that’s just not gonna happen. Like Bo Crowder, Arlo inverts the business of patriarchy by willing to see his son harmed and even killed before sacrificing his own wealth—if he has any wealth.
Johnny, Hurt My Son
Yet even the putrid human patriarchs of the Crowder and Givens clans are not without moral conflict when it comes to sacrificing their sons. Bo signals as much when, in a scene that really cracks me up, he says to Boyd just before running him off and annihilating his followers: “Who am I kiddin’? I can’t hurt my own son. . . . Johnny, hurt my son.” And, to be honest, we must acknowledge that both Boyd and Raylan do bite the hand that would feed them through lines of patriarchal inheritance.
Boyd places his duties to God and others above his obligations to the patriarchal property-accumulation project. He even goes so far as to repudiate his father publicly in the diatribe he delivers before the congregation during Sunday church services when he declares:
We must take the high road of righteousness, even if it means walking, walking and leaving our own flesh and blood behind. Because there is no greater piety, brothers and sisters, than the love of God. (Congregation: Amen.) Amen to that! He is my one true father. There is no other. There is no other, Preacher. There’s no other.
Raylan more or less does the same by repeatedly making it very clear that his allegiance to the law supersedes any lingering loyalty to Arlo. If I were to psychoanalyze Raylan, I’d be tempted to say, in fact, that his devotion to the law is so deep because his flesh and blood father has failed him so profoundly. For Raylan, the law (and Art Mullens) substitutes for his natural father. The law is for Raylan the Big Father, the good father—not only the father he occasionally defies, resists, and sneaks around, as if he were a rebellious son, but also the father he forever wishes to please.
This explains in part why Raylan is so relentless and determined to capture and put down criminals. Every criminal he kills or locks up behind bars is simultaneously a representative of his natural father and an offering to his substitute father, Big Daddy Law, the father who might love him because his biological father never loved him enough. That much is confirmed when Arlo asks Raylan, “How long have you known?” after Raylan reveals he’s onto Arlo’s scheme to turn him over to Bo in the finale of Season One, and Raylan responds as if Arlo’s remark were a different, more global question about their relationship: “Truthfully Arlo, I guess I’ve always known” (“Bulletville”). The screwed-up son of an unloving, screwed-up father, Raylan both loves and hates the law, both tries to please and affront it, both lives outside of it and under it.
If my analysis of Raylan’s character and family is right, then Raylan really isn’t justified in much of his conduct. His capturing and killing criminals is motivated by his personal family demons, even his desires. Social worker girlfriend Alison Brander from Penhook, Virginia, near Roanoke, has got it right when she wryly observes about Raylan: “You are a hero, Raylan. . . . I can tell you’re a man that would run into a burning building without blinkin’ an eye. Thing is I . . . I think you’re the one setting the fire” (“Kill the Messenger”).
Alison herself suffers through a complicated relationship with families. Her very job involves using the power of the state to intervene coercively in dysfunctional families, in a sense to protect them from themselves and to help them do as well as possible in family life. What she’s seen in that work, however, has left her with a rather dim view of the institution, part of which she reveals in recounting the story of a man who threatened her with a tire iron when she stepped in to save his abused son from him. He would have likely killed her, had it not been for the police, and in the midst of the attack he was, in Alison’s words, “saying there’s no way I’m gonna break up his family. . . . All ’cause of this boy he had chained to a radiator. Worse than you’d treat your worst enemy. . . . Family” (“Over the Mountain”).
Boyd has family issues, too, especially daddy issues. For the Boyd of Season One (as you know, Boyd is protean), a loving and just God substitutes for an unloving and unjust human father. The death of Bo and the loss of Boyd’s flock at Bo’s hands (well, his henchmen’s hands), however, mark the killing of both fathers for Boyd. He becomes afterwards, fatherless and self-reliant, ready and willing, unlike Raylan, to become a father himself, even placing himself in his own father’s role by assuming Bo’s work of defending the Harlan drug trade against the interference of religious do-gooders (the St. Cyr’s) and the police.
In another curious repetition of criminal family dynamics, Boyd’s experience mirrors Mags’s downfall when his aspiration to accumulate ill-gotten wealth for his own family and get out of crime is disrupted by the law (motivated by Lee Paxton’s scheming) with Ava’s arrest. Boyd’s Engels-like revenge appropriately finds satisfaction not only in killing Lee and Sherriff Mooney but also by using Lee’s mortuary business, his wealth engine, perversely to destroy his stature and patriarchal legacy; Boyd even uses his own family wealth to undermine the familial bonds between Lee and his wife, Mara.
As if following Engels’s template, the wealth Boyd uses to destroy the corrupt Paxton family and to free his wife Ava (almost) from Big Daddy Law serves to advance the economic-patriarchal order of Hayes Workman’s apparently more deserving family. Workman, whom Boyd bribes to kill Mooney, “has the black lung and ain’t long for this world, won’t even see a trial. But in six months’ time his wife and his boys will have enough money to give them a leg up in this life” (“Over the Mountain”).
Engels wouldn’t at all be surprised that wife-figure Eva becomes entwined, as if symbolically, in the sex trade; she is “a businesswoman, Mr. Augustine,” I suppose, but of a rather distinctive kind (“Decoy”). Although the show has become fascinated with the drama of her love affair with Boyd, readers of Engels will remember that her decision to abandon the anti-crime principles she had insisted upon when Boyd moved in with her and instead join Boyd in a life of crime comes at precisely the same moment Boyd secures and offers her the capital (from the mine robbery) to pay down her mortgage (“Cottonmouth”)—a moment bordering on prostitution itself.
Winona’s relationship with Gary, yes, quelle surprise!, falls apart when he mortgages their largest and most symbolic asset (their home) to speculate on a riskier asset (a thoroughbred racehorse). Just like the failed real estate scheme that ruined their relationship in Season One, it’s a risk he’s willing to take in order to acquire even more capital (“Save My Love”). Arlo’s plan to get hold of capital by robbing Dickie with Boyd leads to the end of his marriage, too—and in the worst possible way. Helen, uncorrupted by money, dies in an act of virtue, protecting Arlo from a man seeking retribution for the disruption of his own capacity to accumulate wealth.
The manner of Helen’s death, like Bo’s reluctance to hurt Boyd, reminds us that even in the worst of families, not everything is about money. In a plot line that parallels and contrasts Boyd and Ava, Raylan and Winona put back the money, the capital, that Winona takes from the evidence storeroom, even though it could have secured Winona’s own vulnerable mortgage. On the other hand, perhaps, in addition to Raylan’s failure to balance the civil against the familial, their unwillingness to secure capital is in part why, in the show’s logic, Raylan and Winona can’t establish a family of their own. In a capitalist society, Engels tells us, families need capital, but capital messes families up.
Hegel: What if Mama Found Out?
Engels, like his philosophical partner Karl Marx, studied Hegel, and the basis of Engels’s interpretation of the family is not only, as the full title of his book indicates, Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) but also Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820).
Hegel does not object to private property, but he agrees that family should not exist for the sake of property. Property is an instrument to serve moral purposes, and at the family’s core should be love not financial interest. “The family, as the immediate substantiality of spirit, has as its determination the spirit’s feeling of its own unity, which is love” (§158).
Hegel argues that the family exists for the formation of its members, in particular children, to raise and educate them as free, self-sufficient, rational, and moral beings. Family is a rather strange institution in this, because its success paradoxically entails its self-destruction (§181). Once the children are successfully raised, they leave the family and go on to start new families of their own. The very word “family,” in fact, derives from a Latin word that means “dependents,” but properly raised children should not be living in their parents’ basements very far into adulthood. When things run properly, they cease to be dependents and leave the nest.
The ethical dissolution of the family consists in the fact that the children are brought up to become free personalities and, when they have come of age, are recognized as legal persons and as capable both of holding free property of their own and of founding their own families.
The Bennetts fail on both counts—love and independence. I don’t know about you, but while I think parents deserve ongoing respect and in many ways deference, those Bennett boys seem a bit too old to be living so thoroughly under their mother’s thumb. It may be proper to submit quietly, even as an adult, to a tongue lashing from a parent, but a ball-peen hammer hand smashing of the sort to which Coover gives himself over seems more than just a little too far. On the one hand (oops!), Dickie and Coover live like teenagers, like college students languishing in a filthy crash pad, getting high on weed, playing video games, messing around with exotic pets like “Charlie” (I love Coover’s reaction when Ava puts Charlie down—“The Spoil”). But, on the other hand, you know very well that Mags orchestrated things that way, that she wants it that way. Yeah, Doyle is a bit more of a big boy, with his job and family and all; but he never shows much independence either, really, as if like his brothers he’s never formed an entirely autonomous self.
Then there’s the lousy moral development all the Bennett children exhibit. Not only has the Bennett family failed to form independent beings. It has also failed to cultivate their moral characters. Coover’s a violent brute. Dickie’s a vengeful sadist. But it’s no wonder. I doubt Coover’s hearing his mother run him down while he stands outside the room where she fawns over Loretta was the first time he’d suffered something like that.
Mags loves her fantasy of a daughter—a daughter she thought she could simply take in the same way she takes money and power and consumer goods—more than her own sons; and I’m sure they know it. Doyle seems utterly lawless and, in fact, seems to find his happiest moments among those actually opposed to lawfulness. I pick that up (don’t you?) in the scene where Doyle for a moment thinks he’s learned that Raylan is a dirty cop, too, after Dewey Crowe impersonates him to steal the oxy (“I of the Storm”). It’s clear in any case, where the Bennett boys got those traits—their parents.
Mags suffers from all of her sons’ moral shortcomings herself, though not from their rank stupidity—she can be as lawless, cruel, and vindictive as any of them. It’s chilling to see her go from pleading, distraught mother of a dead son when she asks Raylan to see Coover’s corpse (“Brother’s Keeper”) to cold, hard, mean crime boss after he says no. In these distortions of motherhood and moral virtue, she generally seems to have almost perfectly realized Engels’s and Hegel’s nightmare family.
Now, what about Raylan? Raylan didn’t acquire his moral compass from his father (except maybe negatively), though he probably did gain something from his family, anyway, through his mother and through Aunt Helen—contrasting maternal figures to Mags. US nineteenth-century political ideology crafted the concept of “republican motherhood,” echoing not only the Hegelian idea that the function of families is to reproduce moral beings but also, frankly, the nineteenth century’s wish to segregate women into the separate sphere of female domesticity. Republican mothers were to raise citizens, not only free rational beings but also political participants ready to take on the civic responsibilities of citizenship; and republican mothers were to do that only from inside the domestic sphere of the household. It may be a good thing that Mags refused the segregating objective of republican motherhood, but it’s not a good thing that she failed to raise citizens devoted to more than their own family’s wealth and power.
That families are vehicles for ethical development and that they dissolve (both when they’ve completed their work and also when the free beings that compose them just decide to split) points to the reason it’s important that there be something beyond families to hold society together. The Bennett-Givens feud demonstrates pretty well why a stronger and more rational third party is needed to manage conflict among families; and the failure of both Walt McCready and Mags Bennett to protect Loretta from the predations of James Earl Dean illustrates why families need support of the sort law enforcement provides in protecting their children (it takes government in the form of Rachel and Raylan, as well as a foster home, to save Loretta). With apologies to home schoolers, even that both Raylan and Dickie attended public high schools signals that families often need support in the business of educating their children, too.
Aristotle understood this in the famous argument he sets out in Book I of the Politics, where he argues that in a sense the state (or anyway, the polis or Greek city state) is “prior” to the family—that the political is prior to the familial. Aristotle understood that the state is not prior in a historical sense. He knew full well that historically speaking families developed from older human forms of association—male-female sex and pair bonding and, perhaps troublingly, master-slave relationships. But the political is prior to families in the sense that it’s logically prior or, let’s say, necessary for their completeness and well-being. That’s because human beings can’t fully develop, for Aristotle, in the context of families alone and because families are themselves dependent upon the state or society for both security and for the resources they need to flourish. Human mental capacities require intellectual, artistic, scientific, and legal goods of the sort only found in the wider social order to realize themselves most fully; and because of the contingencies to which family is subject in its self-destruction and fragility, families require something more stable, rational and self-sufficient to secure those goods—that something is civil society and the state.
This establishes a sometimes conflicting set of duties for people. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was turned over to the authorities by his brother, David. David Kaczynski understood that no matter how much he loved his brother and would hate to see him locked up, he had duties to others and to the larger civil society, too—duties the Bennetts don’t recognize. Raylan, on the other hand, won’t stay with Winona or quit his job in service to the civil order, no matter what damage it does to his relationship to her, to their child, or to Arlo and Hellen.
Acknowledging this conflict between families and the larger social order and taking note of the way people too often conduct themselves like the Bennetts in relation to other people and civil society has led thinkers such as Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh to conclude in their 1999 work titled The Anti-Social Family that the family is at least in our historical moment an anti-social institution. Excessive focus on the family can dilute our wider social duties, and the ideology that everything from education to health care should be performed principally by families weakens our commitment to providing those services through the civic order. That’s why people who favor home schooling often support cutting social services generally.
Plato argued that the state has responsibility to educate and care for children, but he also understood that family can be a threat to the state, that familial interests often stand in opposition to state and civil society’s interests. Family conflict leads to faction, and family often entices officials to use the state to enrich themselves privately. Family members, unrestrained, are liable to give preferential appointments to other family members rather than to those most qualified to hold office.
So, Plato has Socrates in the Republic argue that in the ideal society the rulers should not have personal families. Among the philosopher kings and queens that are to run Plato’s ideal society, sexual unions are arranged for the sake of eugenics, children are to be raised in common, not knowing whom their biological parents are, and children will call all adults of their ruling class “mother” and “father.” It’s not so much in this ideal society, as people often say about Plato, that the rulers have no family or that Plato abolishes the family; it’s that the family and the political community become for the rulers the same. In a way, that’s how it is for Raylan.
People like Doyle and Mags are just the opposite of Plato. They reject the claims and interests of the civil society—or at least they subordinate them to the claims and interests of their own family—and they use the state (Doyle as county chief of police) for their own gain. That’s part of the inversion of the proper Platonic and Aristotelian relationship of the family to the state the show presents and criticizes. It’s an inversion symbolized by the twisted implications of moonshine (illegal and deadly) apple pie (nurturing domesticity).
Not only do the Bennetts break the law by engaging in murder, threats, assault, fraud, and illegal drug sales to advance their power and wealth. Mags morally violates her membership in the larger civic community in the run up to her Black Pike deal, putting on a helluva deceptive performance at the community meeting where people assemble to discuss the project (as well as at the party the next day), a performance that silenced even the remarkable Carol Johnson, a woman of considerable persuasive powers of her own and in her smooth-talking sexuality a symbol of corporate money as an almost irresistible object of desire.
Nut Jobs Living in Caves and Tree Houses
But hold on a moment here. I hope you’ll forgive me if, as a Kentuckian, I make a number of observations about the way the Black Pike deal is portrayed by the Yankee story editor Benjamin Cavell and, I suppose, the many other non-Kentucky writers and producers associated with the show. (Benjamin Cavell, by the way, is the son of the fine Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell, which may in part explain the many interesting philosophical dimensions of the show. Now, Stanley Cavell was raised in the south—in Atlanta. But I’m suspecting, though I could be wrong, that Benjamin has spent very little time in Harlan County.)
I remember having dinner with Christopher Hitchens in Lexington (not Massachusetts) at a French restaurant when he came to Transylvania University in 2005 to lecture and teach. Hitchens was, as you may know, a rather devoted smoker. Now, Lexington enjoys a smoking ban in restaurants; but soon after we sat down and Hitchens was of course recognized, a small, elegant ashtray appeared beside him on the white linen-draped table. Hitchens incredulously asked the waiter how this was possible, exclaiming that people in Washington DC, where he lived, would never tolerate such an offensive flouting of the law. The knowing young man, decked out smartly in classic Parisian waiter garb, casually responded in a beautiful Kentucky accent: “Well, I guess, Mr. Hitchens, we here in Kentucky just have a different relationship with the law.” (Hitchens also loved about Kentucky that drug stores commonly—and legally—devote an entire aisle of shelves to whiskey and other spirits. They are drugs, after all.)
It’s true that Kentuckians’ relationship with the law can be complex. That complexity suggests some Kentucky fried qualifications are in order to Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Engels’s ideas. Philosophical inversions of the relationship between family and state of the sort we witness in the Bennetts are not unknown in Kentucky. Guns and proclamations of gun rights, in defense of family, are ubiquitous (Google “Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot” if you don’t believe me). Gay marriage is prohibited to all (except in federal matters) on the basis of the perceived threat it poses to some forms of family. One hears from elected officials in state and federal government, such as US Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, all kinds of anti-government clichés, clichés repeated by many of those whose families nevertheless depend upon government assistance or government supported jobs, like those at and around Fort Campbell and Fort Knox or in agriculture.
Kentuckians, however, have not had an entirely positive history at the hands of government (it’s the law, after all, that would rape Ava and keeps her locked up), and they know perfectly well the smug contempt borne against them by outsiders, coasters mostly, who refer to them with terms like: hillbillies, inbreds, shoeless, pellagra-infected, backward, white trash stuck in a flyover state. (I’ve heard all of these spoken, and they find their way into characters in the show from Detroit, Canada, and elsewhere—even from the upper classes of Kentucky.)
Many poor eastern Kentuckians derive from Scottish and Irish ancestry. They were driven from their ancestral lands during the Clearances of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries by wealthy absentee lords, factors, and others with attitudes similar to those of the contemptuous on the scene today—looking to make a buck off sheep and “improved” agriculture at the expense of their lives. After they crossed the woods (trans-sylvania) with Daniel Boone into Ken-tuck-ee, they of course turned it into the “dark and bloody ground” through murder and clearances of their own, stealing Cherokee and other Native American lands as they pressed westward. Hounded and burned out of their homes, they resettled in the new highlands of North America’s east coast, cheap land where they thought they could be left alone.
Some of those lands in Western West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky became the site of resistance to additional mistreatment at the hands of a new class of powerful, often better educated trouble during the early twentieth century’s mine wars—including the Harlan County War of the early 1930s and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, the bloodiest armed insurrection in the US since the Civil War. One of the significant early uses of the phrase “redneck” dates from this period, apparently from the red bandanas members of the multi-racial miners’ army wore as its miner-soldiers fought for better pay, safer working conditions, and the right to organize unions.
The practice of wearing red around the neck, in fact, fits well with the history of the region’s people, as it seems to have been used back in eastern Kentuckians’ ancestral Scotland, too, by Covenanters in the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640, where once again they struggled against upper class and episcopal rule in religious and other affairs. (So, with this proud history, why is “redneck” a derogatory term?) The government (the Big Law) as usual took the side of the companies in most of the mine wars, with the US Army Air Corps flying recon for the company forces who actually bombed the Blair Mountain rebels from the air. US Army troops were dispatched to suppress Appalachia’s restive poor. Until the 2011 bombings of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and Anwar al-Awlaki, this was perhaps the only time the federal government has intentionally played a role in bombing its own citizens, and it remains the only time the US government participated in the bombing of its own citizens on US territory—though perhaps you might count the City of Philadelphia bombing the MOVE house in 1985.
A bit more recently, although the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill garnered sustained national attention, to no one’s surprise relative indifference prevailed in the wake of the 2000 Martin County Coal Slurry Spill, a disaster thirty times larger than its Alaskan predecessor, even though it happened just a few hundred miles from Washington DC. At the time, the Martin County spill was the biggest environmental disaster east of the Mississippi, affecting some of the world’s richest woodlands as well as thousands of people along hundreds of miles of river in the Ohio Valley watershed. The federal government first fined the subsidaries of multi-billion dollar Massey Energy, a measly $110,000 for the release, possibly through the influence of another Kentucky family, Senator Mitch McConnell’s. The penalty was later reduced in the govrernment’s administrative courts to just $5,600.
Justified seems to acknowledge this sorry alignment between government and those who would exploit the families of Harlan County when Raylan, like so many government agents before him, is assigned to protect Black Pike Coal Company’s Carol Johnson and pantless Judge Mike Reardon. Alternatively, neither Raylan nor any other government official does anything to help the dead environmentalist’s family, a Kentucky family for whom no one on the show has a kind word but whom the script has Judge Reardon call “nut jobs.”
I wonder what names were hurled at Dennis and Cindy Davidson when they sought legal redress after their three-year-old son Jeremy was crushed to death in 2005 under “fly rock” that smashed through the wall of his bedroom at 2:30 A.M. near the Kentucky-Virginia border. A&G Coal was fined by the government $15,000 for the transgression—about, I suppose, what in many people’s minds killing poor mountain people (nut job families) warrants. The Davidsons have sued for over $20 million. Let’s hope they don’t get Judge Reardon, but US marshals will protect whomever they get, though probably not marshals as good looking as Raylan Givens. Judge Reardon’s courtroom portrays, I think, one of the truest moments in the series, truer I suspect than the show’s makers understand. So, you might forgive or take just a bit of pause before you criticize Kentuckians for their backward anti-government attitudes and hostility to outsiders.
Justifying Families
I have stood on the ridge of Black Mountain near the town of Lynch in Harlan County and peered into Virginia from a place quite different from MLK’s “mountaintop” towards the Davidson home. I’ve watched there mining companies blow the “overburden” off the tops of mountains nearby; and I’ve pondered some of the issues raised about Kentucky and its families by the big corporate television show, Justified.
People know about Jeremy Davidson, and the Martin County disaster; they know about the deadly 1972 Buffalo Creek flood and scores of other, smaller incidents like it. Fewer of the people in Eastern Kentucky are, however, as opposed to the mining operations as the liberal fantasy of a community meeting portrayed in Justified (“The Spoil”) might lead one to believe. People need jobs to support their families; they live amidst an enthusiastic and well-funded public relations campaign aimed at linking their local identities to coal mining; and many hold fast to belief in the beneficence of coal.
I’ve walked up Pine Mountain, too, through Harlan’s near-virgin Blanton Forest, among its ghostly sandstone caves (suitable, Judge Reardon, in a pinch for habitation), cascading streams, mountaintop bogs, and a diversity of flora and fauna that exceeds the Amazon’s (the river basin, not the web site).
I’ve walked among the wreckage of the village of Dayhoit, in Harlan County near White Star Hollow, and its Superfund site, where PCBs, trichloroethylene, volatile organic compounds, and grease were poured into the ground water adjacent to the Cumberland River. I pondered all the while there what happened in that forsaken place to “nut job” activist Teri Blanton’s family—an intimidating coal company truck ripping up her yard by driving circles around her house for a full day after she appealed to the government to protect her children from the pollution to which they were being exposed.
I think, too, about the Givenses, the Crowders, the Limehouses, and Bennetts. They remind me that the very idea of family presents a challenge to moral and political philosophy, because living in families means privileging family members above others and approaching the rest of society sometimes in an ambiguous, cautious way. That’s because the interests of families aren’t always congruent with those of the larger society or civil society, and the rest of society often fails families. We devote more care, time, and money to our own children than to others—even when we know other children may deserve or need it more—and few of us think it would be a good idea to do otherwise. By the way, that unequal treatment of persons by families is warranted is argued persuasively through the thought experiment of a society called “Equim,” where everyone is treated absolutely equally (family members treated the same as acquaintances and strangers) in the book edited by Diane Tietjen Meyers, Kenneth Kipnis, and Cornelius Murphy, Kindred Matters: Rethinking the Philosophy of the Family.
But family obligations sometimes do supersede duties to the larger, embedding society. The ambiguity in our duties is difficult to navigate, especially when historical experience teaches us that rather than protecting us, promoting our general welfare, and nourishing us so that can we develop our human potential, the larger social order (especially its commercial and political institutions) often works against us in league with those who would carelessly exploit and demean us.
Justified reminds us of what Hegel understood, that families and the unequal treatment they require are crucial for the formation of human selves, for creating and reproducing free, rational, and morally sound people. Justified also illustrates Plato and Aristotle’s insight that the state and the larger social order are necessary in relation to families and that sometimes duties to the civil order trump obligations to family.
But part of the genius of Justified is that it also understands something these venerable philosophers seem to have missed but that Kentuckians have long experienced. Justified also understands that those wider duties to the civil order become destabilized and sometimes lose their binding force when the economic and civil institutions of society fail people.
Families are not enough; but in a corrupt and incompetent world populated by oppressive and exploitive institutions sometimes family seems like all you’ve got, the best you’ve got. The social-political challenge with which, then, Justified presents us is to figure out whether it’s still possible for families to flourish in cooperation with the civil and commercial dimensions of our society—and do so within the law.
The moral challenge of the show is, therefore, still a bit deeper. Justified challenges us to consider whether, in the circumstances in which we live today, families—corrupted and exploited by the demands of wealth and treated as spoil even by the political order that should be helping them—can flourish at all, in any morally justifiable way.