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When Is Fiction More Real Than The News?

“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.
Remember, you heard it here — what Edward Gibbon was to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or Charles Dickens to the smoky mean streets of Victorian London, David Simon is to America today.

Bill Moyers, PBS

Baltimore

Separating Illusion From Reality

There are always new voices leaking through the one-dimensional big-media filter. Some, like HBO’s The Wire producer David Simon, offer up important, insightful, interesting and sometimes inspiring information and ideas our understanding of ourselves.  There’s a great deal to learn from Simon’s entertainment oriented view of who we are today — for his contribution to today’s national dialog about what became of what he calls the America left behind offers useful insight into two very different Americas.

But David Simon raises other important questions when he speaks to Americans about America for his newspaperman’s inclinations toward fidelity-to-fact have turned the tables of big media. While broadcast media, and cable news slowly kill themselves for short term economic gain, other media, often owned by the same big media conglomerates are shattering American illusions with American realities.

In today’s confusing media mix, what purport to be legitimate media fail even the most generous test for relevance or credibility while certain entertainment media take on the burden of journalistic leadership. While Jon Stewart broke the barriers of comedy to attack the failures of journalism [ PBS Gwen Ifill and later CNBC's Jim Cramer ] HBO and The Wire have been portraying the dichotomies of today’s America for five successful seasons.

HBO subscribers who found little of importance on NBC Nightly News, or This Week with George Stephanopoulous, turned to David Simon to know what was happening on our streets and deep inside of our culture.

David Simon -- Newspaperman, Producer Writer, HBO's The Wire

The Dust Of Life

David Simon is in some ways an American historian — one that deals in the nitty-gritty details of life on the streets — what Viet Namese  describe as the dust of life. His HBO series was successful, perhaps, because it held up a mirror to American life in ways not otherwise seen in big media America. But there it was in all its grittiness and and broken dreams funded and aired by one of the nation’s most powerful big media.

What’s different about HBO is that it markets its content to consumer-viewers, not advertisers. Thus HBO can take risks and seek to fill small niches advertising media seem unwilling to consider.

Today, after five years devoted to bringing today’s street realities to suburbanites, the young and affluent and anyone else looking for escape from the drizzle of entertainment television, David Simon has a great deal to tell his fellow countrymen about how he has come to see not only where we find ourselves, but how today’s American comports to the America left behind.

Real Life Complexities vs. Single Issue Thinking

On his recent appearance on Bill Moyers Journal, David Simon spoke about things and issues of great importance to solving our perplexing problems — and understanding what we aspire to be. What he learned in the last five years devoted to fictionalizing the realities of modern day urban life was not new to Simon, for his life was once that of a newspaper reporter. He remains a writer, of books and television dramas, but as with you and me, he seeks to make sense of American culture, politics and behaviors.

When asked about today’s big media depiction of today’s American in the media, as compared to what it really has become, David Simon recently told Bill Moyers, what life looks like on the real streets of Baltimore, where his HBO series was portrayed and filmed.

You see the stuff that doesn’t make it into the civics books. And also you see how interconnected things are. How connected the performance of the school system is to the culture of a corner. Or where parenting comes in. And where the lack of meaningful work in all these things, you know, the decline of industry suddenly interacts with the paucity and sort of fraud of public education in the inner city. Because THE WIRE is not a story about the America, it’s about the America that got left behind.

Devastating Insight

But David Simon is about far more than generalities for his attention is often directed to what’s most important to know but least reported. On the impact of failed education for inner city children, Simon speaks of a reality few of us want to know about when he tells it like it is about the plight of inner city students — and their meager prospects in today’s technology driven culture.

And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy. We pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we’re actually including them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not foolish. They get it.

Flexible Statistics

The America David Simon speaks about is the one we all talk about but know little about. Statistics, he explains, is about perception, spin and political agenda. They are used to obscure what’s happening, what’s important and what matters to our survival as a nation.

You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they’re solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn’t represent anything, once they got done with them.

Capitalism As Remedy, Not Cause

In this exchange with host Bill Moyers, David Simon describes the real-life difference between slogans, political idealism, and shared purpose.

Inner City Americans: Marginalized By Statistics?

BILL MOYERS:You know, you start talking about a social compact between the people at the bottom of the pyramid and the people at the top, and that’s how you ground a society, and people look at you and say, “Are you talking about sharing wealth?” You know? “Yeah.” I want to– Listen, capitalism is the only engine credible enough to generate mass wealth. I think it’s imperfect, but we’re stuck with it. And thank God we have that in the toolbox. But if you don’t manage it in some way that you incorporate all of society, maybe not to the same degree, but if everybody’s not benefiting on some level and if you don’t have a sense of shared purpose, national purpose, then all it is a pyramid scheme. All it is, is– who’s standing on top of whose throat?

BILL MOYERS: Why do you think, David, that we tolerate such gaps in between rich and poor?

DAVID SIMON: You know, I’m fascinated by it. Because a lot of the people who end up voting for that kind of laissez-faire market policy are people who get creamed by it. And I think it’s almost like a casino. You’re looking at the guy winning, you’re looking at the guy who pulled the lever and all the bells go off, when a guy wins, and all the coins are coming out of a one-armed bandit. You’re thinking, “That could be me. I’ll play by those rules.” But actually, those are house rules. And you’re going to lose. Most of you are going to lose.

Is there an America left behind in your life?

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