Selected excerpts
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
"When television history is written," one critic says, "Little else will rival 'The Wire.'"And when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, I'll wager they will not be able to ignore this remarkable and compelling portrayal of life in our cities.
BILL MOYERS: For five seasons on HBO, this critically acclaimed series held up a mirror to the other America — the America we couldn't see anywhere else on television. It reveals a lot about what's happened to us in recent years, and it comes from a surprising source — a newspaper beat reporter turned television writer and producer.
David Simon and his creative team, including Ed Burns, a cop turned teacher, used the City of Baltimore and the drug wars there as a metaphor for America's urban underbelly.
Through storytelling brutally honest and dramatic, Simon and crew created a tale of corruption, despair and betrayal as devastating as any Greek tragedy.
David Simon comes by his knowledge of gritty urban reality from twelve years as a crime reporter with THE BALTIMORE SUN.
From his reporting on the streets came the book and NBC television series HOMICIDE, and on HBO, THE CORNER. At the moment he's producing the pilot for a series about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans, called TREME.
Remember, you heard it here — what Edward Gibbon was to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or Charles Dickens to the smoky mean streets of Victorian London, David Simon is to America today.
He's with me now. Welcome to the Journal.
DAVID SIMON: Thank you very much for having me.
BILL MOYERS: There is a fellow in city government, here in New York, who's a policy wonk and a die-hard WIRE fan. And he's hoping I will ask you the one question on his mind, and the mind of many other fans. Here it is. "David Simon has painted the most vivid and compelling portrait of the modern American city. Has he walked away from that story? And if he has, will he come back to it?"
DAVID SIMON: I've walked away from the WIRE universe. It's had its five years. Stories that have a beginning, middle, and end-- sort of stand-as stories-- if you keep stuff open ended, and if you keep trying to stretch character and plot, they eventually break or they bend.
BILL MOYERS: What is it about the crime scene that gives you a keyhole, the best keyhole perhaps, into how American society really works?
DAVID SIMON: Right. You see the equivocations. You see the stuff that doesn't make it into the civics books. And also you see how interconnected things are. How connected the performance of the school system is to the culture of a corner. Or where parenting comes in. And where the lack of meaningful work in all these things, you know, the decline of industry suddenly interacts with the paucity and sort of fraud of public education in the inner city. Because THE WIRE is not a story about the America, it's about the America that got left behind.
BILL MOYERS: I was struck by something, I forget where I read it, that you said. You were wrestling with this one big existential question. And you talked about drug addicts who would come out of detox and then try to steel jaw themselves through their neighborhood. And then they'd come face to face with the question, which is?
DAVID SIMON: "What am I doing here? What am I doing here?" You know, all the same problems that a guy coming out of addiction at 30, 35, because it often takes to that age, he often got into addiction with a string of problems, some of which were interpersonal and personal, and some of which were systemic. The fact that these really are the excess people in America, we-- our economy doesn't need them. We don't need ten or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy. We pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we're actually including them in the American ideal, but we're not. And they're not foolish. They get it.
BILL MOYERS: In this clip from your fourth season, that's what one of the main characters tries to explain to the school superintendent, that what they call the "corner kids" are outside the education system altogether. Take a look.
[from video clip]
HOWARD "BUNNY" COLVIN: You put a textbook in front of these kids, put a problem on a blackboard, or teach them every problem on a statewide test and it won't matter, none of it. 'Cause they're not learning for our world, they're learning for theirs. And they know exactly what it is they're training for, and what it is everyone expects them to be.
SUPERINTENDENT: I expect them to be students.
HOWARD "BUNNY" COLVIN: But it's not about you or us, or the tests or the system, it's what they expect of themselves. I mean, every single one of them know they headed back to the corners. Their brothers and sisters, [deleted], the parents, they came through these same classrooms, didn't they? We pretended to teach them, they pretended to learn, where'd they end up? Same damn corners. They're not fools, these kids. They don't know our world, but they know their own. I mean, Jesus, they see right through us.
DAVID SIMON: They understand that the only viable economic base in their neighborhoods is this multi-billion drug trade.
BILL MOYERS: I've done several documentaries over the last 40 years. The first one I did was about the South Bronx, called "The Fire Next Door." And what I learned very early is that the drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.
DAVID SIMON: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: To pacify these people who don't have any economic-
DAVID SIMON: Absolutely. In some ways it's the most destructive form of welfare that we've established, which is the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It's basically like opening up a Beth Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, "And you guys are all steel workers." To just say no? That's our answer to that? You know, the economic model does not work. And by the way, if it was chewing up white folk, it wouldn't have gone on for as long as it did.
BILL MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who's become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It's called "juking the stats." Take a look.
[from video clip]
ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.
ROLAND "PREZ" PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don't get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?
TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.
PREZ: Juking the stats.
TEACHER: Excuse me?
PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I've been here before.
TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are.
DAVID SIMON: You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they're solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn't represent anything, once they got done with them.
This is just a taste. There is much, much more in the full 2 Part transcript. But there is the ring-of-truth in what the article says.
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