David Simon's year to get attention

Year ago tonight I was in New York City, at this place, where the Drum Major Institute was holding its annual benefit and giving out its Drum Major For Justice Award to, among others, The Wire's Producer and Creator, David Simon.  The Wire had just finished up its fifth and final season with a story arc about the decline and fall of newspapers.  From the old notebooks:

During film introducing DMI and its work to the crowd, Simon comes down from the stage to watch.  Leans on nearest column, putting his right shoulder solidly into the lean, left hand in hip pocket.  No jacket, no tie, blue and white striped shirt coming untucked.  Big, bulky guy with huge bald head.

Film ends.  Awards presented.  Simon last to get his.

Simon begins by saying that apparently this is his year for getting attention.  The Wire was on for four years and during that time he learned that you can make fun of cops, you can make fun of teachers, you can make fun of politicians, drug dealers, and longshoremen, and "nobody really gets exercised."  But in the fifth season he found out that if you make fun of reporters "all of a sudden they can't stop talking about you."

In addition to tonight's award, Simon picked up two others recently.  The University of Texas gave him a William Randolph Hearst Award.  He grins, gets a real kick out of the irony of that one.  "Even better," an organization like DMI out in California gave him the Upton Sinclair Award.

"This is really good stuff," Simon says, because in 1934 Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California on one of the most Progressive platforms ever.  "Damn near Socialist."   He was going to win.  But his "great antagonist" was Wm. Randolph Hearst.  "Hearst and his papers engaged in the kind of glorious character assassination that typifies American journalism of the 1930s and certainly no time after that."

Some people in the movie industry didn't want Sinclair governor either.  Irving Thalberg, for one.  Made fake newsreels showing actors dressed as hoboes getting off trains at California stations and being "interviewed" and telling the "reporters" they were coming to California because after Sinclair was elected they would never have to work again.

So Simon has his two awards on a shelf together and says, "I'm waiting for them to kick the shit out of each other."

_____________

Don't know why I bother to keep a notebook when everything turns up online eventually, except that I get to find out I take pretty good notes.  All of Simon's acceptance speech is on YouTube.

Comments

[Ken Muldrew]

Speaking personally, I take notes because otherwise I start daydreaming.

Did you follow _The_Wire_, Lance? I don't remember reading any posts about it.

[Lance]

Ken,

I didn't follow The Wire from beginning to end. I missed episodes here and there and still haven't watched any of the last season. I've been meaning to go back and watch it straight through. Life hasn't cooperated yet. I think I've written only one post about the show, Dickens comes to Charm City.

[Ken Muldrew]

Thanks for the pointer, I had no recollection of the post (I probably should have taken notes ;-) ). I didn't follow the show on TV (no HBO) but this past winter I got all the DVDs and watched the whole thing over about a month. It is truly an amazing work of art.

As you probably know by now (but perhaps didn't when you wrote that earlier post), Simon is basing his story on the Greek tragedies where the Gods alone decide whether redemption occurs or is denied. He doesn't have an answer. And he means to imply that nobody else has an answer either, because any truly effective solution is going to have to be radical to the point of being cataclysmic to our social order. He makes the case that cataclysm probably isn't such a bad result, nowadays.

What Simon brilliantly accomplishes in The Wire is to illustrate "the problem" that needs answering. He shows how this problem is essentially the same at all scales of social organization, from big city mayors down to the corner boys, and he generates empathy for the characters (many of whom should be utterly despicable on the surface) with the surprising revelation that their problems are the same as our problems.

The problem that Simon illustrates is that individuals within a bureaucratic organization are inherently balanced at a point of instability. That is to say that there can be no equilibrium position for any individuals in a bureaucracy; any attempt to remain stationary within the organization will end up costing your every waking minute of attention simply to stay in place, thereby destroying the very reason that you wanted to stay in that place (to work with craftsmanship, to do the right thing, to do the work that suits your training, temperament, natural abilities, etc.). The curse of middle-management is that once the door is opened for advancement, as it will be, you either accept the mission or pack your bags, because you will be on the way out the door if you don't play along. It's not just that people are ambitious and willing to screw someone over just to advance their career; they have to do these things just to stay in the game. And if the screwing-over is mild compared to what the individual has invested in their place within the organization (and here, this isn't just the crass measures like salary, benefits, pension, and the like, it can also be years of training and experience that allows an individual to do work that enriches their lives (during their downtime from screwing someone else over)) then the individual is likely to stick it out and do the wrong thing, even though they know perfectly well that they are doing wrong and how they should act in this situation to do justice to their fellow humans. The mythology of rugged individuals who make their own way tends to cloud our judgment of the moral compromises that we make when we act as individuals within an intensely interdependent social cage. It isn't evil and personal moral failure that causes individuals to do the wrong thing within a bureaucracy because the institutional inertia and social pressure overwhelm any sense of individual responsibility within the moral calculus. The cost of doing the right thing, when put into context of how social power is distributed and exercised within a bureaucracy, leads one to conclude that it isn't really the right thing.

What Simon doesn't highlight, but shows very clearly by pointedly avoiding it, is the unbelievable success of bureaucratic action in our society. We are ridiculously good at creating and structuring institutions for the organization and direction of vast numbers of people. As Cosma Shalizi has noted, "J. Random American Podunk Burg of a hundred thousand people displays a degree of formal organization which would have boggled any Sung mandarin or Roman proconsul (public school, police, post office, utilities, political parties)". The magic that has accomplished this is independent of political and economic ideology, it is all due to bureaucratic action. So even though we force people into dreadful personal moral compromises, rob them of the opportunity to find purpose in their lives through the execution of craft, leave vast swarthes of humanity bereft of the luxuries and comforts of the select few, we still manage to be outlandishly good at mobilizing people to construct edifices to our collective genius.

So we're trapped in the social cage of civilization and forced to relentlessly pursue economic growth. There are way, way too many people to allow any more than a handful act as lone individuals, and there is no equilibrium point for an economy (at least nobody has ever been able to figure out how to put an economy into equilibrium, so faced with the choice of growth or decay, the obvious choice is...). In The Wire, Simon shows us the tragic cost of our bureaucratic genius. Both the societal cost and the individual cost. He also shows us how we cannot escape through the possible changes that might be enacted through the political institutions that we have (and here I stress "possible", these go way beyond the "practical" solutions that have any chance of ever being implemented). The show is a Greek Tragedy because the problem is beyond human abilities to solve (taking the narrow view that we have to use conventional political avenues to solve the problem).

I hope you get a chance to watch the whole series; it's awfully good television.