The Wire

Recently, I attended the talk given by David Simon, the creator of HBO’s, The Wire during which he discusses several issues relevant to the current status of Baltimore City, the growth and regression of American cities, and the effects that our choices as humans have on our lives, our cities and our race. Several of the points that David Simon states within his talk are also relevant to the matters that we have been discussing in class especially the piece by Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as well as the poem “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manly Hopkins. Dually, both the talk and these pieces of literature add to our understanding of certain harsh, but undeniably true realities about the current situations in cities across America.

Although I have never personally seen the show The Wire, I understand that it is a fictional account of the drug war that plagues Baltimore city and an explanation as to why the people engaging in illegal behaviors act and react in the way that they typically do. Differing from classic cop and robber shows, The Wire questions the standard view of a villain and the natural tendency for a person deemed villainous to be considered less than human. As David Simon begins to explain these facets of the show he also draws upon nonfiction—the happenings of the real world. He says that “the show is about the end of an American Empire” and he questions “can we survive?” He continues with a startling thought that “human beings have lost some of their value” and that obtaining a college degree has decreased in value of importance—meaning that less of us are required to complete today’s tasks than we once were and ultimately this aspect leads to many people feeling indifferent about what they do on a day to day basis. His argument, therefore, is that the many people within Baltimore City, who are tied to drug related crimes, are a result of this feeling of indifference. He cites an example of a young boy, living in an area where the only place to make money is by engaging in the drug trade. The boy chooses to sell drugs because he knows that he matters less and that he will never reach the kind of lavish lifestyle that television exalts. His only option to make money, sadly, is to sell drugs.

Furthermore, Simon notes that as Americans “we have chosen capitalism—it has become our God” and our willingness to chose the dollar over compassion for other human beings has led to “separate Baltimore’s and separate Americas.” He comments that our “triumph of greed” has caused America to become a “more brutish and cynical place.” The more that we try to distinguish ourselves from those around us by the use of money and power, the greater the divide becomes of upper class and lower class. While many of us say that we would like our children to be raised with exposure to diversity, we only want that diversity to come at a very small fraction of the population. Simon says that once the minority population of an area reaches a certain percentile “property value starts to decrease.” Similar to these observations, the article by Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, also focuses on the shrinking middle class and the great divide that forms between the upper class and the poverty line. Not only does this gap in wealth, status, and comfort of living continue to grow, there is also the construction of a boarder between the two lifestyles, both metaphorically and physically.

Even within our own neighborhood of the Loyola College campus, it is easy to recognize the truth of the opinions of both Simon and Jacobs. If we travel for five minutes past the million-dollar, fenced in mansions, we see the ramshackle buildings of the projects—exposing that the middle ground is disappearing into the extremes.

As we are provided with the means to remove ourselves from the realities of poverty—the highway systems that, out of fear, allow us to leave the crime ridden cities—we continue to deepen this divide between the classes. As David Simon suggests “there is nothing to propose that this condition is not going to get worse” and he left the audience with little to hope for. The pieces of literature that we have discussed in class, although raising similar concerns, provide us with the hope that there is room for change. Specifically, within the poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins, the speaker begins with an observation that we as humans have become complacent with the things that God has given us and as a result we do not realize that we are doing harm to nature and to ourselves by abusing the gifts that God has given us. While this message is serious and bleak, similar to David Simon’s point, the poems as well as other sources offer the readers and all humans a second chance to make right the wrongs. Within the Jesuit tradition we learn that if we use all of our senses and the gifts that God has given us, we will be able to find the answers to the seemingly impossible questions that David Simon provokes.