The Creator of The Wire on the Drug War Etc.

There’s a fascinating and riveting interview by Bill Moyers of David Simon, about Simon’s HBO show The Wire–referred to here as “the greatest, bravest, most truthful narrative programming ever heard on American television,” and described this way by one critic: “When television history is written, 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.” And I agree it is one of the most amazing TV shows I’ve ever seen (which was on HBO–premium cable produces by far the best television recently, e.g. Californication, Entourage, the Sopranos, True Blood).

The show was amazingly honest about relationships, underclass issues, racism, crime, drugs, and so is Simon in the interview. Well worth watching, or reading. Any drug warrior needs to read this interview or watch the show. At one point Moyers asks Simon, “The character in that excerpt we just saw says, “What’s the answer?” Do you have the answer after all these years?” Simon’s answer:

Oh, I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we’re basically treating our underclass. The drug war’s war on the underclass now. That’s all it is. It has no other meaning.

As for the state’s corruption, and the corruption in schools caused by state regulations, see the discussion of “juking the stats”:

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.

[…]

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.

***

And don’t miss the concluding discussion of one of my favorite scenes from the series, the scene where Det. Greggs is holding her baby by her living room window late at night, looking out the window onto the streets of Baltimore, and they recite a modified version of Goodnight Moon:

BILL MOYERS: But I want to close with some poetry. Some poetry that I don’t know whether you created or whether you discovered. But it’s that unforgettable moment in THE WIRE when we hear “Goodnight Moon.” Tell me about that before I play it for the audience. DAVID SIMON: You know, I’m going to– I’m going to tell you that that is straight from a book that I totally admire. CLOCKERS by Richard Price. And Price wrote that episode. And he recreated it right out of the novel. It’s almost a benediction for the city. And it is the thing that, you didn’t get it if you were a politician or a police commander or a school superintendent, and you were running on your rep. You didn’t get that THE WIRE was actually a love letter to Baltimore. From your point of view, what it was, was just this nightmare that you had to like argue against. But if you were a schoolteacher or a kid on a corner or a cop walking the beat. If you– if you were, our sentiments were always with labor, it was always at the street level. If you were one of those people, you couldn’t help but hear the affection. That this was– it may have been a conflicted lover. But it was a love letter nonetheless. And I thought that scene really caught it. BILL MOYERS: We’ll hear it now, this love letter. Thank you, David Simon, for being with me on the Journal. DAVID SIMON: Thank you. […]

DETECTIVE KIMA GREGGS: Let’s say goodnight to everybody. Goodnight moon. You say it. CHILD: Goodnight moon. DETECTIVE KIMA GREGGS: There you go. Goodnight stars. CHILD: Goodnight stars. DETECTIVE KIMA GREGGS: Goodnight po-po’s. CHILD: Goodnight po-po’s. DETECTIVE KIMA GREGGS: Goodnight fiends. CHILD: Goodnight fiends. DETECTIVE KIMA GREGGS: Goodnight hoppers. CHILD: Goodnight hoppers. DETECTIVE KIMA GREGGS: Goodnight hustlers. CHILD: Goodnight hustlers. DETECTIVE KIMA GREGGS: Goodnight scammers. CHILD: Goodnight scammers. DETECTIVE KIMA GREGGS: Goodnight to everybody. CHILD: Goodnight to everybody. DETECTIVE KIMA GREGGS: Goodnight to one and all. CHILD: Goodnight to one and all.

Granted, some of Simon’s analyses of “capitalism” are confused–he wants to equate the plight of the poor and those ravaged by the logic of the drug war with “capitalism,” without really clearly seeing that it is the anti-market state that is causing the problems he thinks the state can help to solve. But still–fascinating interview.

Update: See also Jesse Walker’s Q&A with Simon from 2004.

[LRC cross-post]

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