'The Wire was not about McNulty...'
30/10/2009
David Simon says his hit TV creation was aimed at busting the myth of the American dream
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By David Simon, creator of The Wire
The Wire was not about Jimmy McNulty or Avon Barksdale or Marlo Stanfield or Tommy Carcetti or Gus Haynes. It was not about crime or punishment or the drug war or politics or race or education, labour relations or journalism.
It was about The City.
It is how we in the West live at the millennium, an urbanised species compacted together, sharing a common love, awe and fear of what we have rendered, not only in Baltimore or St Louis or Chicago, but in Manchester or Amsterdam or Mexico City or Cairo as well.
At best, our metropolises are the ultimate aspiration of community, the repository for every myth and hope of people clinging to the sides of the ever-more-fragile pyramid that is capitalism.
At best, our metropolises are the ultimate aspiration of community, the repository for every myth and hope of people clinging to the sides of the ever-more-fragile pyramid that is capitalism.
At worst, our cities – or those places in our cities where most of us fear to tread – are vessels for the darkest contradictions and most brutal competitions that underlie the way we actually live together, or fail to live together. Mythology is important, an essential event, to a national psyche. Americans, in particular, are desperate in their pursuit of national myth. To a point, this is understandable: coating an elemental truth with the bright gloss of heroism and national sacrifice is the prerogative of the nation state.
But to carry the same lies forward, generation after generation, so that our collective sense of the American experiment is better and more comforting than it ought to be – this is where mythology has its cost, and a cost not only to the United States but to the world as a whole. In a young and struggling nation, a moderate degree of self-elevating bullshit has a certain earnest charm. For a militarised, technological superpower – overextended in both its economic and foreign policy impulses – it begins to approach the Orwellian.
We began writing The Wire when certain narratives were playing out within American culture: the shocking frauds at the heart of Enron and WorldCom, outlying harbingers of the economic implosion that was still to come, as well as the institutional scandal of sexual abuse by priests and shameful self-preserving mendacity of the American branch of the Catholic Church. It seemed to us, back in 2002, there was something hollow and ugly at our institutional core, and from what Ed Burns [co-writer of The Wire] understood of the Baltimore police department and school system, and from what I had witnessed at the heart of that city’s newspaper, the institutional and systemic corruptions of our national life seemed near universal.
In practical ways, America was becoming the land of the juked statistic – the false quarterly profit statement, the hyped school test score, the non-existent decline in crime, the buried scandal, the hyped Pulitzer Prize.
We were observant, but not as prescient as the state of our nation now makes us seem. Or at least, we don’t now count ourselves as prescient in that the enormity of the mortgage security scandal and the Wall Street pyramid schemes that wrecked the world economy were too shameless and absurd for even our fevered imaginations.
We saw there were elements in the culture that were parasitic and self-aggrandising, that the greed and rapaciousness of a society that exalted profit and free markets to the exclusion of any other social framework would be burdened by that level of greed. We understood that throughout our national culture there was a growing inability to recognise our problems, much less deal honestly with them.
But forgive us, we had no idea that the greed had become policy, that the rogue elements were not being carried by corrupted systems, but were in fact in charge of those systems. We could not have imagined [hurricane] Katrina and the hollow response to that tragedy. We could not have conceived of the empty lies and self-delusions that brought about the senseless misadventure in Iraq. We had a good argument, as far as we knew, but in the beginning, at least, we didn’t know how good.
To state our case, The Wire began as a story wedged between two American myths. The first tells us that in this country, if you are smarter than the next man, if you are shrewd or frugal or visionary, if you build a better mousetrap, if you get there first with the best idea, you will succeed beyond your wildest imaginations. By virtue of free-market processes, it is entirely fair to say that this myth, more than ever, happens to be true. Not only is this accurate in America but throughout the West and in many emerging nations. Every day, a new millionaire or three is surely christened. Or 10. Or 20.
But a supporting myth has also presided, and it serves as ballast against the unencumbered capitalism that has emerged triumphant, asserting as it does for individual achievement to the exclusion of all societal responsibility and declaring for the amassed fortune of the wise and fortunate among us.
In America, we once liked to tell ourselves, those who are not clever or visionary, who do not build better mousetraps, have a place held for them nonetheless. The myth holds that those who are neither slick nor cunning, yet willing to get up every day and work their asses off and be citizens and come home and stay committed to their families, their communities and every other institution they are asked to serve – these people have a portion for them as well.
They might not drive a Lexus or eat out every weekend; their children might not be candidates for early admission at Harvard or Brown, and come Sunday, they might not see the game on a wide-screen TV. But they will have a place, and they will not be betrayed. In Baltimore, as in so many cities, it is no longer possible to describe this as myth. It is no longer possible even to remain polite on the subject. It is, in a word, a lie.
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 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.
From Sparrows Point, at the south-eastern approaches to my city, the corporate remnant of the once-great Bethlehem Steel informs thousands of retirees that money is no longer available for their pensions. Men who worked the blast furnaces and shipyards, the very men who built Liberty Ships to beat Hitler and Mussolini, are told that while they may suffer from asbestosis, they no longer have health benefits or life insurance.
From the piers of what was once Maryland Ship & Drydock, luxury condominiums and townhouses now rise in place of industrial cranes, while the yachts and powerboats of Washingtonians speckle an inlet where the world’s great shipping lines once manoeuvred. The grain tower and pier that Frank Sobotka tried to salvage in The Wire’s second season, as predicted, it did indeed fall to the developers, who have transformed it into something called Silo Point, featuring luxury housing where union-wage jobs are a sad memory.
From Johns Hopkins University – now, by default, the city’s largest employer – came the news that the remaining families who survived generations of poverty, neglect and addiction in the barren ghetto just north of the East Baltimore hospital would be moved out entirely, allowing the university to bulldoze their blocks into a biotechnology park. For most of the last century, Hopkins and city officials could find no meaningful way to connect the great research institution with surrounding communities; finally, they destroyed what remained of the village in the claim of saving it.
From the city school system comes year after year of failure and decay, with graduation rates of no more than 30 per cent as administrators pretend to teach Baltimore’s children to join an economy that has no real need for them. With each passing election, the test scores magically rise at the third and fifth grades, before collapsing entirely two years later when the same students – having been taught the test – finally opt out and disappear from the classrooms, choosing the street corners instead.
From the police department, the arrest rates go ever higher as raw statistics predominate over actual police work, and the numbers game ensures that the most incompetent commanders are promoted over those actually capable of retroactively investigating crime. The clearance rate for homicides – in the 80 per cent range twenty years ago – is now below 35 per cent.
From the city’s last remaining daily newspaper, a string of buyouts and attritions that now leaves Baltimore’s premiere watchdog institution with 140 reporters to report on a city once covered by 500 souls. And the Baltimore Sun is not alone in its collapse; from Martin Marietta to Koppers to Black & Decker to General Motors comes a seemingly endless string of layoffs, reductions in force, half-shifts and idle assembly lines.
And the city empties: drive through East or West Baltimore and behold a world of boarded-up rowhouses and vacant lots.
David Simon writes the introduction for Rafael Alvarez’s book The Wire: Truth Be Told (Canongate), which is out now
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