[In its last season, Ozark goes beyond family drama. It critiques
the insidious ways that capitalism and political power work in America
and the self-interested choices elites make to keep climbing the
ladder.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

WAS OZARK ACTUALLY ABOUT THE CLINTONS?  
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Ryan Zickgraf
May 17, 2022
Jacobin
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_ In its last season, Ozark goes beyond family drama. It critiques
the insidious ways that capitalism and political power work in America
and the self-interested choices elites make to keep climbing the
ladder. _

Jason Bateman and Laura Linney as Marty and Wendy Byrde in Ozark. ,
(Netflix)

 

YES, THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Netflix’s _Ozark_ was pulpy fun in its first seasons, but early on
it suffered from a déjà vu problem. Too often, it felt like a
serious version of Jason Bateman’s previous work in _Arrested
Development_ or a sweaty _Breaking Bad_ retread, one that had hit
the road and migrated eastward from the high desert of the Southwest
to the rugged hills of the Bible Belt.

Like Walter White, _Ozark_’s Marty Byrde is an intelligent but
selfish patriarch who drags his family into the moral muck of the
illegal drug trade while trying to convince himself — and everyone
else —that the ends justify the bloody means.

But by_ Ozark_’s just-released final season, the show had evolved
into something more than a neo-noir about a once ordinary
upper-middle-class family that became key players in a Mexican drug
cartel. As the Byrde clan grows in wealth and political stature, the
familial drama takes a backseat to the societal kind — one that
critiques the insidious ways that capitalism and political power work
in America and the self-interested choices that elites make to keep
climbing the ladder.

In fact, after watching that gut punch of a series finale, I’m
convinced that the show was secretly a fictionalized version of the
rise of the Democratic Party’s royal family — the Clintons.

The Clintons Rebooted

That’s not to say that_ Ozark_ is like the novel _Primary
Colors_, the 1996 roman à clef more than loosely based on Bill
Clinton’s bullshit-heavy
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presidential campaign. The Byrdes’ story is more reminiscent of the
Clintons’ early years — the sordid stuff from their days in
Arkansas that has all but evaporated from the American consciousness.

Some of the commonalities are biographical. Bill and Hillary Clinton
moved to the southern part of the Ozarks in Fayetteville, Arkansas,
after graduating from Yale Law School in the mid-’70s. The Byrdes
are white-collar Democrats who hail from Chicago, where Hillary was
born.

Wendy is depicted as growing up in a religious, working-class family
in a small town in North Carolina, where an alcoholic and abusive
father scarred her. Likewise, Bill Clinton’s mother lived with
modest means in a small town in Arkansas and married Roger Clinton, a
car dealer, an abusive alcoholic. Both Bill Clinton and Wendy Byrde
are striving meritocrats that have fled their humble beginnings on
their ascension to American greatness.

Hell, it’s theoretically possible that Wendy crossed paths with the
Clintons in _Ozark_‘s imaginary world. In Chicago, she was a former
political operative for several Illinois state politicians and worked
for Barack Obama’s second state legislature campaign. Marty Byrde
worked as a financial consultant. His firm’s involvement in a
Mexican drug lord’s finances prompts the power couple and their two
teenage children to move to the remote Lake Ozark area of Missouri.

As_ Ozark_ progresses, the Byrdes’ plan to build a criminal empire
involves gobbling up more local businesses and real estate to launder
dirty money — ranging from a funeral home, a strip club, too, and
ultimately a riverboat casino. At first, the Byrdes’ motivations are
about self-preservation, considering that the cartel threatens to kill
them if they stop laundering.

But Wendy’s involvement in the cartel’s work changes their
calculations. She has personal political ambitions to become a king or
a kingmaker — in Missouri and beyond — despite their ill-gotten
gains. The cartel money opens doors, and she begins meddling in
regional politics to secure more deals and make sure the authorities
either don’t know where the bodies of those who’ve crossed the
cartel are buried or are paid enough not to care.

In season four, she even starts a foundation as a framework to build
her political reach. As the Clintons know, foundations are a tool of
tax evasion and a way for rich people to morally launder their greed
and misdeeds.

“This is America. No one cares where your fortune comes from,” she
tells her son, Jonah. “In two election cycles, it’s going to be
some myth at some cocktail party.”

State of Scandal

Wendy Byrde might as well have been referring to our collective
amnesia about the Clintons.

Many of us only have a vague notion of their scandals. You might
remember many times when “gate” was attached as a suffix —
Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewatergate — but mostly just know about
Monica Lewinsky and the various sex scandals. What’s forgotten is
how the Clintons were breaking bad in the southern region of the
Ozarks a generation ago in ways strikingly similar to their TV
counterparts.

Like the Byrdes, they quickly got involved in local politics and
financial chicanery. In 1978, Hillary, a corporate lawyer who served
on the boards of two big Arkansas companies, Walmart and TCBY (The
Country’s Best Yogurt), invested $1,000 in cattle futures
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quickly rocketed to the moon to the tune of $100,000, all while Tyson
Foods benefited from Bill’s turn as governor.

And then there’s Whitewater, the morass of a land deal that a
1992 _Washington Post_ headline described
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“COUPLE’S ‘MOST CONFUSING’ DEAL INVOLVED REAL ESTATE IN
OZARKS.” In 1978, the Clintons and their friends James and Susan
McDougal bought land in the Ozarks for $203,000 of borrowed money and
divided the land into forty-two lots to sell as pricey vacation home
sites. “If Reaganomics works at all, Whitewater could become the
Western Hemisphere’s Mecca,” Hillary wrote
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James McDougal in 1981.

But just like Reaganomics, Whitewater flopped big time. Yet the
McDougals ended up taking the fall
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all of the shady financial dealings behind it. The Clintons came out
of the Whitewater controversy relatively unscathed.

What about the drugs, you ask?

In 1986, federal drug charges of cocaine dealing were filed
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Arkansas investment bankers and Roger Clinton, Bill’s infamous
brother. One of them was a bond dealer and racehorse owner named Dan
Lasater, who was a friend of the Clintons, one who Bill called a
“substantial supporter of mine.” Lasatar had loaned Roger $8,000
to cover his cocaine debts
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Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel.

Then there’s Barry Seal, the drug smuggler turned DEA informant, who
allegedly had ties to Lasater and flew weapons from Mena, Arkansas, to
the contras in Nicaragua and brought back millions of dollars of
cocaine and heroin. According to multiple sources, including two books
written by journalists, it was a conspiracy that the CIA, Oliver
North, and Clinton were all involved with.

Eyewitness testimony from a former member of then governor Clinton’s
Arkansas security detail confirmed it. He claimed that he had
participated in secret flights originating from Mena in 1984, during
which M-16 guns were exchanged with the Nicaraguan contras for
cocaine, and that Clinton himself was involved.

Much of the mainstream press dismissed reports
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Mena as part of what the Clintons called “a vast right-wing
conspiracy,” but it was a group of progressive students at the
University of Arkansas that formed the Arkansas Committee to examine
the Mena operation. Later, a probe by IRS and Arkansas State Police
investigators into Mena got covered up, according to William Duncan
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bring the matter to light.

Ironically enough, even the 2017 movie about Mena and Seal’s
smuggling adventures starring Tom Cruise was censored
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But in 2020, the FBI unsealed (heavily redacted) documents that
confirmed that Seal used the Mena airport for “smuggling activity”
from late 1980 until March 1984.

It’s no wonder that the Clinton administration’s deputy secretary
of the Treasury, Roger Altman, wrote in his diary, “HRC doesn’t
want [the independent counsel] poking into 20 years of public life in
Arkansas.”

Those twenty years are full of sex, drugs, and corruption. All
that’s missing from _Ozark _is the first part of the equation. If
only HBO had picked it up.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan Zickgraf is an Alabama-based journalist and is the editor
of Third Rail Mag.

 

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