This Sunday, squarely between the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary, The Wire enters its fifth and final season on HBO. But thanks to the God-given miracle of On Demand, I sat down with some friends and watched it two days ago. I was not disappointed.
Watching this show, and indeed, hearing creator David Simon talk about his subject, such as how the drug war in Season Three was a metaphor for Iraq, you come away not only impressed as hell, but also wishing there were more sober and honest voices in the din that passes for dialogue in our public sphere. Because there is one cultural figure whose opinion actually matters to me, someone who 95% of Americans would be hard-pressed to put a face to, if they even know his name -- but someone who has made a pretty convincing case on television that he knows what the hell is going on in America. [Note: That figure is not Aaron Sorkin.]
So who is David Simon voting for?
Okay, this is crazy and I know that. The Wire's stock in dramatic trade is systemic failure, and the first thing to know about that is that no one man or woman can change the system without a fuckload of luck. On a show that depicts the mayor getting blown at his City Hall desk, the very image of a president seems inherently ironic, and the idea that one could do anything so metaphorically banal as changing the course of a nation... that's believing in unicorns. Right?
But being that we can vote, we may as well. And the theme of systemic failure couldn't be more appropriate these days, what with sub-prime mortages, unaffordable healthcare, the war and, last but not least, the slow and sure erosion of morale from the middle to the lower classes. It's like The Wire...only in real life and everywhere!
So who is David Simon voting for?
To the uninitiated, The Wire plays like the sorry endgame of another HBO product, the lamentably dormant Deadwood. In chronicling the early days of a Black Hills prospecting settlement, Deadwood tapped into something deeper about the forces that birthed American civilization: namely, the extraordinary and, at times, abstract greed that drove its development, and the desperate humanity that held it together. The Wire is about a civilization's slow death, over a century later, at the hands of craven careerists and the morally lazy.
The star of the show is Baltimore -- its police departments, city councils, drug organizations, unions, and now its daily newspapers -- but like any great tale, its characters are universal, all bazillion and ten of them. What we get here are the inner workings of failing institutions: the backroom tactics of leaders who are less interested in leadership than they are in self-preservation, the loss of faith, the lifting of the grand illusion that anything will ever really change. There is no real way to do the show's extraordinary characters and plotlines justice, but suffice to say Simon has created something impossibly aware, prescient and devastating... and it's on television. It's the kind of thing, if you work in the Business, that gives you hope that great and important things really can make it on the air and stay there. Which is ironic, since if there's one lesson about hope I've taken away from four seasons of The Wire, it's that if it looks like there's a new day in Baltimore, look again.
This ethos, and the show's elaborate, variegated world makes Simon, for me, a bit of a Tolstoy. Most Tolstoysan of all is the sense one gets watching The Wire that position doesn't earn one true power. In War and Peace, Tolstoy mocks the notion that Napoleon was truly the great general he was credited as being, positing instead that his successes were the result of the almost coincidental aggregation of human desires and fears. Napoleon had no more free will, and possibly less, than all the people beneath him.
Similarly, The Wire's Tommy Carcetti, the great white hope of Baltimore city politics, having denounced the incumbent Mayor Royce as corrupt and weak on crime, rides the civil disaffection to an election victory. He makes some big changes in the police department, and we're left with the feeling that this time, things might really change.
Yeah. And the Orioles might win the World Series.
So fans of the show know to be wary, just as Americans are trying to take the political promise 2008 holds with a whopping grain of salt -- the predictable appeals to our desire for a New Direction, A Real Change, not just More of the Same -- just as we are the notions of Experience, Inexperience, the Fresh and the Stale. And maybe I'm naïve, but Barack Obama's candidacy does dare me to hope. Of course, he can't possibly know what he's getting himself into, but he seems to have the skill set and the respect for our collective bullshit detector. Can he really bring about change in health care, in foreign policy, in conventional wisdom... or is he just another Tommy Carcetti, bound to face backbreaking compromises and ultimately, failure?
Don't get me wrong. I respect that Oprah, like me, dares to hope. But Oprah, last time I checked, is in the business of hope. David Simon's business, on the other hand, is system diagnostics, underbelly exposure and eyewool removal. Who is the candidate for the guy who really gets it, not just how bad everything sucks, but why? Because if neither Obama nor any of these others can effect change... well, I guess we'll always have that benevolent dictator with the remote control.