The Wire – The Most Dangerous Thing in America
Much of [David] Simon’s work focuses on the troubles of low-income African Americans, be they heroin dealers or trombone players. It’s a preoccupation he shares with a long line of American Jewish social activists and cultural figures, from early abolitionists to the Jews who helped found the NAACP to the Jewish Freedom Riders murdered in the early 1960s. When I bring that up, though, Simon brushes aside the comparison. “The Freedom Riders and NAACP founders were doing something far more substantive, and in the case of the Freedom Riders, risking far, far more,” he says. “I wouldn’t put myself in that category under any circumstances.”
Nonetheless, he’s very conscious of that history.
“But until organized American Jewry turns itself to the places of greatest need in this country, we cannot pretend to be a light unto the nations.”
Quotes:
“My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.”
— David Simon
Well, it is what it is and it has been for years, and it’s why we’re able to marginalize larger and larger percentages of our population. Fuck ’em where they stand. Five percent, 10 percent, 15 percent. How many people are you going to keep out of the gated community? How many guards are you going hire?
Just another rich liberal socialist (not a marxist, mind you) telling us what we should be doing with our money.
“I don’t want to reduce The Wire to one big theme, but would you say that a major thrust of the series was the idea of institutions versus individuals?
Yeah, that permeated it. One of the things we were saying was that reform was becoming more and more problematic as moneyed interests—capitalism, which is sort of the ultimate Olympian god—become more entrenched in the postmodern world. Reform becomes more and more problematic because the status quo is arranged in such a way as to maximize profit and to exalt profit—particularly short-term profit—over long-term societal benefit and/or human beings.“
Simon is a foul-mouthed cosmopolitan know-it-all cut from the same ancient jewish social critic cloth as James Howard Kunstler. They make noises about the nasty side-effects of corporatism and materialism, weep crocodile tears for “people of color”, and every so often vent their visceral disgust for ordinary, middle-class Whites.
“Reform”, especially as used here, is a code-word for making over the world so it better suits jewish sensibilities. What makes “reform” so problematic today, from a jewish social critic’s point of view, is that the “moneyed interests” are overwhelmingly jewish – as edgy and radical as they style themselves, jewish social critics are not interested in “reforming” that part of society.