Note to NYT: If You're Going to Selectively Gush Over White-Gown-and-Bouquet Weddings, Keep Cold-Blooded Murderer Grooms Out

Are you allowed to blog on HuffPost if your politics are a patchwork, rather than a straight-up-and-down liberal party line? (For the record, I am not a classic liberal -- maybe not a liberal at all -- when it comes to violent crime and real -- as opposed to politically concocted and cherry-picked-combated -- Islamic terrorism.) Is it schizophrenic to believe, on the one hand, that a certain dramatic episodic series is the best thing that one has ever seen on television: right up there with the best of classic literature (Salon has compared it to Shakespeare; I'd settle with Dickens and Dreiser), but also feel that the show's auteur was working with sentimental liberalism in victim-offending overdrive in championing the murderer who was the basis for one of its characters... championing him not only out of prison but also into the rosy, approving pages of the New York Times?

I'm referring to the wince-inducing twice-in-two-weeks uncritical Times gush over Donnie Andrews (the model for the character of Omar Little in -- the insuperably wonderful -- HBO series The Wire), who also happens to be a convicted cold-blooded murderer. A number of years ago, on the mean streets of Baltimore, Andrews had a gun pointed to the head of a man who was lying on the street looking up at him, pleading for his life. The man poignantly questioned Andrews' intent to gratuitously kill him with one word: "Why?" Andrews heard the plea and assessed the man's vulnerability; he even knew that killing him was pointless, even to his own interests. He chose to pull the trigger anyway. In prison he started to feel remorse. That remorse led him to do good things, as, let's face it, remorseful (or shrewd system-playing) prisoners often do. With the help of David Simon, the creator of TV's Homicide, The Corner, and the resplendent The Wire, Andrews got paroled. He has been doing "anti-gang outreach work" -- sorry to be cynical, but doesn't everybody who can't do much else and has murdered someone and wants to repent do something like "anti-gang outreach work"? He helped to rehabilitate a lifetime heroin user, Fran Boyd, who was the basis for the character in The Corner. He helped to rehabilitate her because he fell in love with her -- he wanted her. A good deed, but one mixed with a generous serving of self-interest. Their love story made the Times so apoplectic with approval and they featured it on the front page of the paper the other week. (Would they have done so if the murderer-turned-gang-outreach-worker and the reformed junkie were white?)

All right, that was just the Times being embarrassing, like it sometimes is. Another way it is embarrassing is in its alternatingly social-climby awe and doyenne-ish superciliousness about people's expensive houses and co-ops, fretted-over renovations (which underpaid laborers do), ultra-chic gardens and pools, and humorously erudite food and furnishings taste, not to mention its unwavering yearly coverage of that Central Park event where all the women wear those flying-saucer hats. (As well as that offensive-to-adolescent-girls story in which a group of awkward-age Manhattan daughters were prodded to opine that they could never be as hip or sexy as their Botoxed, shopoholic moms.) I call this the Times' "giddy elitism" -- a kind of unintentional self-parody; a blind-spotted, over-the-top tropism for traditional society-column snobbery and shallow values that merrily ignores -- or perhaps is felt to be offset by -- the paper's equal blind spots about other subjects, such as the true consequences of victim crimes.

When these tendencies collide -- when the Times' swoon over politically correct rehabilitated criminals joins with the Times' high-priestess power-to-socially-anoint, it's usually funny. Today it was more: It was insulting to any family who has lost a loved one to a cold-blooded murderer. The "Vows" column -- that white-strapless-gown-and Meet-Cute-quote-bedecked half page of choicest Styles section real estate that many an earnest couple-in-love would give their Treo-clicking fingers, or at least their Hamptons shares, to be chosen for -- was devoted to the marriage of aforementioned Donnie Andrews. Yep, the person who gratuitously killed the man who pleaded for his life is the Times' freshly-minted Groom of the Week, resplendent in fine suit and "bubblegum"-hued tie. Two adoring stories on this guy in two weeks? (To Donnie Andrews's publicist, from all those direly missing the services of Karl Rove: "Pssst, call me.")

Here is the last line of today's "Vows" column: "'Everything has a second act and a third act," said Mr. Simon, who was also the best man. 'And everybody gets to write their endings.''" Far be it for little me to quibble with the creator of the best show that has ever appeared on television, but: Not true, David Simon. The family of Donnie Andrews' murder victims didn't get to write their ending. And, unless I'm missing something, the victim who asked, "Why?" never got a proper answer, despite all the rice thrown by The New York Times.

Comments

[NickJones]

To paraphrase from the Editorial Review by Amazon.com of "Dancing at Ciro's": "an almost palpable sense of personal exorcism and, crucially, a quest for ultimate...redemption." So who says you're the only one entitled to redemption?
Sadly, in the last decade or so, the mindset of the justice system, the pundits and the public has been "Lock 'em up and throw away the key," or "Exterminate the brutes!" Perhaps you've spent too much time with the survivors of crime victims that have raging hearts of their own.
A quote attributed to Dostoevsky says, "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." So what does that say about our society, where damaged people from mean streets go into worse prisons, where physical and sexual violence await them and there is no rehabilitation?
Not every convict in prison is incorrigible. The actor Charles Dutton, who was himself imprisoned for killing a man in a street fight, and was lucky enough to have the opportunity to receive rehabilitation has said, "I used to be a hard-core, hardhearted guy. Once you make the decision to change, all kinds of things happen." Amen, Brother Roc.

[Tendo]

Well said Mr. Jones

[Tendo]

Ms. Weller -

Very disappointing, yet telling, that you would pick the reporting on the marriage of Donnie Andrews and Fran Boyd to try an illustrate The Times' an alleged skewed value system. I suppose it's far less worthy than, let's say...writing a book about the marriage of O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown?

It's telling for a few reasons though. First off, even though you refer to David Simon's show THE WIRE as "resplendent," you seem to have missed its intent: to show that drug dealers on the corner are a creation of the society we live in (that's you and me) and can't simply be dismissed as "drug dealers," or "cold-blooded murders." To do so, as you did in your post, does NOTHING to solve the problem, but simply continues the cycle. Should people like Donnie, who have reformed themselves and served their time in accordance with the law, be relegated to "bad people island" never to be heard from again? Is Fran Boyd's battle with addiction less worthy of the New York Times than the numerous casualities of addiction it reports on?

Also telling is your question - "(Would they have done so if the murderer-turned-gang-outreach-worker and the reformed junkie were white?)" Are you serious about this? The answer is EVERYDAY.

Most telling, however, is your confusion over the facts. Donnie was remorseful after the killing, which lead to his confession and turning himself over to the law. It didn't come, as you put it, "In prison..." That is to say, his remorse wasn't a reaction to punishment, but rather, begat the punishment. BIG DIFFERENCE and something that many of our esteemed leaders of institutions (read: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Delay, Gonzalez, etc.) haven't been bold enough to do. Let's not even get into how many they've murdered.

Are you sure you've watched THE WIRE or, maybe, you just read about it in The New York Times?

Sincerely,
Tendo Nagenda

[larry278]

Conservatives might choose to remind the young of the era when people who wanted jobs looked at the classified ads of the NYT & the cartoon of Fidel Castro saying, "I got my job through the NEW YORK TIMES.". When crime pays the NYT will honor those who manage to make their crimes pay off for them.