Michael Gillespie
7/31/2026
"Land is the stage of society; men are the actors. And man must ever adjust his performances to conform to the land situation. The evolution of the mores is always dependent on the land-man ratio. This is true notwithstanding the difficulty of its discernment. Man’s land technique, or maintenance arts, plus his standards of living, equal the sum total of the folkways, the mores."
"A corporation is a pile of money to which
a number of people have sold their moral allegiance."
-Wendell Berry
The Paramount TV series Landman, which glamorizes and glorifies the Texas oil industry with unadulterated panache, illustrates the desperate efforts of the Epstein class to sell itself to mass audiences while ignoring, obscuring, excusing, distracting attention from and normalizing if not legitimizing its manifold crimes here at home and abroad.
In the first season of Landman (2024), the bad guys are an international drug cartel (crudely representative of the global South) who threaten M-Tex Oil, the largest independent oil outfit in West Texas, and its hard-working managers and employees. The battle between the vicious and heavily armed cartel enforcers and the oil field men is violent with deadly consequences.
In the second season of Landman (2025), the hard-working and hard-pressed protagonist, M-Tex landman Tommy Norris (played by Billy Bob Thornton), in order to create his own oil corporation after he's been fired from his VP position by his longtime employer, happily becomes the business partner of Danny "Gallino" Morrell (played by Andy Garcia), the Cuban-American head of the international drug cartel whose gun thugs tortured and tried to kill him. Morrell presents publicly as a legitimate financial investor. Along the way we are introduced to the most dysfunctional family, including the most attractive and vapid mother and daughter duo imaginable, ever to be promoted by the Deep State as heroic role models of a new American dream. Vapid that is, until Angela Norris (played by Ari Lauter) drops off daughter, Ainsley Norris (played by Michelle Randolph), a freshman cheerleader at Texas Christian University, an institution that apparently still has some standards but nevertheless needed some publicity. Cooper Norris, Tommy and Angela's son and Ainsley's brother (played by Jacob Lofland) seems to be a genuinely decent young man, sensitive, hard-working, honest and boyishly naive. Yet, late at night when he discovers a man attempting to rape the young woman he plans to marry, he beats the middle-aged drunk senseless with is bare hands. The drunk later dies at the hospital, whereupon Midland police detectives attempt to hang a murder charge on Cooper, but M-Tex's lawyer, Rebecca Falcone (played by Kayla Wallace), and Tommy are having none of that in two scenes of many that make for memorable TV. Landman's oil patch is the wild West but with gangsters, lawyers, guns, money, billionaires and would-be billionaires with ostentatious, tawdry and unsustainable lifestyles.
.jpg)
Landman's intersecting story lines are held together by a more or less constant stream of profanity, beautiful women, partial nudity, romance, sex, blasphemy, cynicism, dark humor, and at times cloying sentimentality punctuated frequently by violence including murders, shootings, beatings, deadly car and truck crashes, explosions, attempted rape, torture, various oil patch accidents and tragedies and now and then a home truth in pithy dialog delivered with the utmost sincerity. All of this is set against the sprawling backdrop of West Texas between Midland and Fort Worth featuring an impressive product placement index of luxury items presumably favored by oil patch billionaires: huge business jets including the Bombardier Global and the Gulfstream 400 as well as the smaller Beechcraft King Air (for remote airstrips with a short runway), Rolex watches, designer clothing and purses, expensive jewelry and a Bentley Continental GT sports car owned and driven by a beautiful, remarkably well-endowed, and aggressively exuberant except when angry blond bombshell and she is often angry, Tommy's ex-wife. Angela's eccentricities and plunging necklines featuring a diamond-encrusted gold cross plumb new depths of the meaning of objectification.
The star of the product placement show though is Tommy Norris's Ford F-350 Super Duty Crew Cab, the ever present M-Tex Oil work truck with aftermarket extras. M-Tex runs with a fleet of F-350s the interiors of which serve as mobile offices and cozy places for morning coffee, heart-to-heart talks, and the occasional blow job. Ford Motor Company hasn't produced trucks in Texas since 1970 but the state features massive truck distribution and commercial footprints, such as the Ford Distribution Center located in Carrollton, TX, and high-volume dealerships like Planet Ford Dallas.
Who can say how much money Ford forked over to get its products and that blue oval logo in front of big Landman audiences? Rotten Tomatoes 37 reviews give season one 78 percent positive and season two came in at 83 percent. Thornton has been nominated for three different Best Actor awards, and the 2026 season won the Satellite Award for best cast in a television series. That stacks up as a lot of eyeballs, so presumably Ford is getting its money's worth. The product placement fees help offset production costs. The Texas Film Commission serves as a clearinghouse and promoter for the state's entertainment industry. The state commission alongside the Fort Worth Film Commission "heavily supports and incentivizes the hit Paramount+ series Landman, a major economic driver created by Taylor Sheridan and Christian Wallace," says Google. So yeah, if you can believe Google, Landman is literally State propaganda made in Texas where going Deep has long been a petroleum industry specialty.
"In November 2024, it was reported that Shari Redstone would leave Paramount Global after the company completed its planned merger with Skydance Media. As previously announced, the merged entity will see David Ellison, founder of Skydance Media, assume the roles of chairman and CEO, while Jeff Shell, former CEO of NBCUniversal, will become president. In December 2024, before merger, Paramount consolidated its television and streaming units into one" (Wikipedia).
The acting, the "stars", those mentioned above and others including Demi Moore as Cami Miller, wife of the owner of M-Tex Oil, and Sam Elliott as Thomas "T. L." Norris, Tommy's father, all shine. The production values of Landman are top shelf by Hollywood standards, which greases the skids for American audiences accustomed to viewing and conditioned to suspend disbelief while enjoying realistic depictions of deadly and sadistic violence, profane and salacious dialog and many other kinds of loathsome, demoralizing and socially destabilizing excess. Such entertainment plays a significant role in the efforts of what some call the Deep State to shape and "control the narrative" produced for and made available to huge domestic audiences. These productions are fictional entertainment for the masses crafted to normalize official and private sector corruption, fraud, violent crime, militarism, war, torture and other expressions of depravity for profit and political purposes, while minimizing public concerns related to actual realities, horrors such as the wholesale slaughter of defenseless women and children in the on-going genocide in the Holy Land and the utterly disastrous and failed or failing resource (oil and gas mainly) wars against Russia in Ukraine and against Iran in the Persian Gulf region. There is no mention of any of that, nothing, in series one and two of Landman. These fantasies, violent fantasies replete with graphic depictions of gun violence, drug smuggling, sudden and violent death, burned and dismembered bodies, sex, blasphemy, exuberant criminality and wild excess fueled by alcohol and drugs including favorable mention if not outright promotion of addictive amphetamine and benzodiazepine product brand names, are created to influence those who can be manipulated by mass market entertainment (government subsidized propaganda) into believing that they are more comfortable and better off living in a heavily mediated bubble of glamorous, violent, profane and intoxicated entertainment industry unreality. Bread and circuses streaming, the Colosseum comes to the homeland of the American empire.
Given recent developments and current alternative media news about and the best-informed analysis of our government's perpetual war, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that production of season three of Landman, which had been approved by Paramount, was postponed. It probably doesn't surprise you if you have begun to comprehend the potential and increasingly likely ramifications of the foreign policy catastrophe the current occupant of the White House and those who have influence over him have conjured up. Do the major foreign policy blunders of two previous presidents who hailed from Texas, the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, not pale in comparison with the present war against Iran? And let's not forget the war in Ukraine and the Deep State's publicly stated strategy of breaking up Russia in order to cannibalize that country and extract its resources. Can you imagine trying to put lipstick on an on-going foreign policy catastrophe of such massive proportions? More to the point, perhaps, can you imagine supplying the explosion, heaven forbid, that inevitably brings catharsis or what passes for it at the end of such productions? Regarding season three, I'm thinking that Paramount's Landman crew, Taylor Sheridan's Landman crew, or whoever the heck is actually running the Deep State's department of culture has their work cut out for them.
Every author I've ever read who has studied and written about violent mass media product and the attendant socially-destabilizing criminality, from Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985); Barry Sanders (A is for Ox: Violence, Electronic Media, and the Silencing of the Written Word, 1994); Sissela Bok (Mayhem, 1998); Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano (Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, 1999); to Robert W. McChesney (Rich Media Poor Democracy, 1999, and Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for a Post-Capitalist Democracy, 2014) among others strongly suggests that glamorizing and glorifying violence for profit and political advantage in mass media is a road trip spiraling downward toward a disastrous a dead end. The body of relevant peer reviewed and published social science studies, thousands of them, well over half a century of research, is overwhelmingly persuasive.
On January 10, 1901, a well at Spindletop oil field in Beaumont, Texas
struck oil ("came in").
The Spindletop gusher blew for 9 days
at a rate estimated at 100,000 barrels of oil per day.
Gulf Oil and Texaco, now part of Chevron Corporation,
were formed to develop production at Spindletop.
The Spindletop discovery led the United States into the oil age.
(Wikipedia)
It's not too late to stop and consider rational alternatives including good faith diplomacy that might well lead to a brighter future for our grandchildren. It's not too late to change. But what do I know? I'm just a guy who grew up in the East Texas oil patch, learned a trade as an International Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Iron Ship Builders journeyman shipfitter in Bethlehem Steel's Beaumont Yard, the shipyard where the offshore oil drilling rig was invented. My first management position in marine construction was as a foreman for Cross and Associates on an inland waterway drill barge new construction job on the Sabine river in Orange, Texas, pushing a crew of about 30 shipfitters. During lunch one day, a flat-bottom fishing boat came flying around the bend in the river. There were four young women in the boat including the girl working the outboard motor throttle and tiller. When they got close to where we sat in the shade eating our sandwiches, one of my crew shouted "Show 'em!" and all four women did just that in unison as they raced by.
I was 11 years old when the James Commission rolled into town in 1960 to crack down on the corruption and vice. The biggest brothel, the Dixie Hotel on Crockett Street downtown, was sandwiched between the Pipefitters union local and the barber college where a haircut was 50 cents, four blocks from the Federal Building and five from City Hall and the Police Station. Entrepreneurial returning veterans of WWII's "greatest generation" stuffed their trauma deep and organized the entertainment: gambling, after hours liquor, prostitution, drugs, and every other kind of vice imaginable. The Dixie Mafia rotated young women through brothels in cities across the South, from Miami to New Orleans, Beaumont, Port Arthur, Galveston, Houston, La Grange, Austin, Midland, El Paso, Albuquerque, Phoenix and farther west. Texas was as crooked as a barrel of snakes. As Faulkner pointed out, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In the Hill Country they like to say that East Texans are the ones who were afraid to come out of the woods. The truth is that the West Texas oil patch had nothing on East Texas.
I worked in six different shipyards on the Gulf and North Atlantic coasts in the '70s and '80s. Four of those are no longer shipyards. Wall Street deindustrialized the USA. Working men damn sure didn't ship all the good paying industrial jobs to China and Mexico. Ronald Regan fronted for the cabal of rapacious well-heeled union-busting hedge-fund thieves who did that. By the way, in the riverbank scene in the final episode of season two of Landman, the purported M-Tex Oil offshore deep-water gas drilling rig being floated down the river toward the Gulf is actually a partially submerged (ballasted) shallow-water coastal drilling platform.
When the oil market went flat in the early '80s, the tide went out and left me and about 30 other Texas shipyard hands standing on a pier at the old Bethlehem Steel Yard in East Boston.
Boston Shipyard Corp.
Others went back to Texas. I went across the river and got myself into school. Starting with a Bible course taught by the wife of the vice president and general counsel of the university, I cherry-picked the Harvard Extension School and Summer School course catalogs for six years. I read voraciously in biography and autobiography while taking courses in English literature, psychology, expository writing (through-year), drama, screenwriting, Shakespeare (through-year), and the history of terrorism while working for the university. I fled to Europe in 1990 after my apartment and my office next door to HUPD and Security were burglarized and my phone was tapped. Upon my return to the States seven months later, I continued my studies. I completed my journalism degree at Iowa State University, a Carnegie One research insititution, where I was inducted a member of the National Honor Society in Journalism and Mass Communication, my only adademic honor.
I have never wanted to glamorize and glorify violence for profit. Too many of my friends died in Vietnam or came home and suffered for years with post traumatic stress, moral injury and physical disease before dying much too young. It's memories like those that I keep green.
https://www.verywellmind.com/coping-with-ptsd-2797536
"Militarism is autocratic and cruel—savage."
War is barbaric. Genocide is barbarism at its worst. We can do better.
"Present-day profit-motivated economics is doomed unless profit motives can be augmented by service motives. Ruthless competition based on narrow-minded self-interest is ultimately destructive of even those things which it seeks to maintain. Exclusive and self-serving profit motivation is incompatible with Christian ideals—much more incompatible with the teachings of Jesus."
_1870-1876%20(1).jpg)
"... Upon the impartiality, fairness, and integrity of its courts the endurance of a nation depends. Civil government is founded on justice, even as true religion is founded on mercy."
_1870-1876%20(1).jpg)
https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/298100
"Man and angel may or may not be reunited in eternal service, but wherever seraphic assignment may take them, the seraphim are always in communication with their former wards of the evolutionary worlds, the ascendant mortals of time. The intimate associations and the affectionate attachments of the realms of human origin are never forgotten nor ever completely severed.
In the eternal ages men and angels will cooperate in the divine service as they did in the career of time."
"Fear not. Your watchcare is superb. The Master himself takes note of your progress."
