More from the Cluttered, Angry Mind of David Simon.

We asked this before: does The Wire‘s central premise — that institutions are soulless, self-perpetuating and swallow up even the best intentions at reform — run contrary to support for Obama, whose running on a platform of systemic change?

David Simon (did y’all peep his cameo in the newsroom in the finale?), in an interview with the Newark Star Ledger, offers up one of his typically verbose, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink answers.

Not that I’m announcing my support for anybody, but I’m impressed that Obama got this close to being a nominee just being part African-American. There’s a part of me that looks at that and says, “Damn, we’re getting healthier on some things.” Now, is Obama any more able to address the fact that we’re a money-obsessed oligarchy and not a democracy? I don’t think so.
I think for change to happen on a level that actually affects the structure of that oligarchy, a lot of distressing things will have to happen, and more people are going to have to suffer a great deal more. More struggle for the working class, and the middle-class is going to have to be marginalized. Wages will have to go a lot lower, the recession will have to go a lot deeper — and I think we’re in a recession and headed for some bad economic times. I think it’s going to have to go a lot deeper.

At some point, the Sunis that we paid out with money and guns are going to have to wait until we fashion whatever escape we have from that war and start ripping the country up and reducing it to a civil war. I think we’ve built a Lebanon, and once it becomes clear that we’ve built a Lebanon and condemned that region to generations of internecine violence, and it cost us 4000 troops and a veritable treasure — I hope we get out of there before it’s more — I think people are going to be angrier.

Right now we have the illusion that we’re fixing things. I don’t know for sure; I’m not there on the ground. But I’m sitting here in a room with Even Wright, who just was in Baghdad and spent weeks there interviewing everybody there and talking to Petraeus and to people on the ground, and his take on it is we’ve built another Lebanon. Right now, we’re paying people not to shoot at each other, and we’re giving people guns and saying, ‘Please don’t use these.’ At some point, somebody’s going to assert for power there, probably after we’re gone, and we’ll realize that this was over nothing, over absolutely nothing.

When that happens, maybe the next war gets harder, and when the economic structure fails to a point where people begin to realize en masse that they’ve been cheated and that their future has been marginalized, at that point maybe there’s another New Deal coming, maybe there’s another reckoning. But short of that, as long as it’s just some people in places like Baltimore, and it’s only 10 percent or 15 percent of the population we don’t need, I’m sorry, I think there’s a lot of money to be spent by a lot of people in order to keep people pacified.

Well, okay then.

Also, he confirms that Cheese is indeed Randy’s pops.

(Hat-tip Ari/Eric).

Simon, if you’re interested, dropped by NPR’s Fresh Air last week to chat with Terry Gross (who is a huge Wire fan; she’s interviewed quite a few of the folks from the show over its run).

UPDATE: And yet more still. Slate’s Andy Bowers has posted a bunch of links to radio interviews by Wire folks over the last few weeks. (Damn. The extent to which public radio’s listeners and The Wire‘s fanbase overlap is fascinating to me.)

G.D.

G.D.

Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
G.D.
  • Thanks, this is a ton of info on The Wire. I feel like their needs to be books with volumes to them to be written about this show