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April 7, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: From police beat reporter to socio-political sage

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — What’s my definition of tragedy? Life.

— David Simon, creator of “The Wire”

“The Wire,” David Simon’s five-season saga for HBO, has become many things to many people. Perhaps the most useful is as a keen delineator of the perspective we possess when we look at his Baltimore backdrop and at the nation we inhabit.

You either resonate to lines like, “We used to make (bleep) in this country, build (bleep). Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” or you don’t.

You either see mirrored parallels in the struggles, victories and corruption of “The Wire’s” drug gangs, cops, politicians, dock workers, public schoolteachers — and the shrinking news media that are supposed to be the watchdog of all of them — or you don’t.

You either believe that every human is flawed and capable of both noble deeds and evil ones — And who is anyone to haughtily judge? — or you don’t.

OK. Strike that part about judging.

Simon, who spoke last week to a ballroom full of students and other “Wire” fans in the student union at DePauw University, is a judgment machine. But he isn’t haughty; he’s angry, and he often includes himself and people like him in his indictments.

He is also wickedly funny and quite fluent in his second language — sarcasm. A good example is the title of Simon’s talk in Greencastle — “The Audacity of Despair: The Decline of American Empire and What’s in it For You.”

A former police beat reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Simon, who was born in 1960, admitted to the audience that the title was “a goof” on Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope.” His aim, however, was to prompt the room of young people — most of them part of the 35th annual Undergraduates Communications Honors Conference — to think about our current state of affairs in a less passive way than have generations before them.

“Since you’re about to inherit this broken version of America we’ve dropped on you … what you really have going for you on this despairing view of America is, you’re allowed to get angry, you’re absolutely allowed to get angry,” he told the students.

The goof on Obama’s book was not meant as disrespect for the president, Simon said. After all, Obama named “The Wire” as one of his two all-time favorite television shows (“MASH” was the other). And Simon, himself, went door-to-door in Pennsylvania last fall campaigning for Obama.

It’s just that, “We’ve been building this America for 30, 40 years,” he said, and “when somebody has a simple solution or somebody tries to say it’s about electing the right guy or it’s about passing this one law,” we need to resist deluding ourselves that the decades-old mess we have created can be so easily dispatched.

Of all the messages delivered over five gritty seasons of “The Wire,” one of the major themes, Simon said, was America’s need to “be willing to swallow the hard truths,” to comprehend the mess and acknowledge our national denial of it.

No matter the power structure or institution, he said, “The Wire” was the declaration, “We can’t even recognize our problems, much less solve them anymore.”

In Greencastle, Simon was exhausted but “hyped on coffee,” having driven through rainstorms from Cincinnati, where his plane from New Orleans had arrived too late for a connection to Indianapolis. He and his film crew had wrapped up shooting on a proposed new series for HBO at 6 a.m. in Louisiana. The series is set in the early months after Katrina.

Simon teamed up as a writer for many episodes of “The Wire” with Ed Burns, a former Baltimore police detective with whom he had collaborated on a book that gave rise to the HBO mini-series, “The Corner.” While still a journalist, Simon also wrote a book that became his first TV series, “Homicide: Life on the Streets.”

“The Wire” ran from June 2002 to March 2008 with more than a year off during the national writers strike. The show never won an Emmy Award, which says a lot more about the Emmys than it says about the quality of the series. More than one respected critic called “The Wire” possibly the best dramatic series ever made for television.

Now in a boxed DVD set, the show is attaining cult status as friends tell friends they are missing a major chunk of American culture if they don’t dive in. Recently, BBC Two in Great Britain began to air “The Wire,” drawing the kind of top ratings the series never locked in on HBO.

The timing couldn’t be better. With the United States and the globe in economic peril, Simon’s long-held disdain for unchecked capitalism — and the social and political hypocrisy that accompanies it — is finding new, empathetic audiences. Disillusioned and disgusted people who’ve played by the rules are drawn to stories and characters that were spun by an illusion-free, cynical man.

But like so many cynics among us, Simon seems only a couple of incidents from his own Bastille storming. He doesn’t believe anyone in power can foment real change, or that many movers and shakers even want change. But the lover of social justice in him — the guy who all the corruption and deceit that he has seen can’t kill off — that guy is rooting for a people’s rebellion.

The uprising won’t look like mindless destruction or selfish rage. “Not the sort of venal anger that you didn’t get what you wanted, that you didn’t get what was coming to you — there’s no dignity to that …” he told his DePauw audience. “You might try getting angry in the collective sense … to understand that we actually are all connected.”

Sounding a lot like Tom Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath,” Simon said neither he nor “my spirit” can “fully live” in his nice neighborhood in Baltimore “when 20 blocks away, people are killing each other over scraps.” Likewise, none of us in this country “can have any sense of our own dignity when people are dying in Iraq on the basis of another (bleep)-for-gold disaster” we were sold by the corrupt powers that be.

“We’re all connected,” he said, “and that has to be recognized and addressed, systematically.”

A few minutes later, before opening the floor to questions, Simon returned to his no-illusions, wisecracking cop reporter’s stance. “That’s my spiel,” he told the audience. “I usually like to come out with some nugget, some little point of light to focus on, that everything’s going to be all right. I gave up on that about four speeches ago. I’ve got nothing for you.”



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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