I accidentally tripped on this link to the transcript of the audio blog of David Simon in the times. Being a HUGE fan of the TV show "the wire" I put it on at work. I really think there is a lot of stuff in this "Introduction to his new book" that is worth thinking about and discussing.
First the link.
What is mind boggling to me is how less popular "The Wire" was and is. It is by far the best thing I have ever seen on a screen. It makes you think, It makes you think hard about what is wrong with the cities and hence this country.
I would like to share some of the quotes from the blog hoping to have a discussion, and hopefully convert some of the kossacks in to wire-heads.
In my city, the brown fields and rotting piers and rusting factories are testament to an economy that shifted and then shifted again, rendering obsolete whole generations of union-wage workers and workers’ families. The cost to society is beyond calculation, not that anyone ever paused to calculate anything. Our economic and political leaders are dismissive of the horror, at points even flippant in their derision; Margaret Thatcher’s suggestion that there is no society to consider beyond the individual and his family speaks volumes in the clarity of its late-20th century contempt for the ideal of nation-states offering citizens anything approximating a sense of communal purpose and meaning.
When I watch this show I wonder if things are this bleak?
I used to work at a great grey newspaper in Baltimore until Wall Street found the newspaper industry and eviscerated it for short-term profits and out-of-town chain ownership proved that they could make more money producing a mediocre newspaper than a good one. The worship of the bottom line, coupled with the venalities of transplanted, prize-sniffing editors, sucked all joy from the place.
I am not sure if I agree with his views that the only way to save news papers is to make people pay for online content.
And Finally here is his description of the show
The first season of The Wire was a dry, deliberate argument against the American drug prohibition – a Thirty Years’ War that is among the most singular and comprehensive failures to be found in the nation’s domestic history. It is impossible to imagine pitching such a premise to a network television executive under any circumstances. How, he might wonder, do I help my sponsors sell luxury sedans and prewashed jeans to all the best demographics while at the same time harping on the fact that the American war on drugs has mutated into a brutal suppression of the underclass?
The second season of The Wire was even more of a lighthearted romp: a treatise about the death of work and the betrayal of the working class, as exemplified by the decline of a city’s port unions. And how exactly do we put Visa-wielding consumers in a buying mood when they are being reminded of many of their countrymen – black, white and brown – have been shrugged aside by the march of unrestrained, bottom-line capitalism?
Season three? A rumination on our political culture and the thin possibility of reform, given the calcified oligarchy that has made cash the mother’s milk of American elections. And having established our City Hall, the stage is set for viewers to coldly contemplate the state of public education, and by extension, the American ideal of equality of opportunity and what that might mean for the likes of Michael, Namond, Randy, and Duquan.
And finally, for anyone who has come this far, a final reflection on why these worlds endure, why the crime stats stay juked and the test scores stay cheated and the majors become colonels while the mayors become governors – a depiction of what remains of our media culture, a critique that makes plain why no one is left to do the hard work of explaining the precise nature of our national problems, so that we have become a nation that comfortably tolerates failing schools and corrupting drug wars, broken levees and bought politicians.
I know this is not much of a diary, but wanted to share this article.