"...grievous abominations and disorder..."

"Deadwood" continues to explode the myth of the West and explore how societies are established if they are originally populated by characters not especially given to cooperation and structure. It is, without a doubt, the smartest thing on television these days, and one of the most beautifully filmed.

So, we'd better hope Senator Ted Stevens doesn't read Frank Rich's column from over the weekend.

This is why "Deadwood" could not be better timed. It reminds us of who we are and where we came from, and that even indecency is part of an American's birthright. It also, if inadvertently, illuminates the most insidious underpinnings of today's decency police by further reminding us that the same people who want to stamp out entertainment like "Deadwood" also want to rewrite American history (and, when they can, the news) according to their dictates of moral and political correctness. They won't tolerate an honest account of the real Deadwood in a classroom or museum any more than they will its fictionalized representation on HBO.

Lynne Cheney has taken to writing and promoting triumphalist children's history books that, as she said on Fox News recently, offer "an uncynical approach to our nation and to our national story." (So much for her own out-of-print "Deadwood"-esque novel of 1981, "Sisters," with its evocation of lesbian passions on the frontier.) That's her right. But when her taste is enforced as government policy that's another matter. The vice president's wife has used her current political clout, as The Los Angeles Times uncovered last fall, to quietly squelch a Department of Education history curriculum pamphlet for parents that didn't fit her political agenda. It's no coincidence that Senator Stevens attacked the Smithsonian Institution in the 1990's when it mounted an exhibit deromanticizing the old West, "Deadwood"-style, by calling attention to the indignities visited on women, Indians and the environment.

I do disagree with one statement of Rich's: "At a certain point political correctness on the right becomes indistinguishable from that of the left." He bases that on a censored song that Robin Williams had planned to perform on the Oscars, in which he sings "Pocahantas is addicted to craps." Rich implies that the line, from a song intended to make fun of Dobsen's attack on SpongeBob Square Pants, was axed because of PC concern for native Indians. Maybe. Though it seems just as likely that is was over concern for moneyed casino interests, not the Indians themselves. Furthermore, there is much to distinguish what is PC for the right versus the left. For all of its faults, the PC "movement" was developed out of recognition that some language common in the dominant culture can be and is used to marginalize other cultures. PC for the right is a reaction to that; it is now the dominant culture rising up to say that it shouldn't be laughed at or insulted either. That's why Christianity is always "under threat in this country" these days, and why we can't have Smithsonian displays showing the plight of Indians at the hands of white settlers.

UPDATED to fix the first paragraph's logic...sort of.