Is The Wire Too Cynical - The Diigo Meta page

• 28 Aug 08
  

  tv david_simon the_wire baltimore poverty shakespeare public education

  • Anyone who’s worked or lived in America’s inner-city neighborhoods could recognize the reality of the show’s characters and the issues of crime, poverty, drugs, and family stress presented with a combination of sympathy and outrage. But the show’s version of reality was only partly right. The Wire reinforced white middle-class stereotypes of inner-city life. The show’s writers, producers, and directors portray most of the characters—clergy and cops, teachers and principals, reporters and editors, union members and leaders, politicians and city employees—as corrupt, cynical, and ineffective. Viewers may have thought they were seeing the whole picture, but the show’s unrelentingly bleak portrayal missed what’s hopeful in Baltimore and, indeed, in other major American cities. In that way, it did the opposite of what its creator, David Simon, said he wanted the show to do: spur our country to end the plight of the poor and minorities who live in America’s inner-cities.
  • Baltimore passed the nation’s first living-wage ordinance in 1994. The current rate is $9.62. (Last year, about thirteen years after the campaign began, Maryland became the first state in the country to enact a state living-wage law.)
  • “The Wire ignore[d] all the good work the faith community had done,” he complained.
  • JUST AS the show found no room for grassroots heroes like Bell and Miles, so too it overlooked the efforts of other community groups involved in successful organizing efforts.
  • offended by its bad language but also by its unrealistic depiction of the Baltimore he’s lived in his entire life. “It’s more negative than positive,” he observed. “The people on the show don’t have anything to live for. The young people have no vision. If you want change, you have to believe things can change.”
  • Shakespeare was not wrong because he didn’t write about the good kings. Dante was not wrong because he wrote about hell. Simon’s characters are fascinating individuals who reflect a broad array of human emotions and conflicts. The workplaces, neighborhoods, language, and events portrayed in The Wire have the kind of verisimilitude that justifies the torrent of praise.
     
     The problem is that The Wire won’t encourage America to care about change. Instead, Simon’s portrayal of Baltimore buttresses the myth that the poor, especially the black poor in the city’s ghettos, are drug dealers or users, eternally helpless victims, unable to engage in collective self-help and dependent on government largesse, or crime, to survive. Week in and week out, the stories were so relentlessly hopeless that Slate’s Jacob Weisberg felt buoyant because the show “is filled with characters who should quit but don’t, not only the boys themselves but teachers, cops, ex-cops, and ex-cons. . . . This refusal to give up in the face of defeat is the reality of ghetto life as well. Feel me: It’s what The Wire is all about.”
  • Simon’s worldview is hardly radical. He generally views the poor as helpless victims rather than as people with the capacity to act on their own behalf to bring about change. He may think he’s the crusading journalist exposing injustice, but he’s really a cynic who takes pity on the poor, yet can’t imagine a world where things could be different.

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