\u201cThe Wire,\u201d [David] Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society\u2014and, particularly, \u201craw, unencumbered capitalism\u201d\u2014devalues human beings. He told me, \u201cEvery single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don\u2019t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It\u2019s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm\u2014the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it\u2019s got three hundred. Management says, \u2018We have to do more with less.\u2019 That\u2019s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.\u201d<\/p>\n
. . .<\/p>\n
As a crime reporter for the Sun, Simon knew plenty of junkies, snitches, cops, and people just trying to keep their heads down and get by in violent neighborhoods. Simon can be scathing, even righteous, about other television shows that presume to depict urban America without the benefit of direct knowledge. As he told the audience at Loyola, \u201cSo much of what comes out of Hollywood is horseshit. Because these people live in West L.A., they don\u2019t even go to East L.A. The only time they go downtown is to get their license renewed. And what they increasingly know about the world is what they see on other TV shows about cops or crime or poverty. The American entertainment industry gets poverty so relentlessly wrong. . . . Poor people are either the salt of the earth, and they\u2019re there to exalt us with their homespun wisdom and their sheer grit and determination to rise up, or they are people to be beaten up in an interrogation room by Sipowicz. . . . How is it that there\u2019s nobody actually on a human scale from the other America? The reason is they\u2019ve never met anybody from the other America. I mean, they could ask their gardener what it\u2019s like.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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The New Yorker has an awesome piece this week on “The Wire,” the best TV show ever. In addition to detailing why the show is generally awesome, there’s these two fantastic bits from the show’s creator, David Simon. The New Yorker: \u201cThe Wire,\u201d [David] Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society\u2014and, particularly, \u201craw, unencumbered capitalism\u201d\u2014devalues human beings. He told me, \u201cEvery single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[103,115,194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-journalism","category-los-angeles","category-the-wire","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-nd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}