Bubblehammerblog

Bill Moyers, one of the very few mainstream US journalists with anything interesting to say, recently interviewed David Simon, creator and co-producer of The Wire. It's in two parts, and I urge you to watch it HERE

Moyers says in his introduction:

'When television history is written', one critic says, 'Little else will rival The Wire. 'And when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, I'll wager they will not be able to ignore this remarkable and compelling portrayal of life in our cities.'

I agree. He goes on to compare The Wire to Gibbon, for its portrayal of the decadence of an empire, and to Dickens, for that writer's description of the dark undercurrents of Victorian London. These comparisons are apt enough, though I'd prefer a comparison to Mayhew, less sentimental and voyeuristic than Dickens, and to Engels, for its comprehensive and incisive depiction of contemporary working class life. (Something that, incidentally, The Wire shares with the sadly neglected recent film The Wrestler.)

Simon has plenty of useful things to say in the interview about the US elite's 'War on Drugs' strategy, though he doesn't venture beyond the current discourse of American liberalism, and so a sense of frustration, pessimism, and disappointment is evident - but he can hardly be blamed for that, since in America, as elsewhere, this is the only oppositional discourse with any hope of getting a hearing.

Simon sees the WoD in structural economic terms, being a consquence of the fact that in the modern economic system some 10-15% of the population, for various reasons, is entirely superfluous to requirements. This is true, but in Britain at least I'd opt for a much higher figure of 20-25%.

You could present this in crude diagramatic terms. The social structure of late capitalism might be represented by a diamond shape - vast wealth at the top apex, (as Simon points out with some outrage, one percent of elite Americans own over 20% of the wealth, and counting), broad contentment in the middle, and in the bottom sector a range of relative to abject deprivation. Simon, as a liberal, implies that he'd settle for a society that looked more like an equilateral triangle. We 21st Century communists are working towards a model that might resemble a circle, or a sphere.

But don't let me distract you from watching an excellent interview.

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