From: An Anonymous Wire Viewer [Email him]

Another notable thing about David Simon, one that reminds us that far from being a free market or competition of talent and drive, even the heights of our pop culture are very tightly controlled propaganda, staffed by "sound" men who will not even think wrongly, is his attitude towards surveillance.

As a Leftist you might expect Simon to be reflexively against Big Brother. Reviewing his editorials and his deliberately ambiguous depiction of surveillance in The Wire shows him cheerleading the police state as clearly as he can without losing his audience. (The reason it’s called that is because of wiretapping and secret recording.)

One early scene has the "creator commentary" on the DVD set to the effect that he wanted to show there was a loss of privacy but also show that natural bureaucratic inefficiency (the visual: a sleepy black security guard) meant this was nothing to fear.

Another thing about Simon is his desire for a Noble Thug, represented by Wire characters Stringer Bell or Omar. It is like he is whimpering, "if only rape-using neighborhood-terrorizing drug dealers could quote David Ricardo and John Kenneth Galbraith," the way Bell does.