The events of the last two weeks, however, have changed my view of The Wire in a very fundamental way. I have spent most of my time listening to people in Baltimore speak about how this uprising came to be and why the anger runs so deep. I’ve been primarily speaking to black Baltimoreans in grassroots organizations who have, in a state of MSM invisibility, been building movements for years to fight poverty, end street violence, and challenge police brutality. This is humbling to admit, but this experience has made me reassess my favorite show, as if a very dim light bulb was being switched on above my head.
The idea that David Simon, praised as someone with an ear to these Charm City streets like no one since H.L. Mencken, could look at what was happening in the Baltimore of 2015 and not see the social movements and organization beneath the anger, makes me wonder how much he truly “saw” when producing the show.
Now, I cannot help but recall all my favorite Wire moments through a lens that has me wondering if the show was both too soft on the police and incredibly dismissive of people’s ability to organize for real change. In the season that took place in the public schools, where were the student organizers, the urban debaters, and teacher activists I’ve met this past month? In the season about unions, where were the black trade unionists like the UNITE/HERE marchers who were—in utterly unpublicized fashion—at the heart of last Saturday’s march? In the season about the drug war and “Hamsterdam,” where were the people actually fighting for legalization? In the stories about the police, where were the people who died at their hands? It all reveals the audacity—and frankly the luxury—of David Simon’s pessimism.
I am not saying that art should conform to a utopian political vision of struggle like some dreck from the Stalinist culture mills. But I am asking a question that I wasn’t before: Why were those fighting for a better Baltimore invisible to David Simon? I don’t mean those fighting on behalf of Baltimore—the (often white) teachers, the social workers, and the good-natured cops who are at the heart of The Wire—but those fighting for their own liberation? Why was The Wire big on failed saviors and short on those trying to save themselves? And if these forces were invisible to David Simon, shouldn’t we dial down the praise of the show as this “Great American Novel of television” (Variety!) and instead see it for what it is: just a cop show?
In the wake of the Baltimore uprising, The Wire’s pessimism seems childish to me, and I’m going to put it away for a while. I could see myself revisiting it in the future, maybe amidst a more dreary political moment. But that moment isn’t now.
May 5, 2015 @ 8:03 pm
Are you complaining about this column, or agreeing with it?
I think the writer is not being particularly Stalinist. I guess one critique would be that the things he is looking for are not necessarily that conducive to the kind of story that The Wire represented, but otherwise not all THAT bad.
May 6, 2015 @ 12:33 am
Welllll..I can cetainly agree the piece was rather pious, so I guess I am just beign dense today.
I guess the problem is I have seen so much worse that this seems mild.
But I do agree with Freddie's overall point that cultural critism is not really very useful.
On a related note, does the "Center for Student Life" or whatever glossy building just opened at Purdue not remind you just a bit of the elementary school janitors buying a 3,000 square foot luxury house in a gateed community with no money down? And the media articles (NYT) implying that even if you go deeply in debt and fail EVERYONE should still go to college.
One for profit "school" has already imploded.
The next bubble?
May 5, 2015 @ 9:38 pm
So, you want the text version, do you? Well, then.
I saw the link on Freddie's Twitter feed, where his comment was to the effect of, "Maybe the problem is that you think cultural consumption is a political act." In other words, like The Wire, hate The Wire, nobody gives a shit, but real-world racial injustice is not affected in the slightest either way. And the web is overflowing with useless people who think that arguing about artistic representations of politics counts as a meaningful political substitute.
So. As for me, my first reaction is to roll my eyes at the exercise in navel-gazing self-indulgence while using civic chaos as a backdrop. It's not a moral outrage or anything, but it's perhaps just a little crass to see riots happening and think, "Oh! What a perfect excuse to talk about my emotional journey alongside my favorite TV show!" And, I dunno, I could see that someone who comes to The Nation could reasonably be expecting more substantial political analysis, as opposed to the kind of shit you can find at Salon or the HuffPo.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, there's the way the entire piece revolves around his wounded, petulant reaction to David Simon personally. "He's not my hero anymore, and I'm not sure he ever was!" Simon made a brief comment on his blog urging people to stop rioting. Now, you might think that Simon's history has at least earned him the right to have his opinions considered without instant dismissal, but no. Zirin immediately reduces him to just another "middle-aged white male" who presumes to tell people of color how they should behave (unlike young white males like himself, who are clearly on the side of the angels).
Which brings us to the tiring, completely predictable spectacle of mostly-white progressives getting their cheap voyeuristic thrills by cheering on the rioters from their safe, comfortable perch on the Internet sidelines, knowing full well that even if righteous rage doesn't produce a glorious popular uprising, it's not going to adversely affect them.
May 5, 2015 @ 9:39 pm
As for his criticism that a show that stopped airing nearly a decade ago should have somehow been optimized for the 2015 version of Dave Zirin's taste, well, I'm not a critic. But from my common-man's perspective, I see no point whatsoever to criticism that refuses to engage with the art as it is. If he's half the fanboy he claims he was, he should be familiar with Simon's stories of how hard he had to fight to get HBO to take on a show in which story lines could arc over several episodes, or even seasons, a show that refused to provide affirmation or tidy conclusions. The show was never terribly popular while it aired, let alone a moneymaker, so Simon had to fight uphill to realize as much of his vision as he could. And that's from the business side of it. On the creative side, he's trying to tell this huge, sprawling story about the failure and human cost of the drug war, and the gutting of labor via neoliberalism in 60 hours of TV. By necessity, some things are going to be left out.
But here we have this douchebag joining in with the thousands of useless film studies dropouts online wailing and whining about how they would have totally done the show differently and made it better, no doubt. Well, the show is what it is. It's a story of individuals fighting the system. Simon consciously modeled it on Greek tragedy, with our failing institutions taking the place of the Greek gods, and individuals doing their best to survive. That was the choice he made. Either engage with it as it is or fuck off. Nobody gives a shit that you think it should have been a different show with a different focus. I mean, even there, it would be fine to say, "Hey, The Wire really opened my eyes to a lot of things about the America most of us never see, but when I look at current events, it occurs to me that The Wire was bleak by necessity because individuals will almost always lose going up against the system. That's why, in real life, we need collective action to change systemic problems." But for this moron, Simon's failure to tell the story he now wants to see stands as an indictment of Simon himself, as if it were Simon's responsibility to provide a blueprint and spell everything out for this dumbass so he wouldn't have to read between the lines and think for himself.
In short, this guy is an idiot who represents nearly everything wrong with online progressivism. You see why it was so much easier to express all that in a few gifs?
May 6, 2015 @ 2:40 pm
Oh, I am not dismissive of the pessimism at all! 🙂
I think automation, off-shoring, consolidation of business into fewer and fewer hands, the rise of piecework, the rise of China, etc. etc. means that things are going to get much, much worse! I'm glad I am too old to be around and I don't have any kids. It's mostly pseudo intellectual fappery on my part, tbh.
Cheers!
May 6, 2015 @ 12:27 pm
It is mild. That's usually when I bust out the gifs, when something is laughably stupid, but not to a degree that requires detailed elaboration. It's my way of pointing and laughing at things that I would otherwise ignore.
Criticism can be fine, but this is just consumption. At the end of the day, all you've done is watch TV and pass judgment on it. There's no political content to that. Making an issue out of your emotional reaction to David Simon's supposedly-flawed political judgment is the kind of empty, narcissistic garbage that the Last Psychiatrist specializes in taking apart.
Fucking kids, man. They see one urban riot and they think it's 1789 and a bright new dawn for society. Get back to me in ten years and see if you're still so dismissive of Simon's bourgie pessimism.
May 6, 2015 @ 11:47 pm
Oh, I am not dismissive of the pessimism at all! 🙂
Not "you" as in you, "you" as in him. You know? That is, you know?
Actually, let me throw it in reverse and back up to this part again. Here is Simon's statement in its entirety:
Yes, there is a lot to be argued, debated, addressed. And this moment, as inevitable as it has sometimes seemed, can still, in the end, prove transformational, if not redemptive for our city. Changes are necessary and voices need to be heard. All of that is true and all of that is still possible, despite what is now loose in the streets.
But now — in this moment — the anger and the selfishness and the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in Freddie Gray’s name needs to cease. There was real power and potential in the peaceful protests that spoke in Mr. Gray’s name initially, and there was real unity at his homegoing today. But this, now, in the streets, is an affront to that man’s memory and a dimunition of the absolute moral lesson that underlies his unnecessary death.
If you can’t seek redress and demand reform without a brick in your hand, you risk losing this moment for all of us in Baltimore. Turn around. Go home. Please.
To which our douchebag hero responds:
It’s always cringe-worthy when a wealthy middle-aged white guy lectures young black people about who they are and what they should do.
So here we have another example of what Kenan Malik keeps saying: white people like this dipshit keep assuming that the most "authentic" voices in a minority community must be the ones most diametrically opposed to the bourgeois white norms that we feel so guilt-ridden about; i.e. the angriest, loudest and most violent. The fact that most, maybe even a majority, of inner-city residents would agree with Simon that violent protest is not going to help fix things is simply ignored, since they obviously can't be dismissed with the same empty snark as a "wealthy, middle-aged white guy". The "true" community is assumed to be represented by the ones looting a CVS or destroying cop cars, which of course says much more about the projections of guilt-ridden white people desperate to prove that they're not the bad, oppressive kind.
May 7, 2015 @ 5:00 pm
Some good things, here Damian!
I am always disturbed by arguments that posit a singular monolithic correct "position" on issues. Even if I think there are obviously bad positions (such as the beleif among a frightening percentage that Obama is establishing ISIS training camps in the US)
I know I will be disowned here for mentioning HER name (I kid!), but that was a common theme I liked in a lot of Ophelia's writings before she went down the rat hole: the danger of assuming that the violent and fanatical represent "the community" or that there is even such a monolithic thing as "the community".