Live from The Wire: (David) Simon Says

David Simon discuss a scene with cast during shooting

The drug-filled scenarios from The Wire were fiction based on reality, but the fact is that America's failed war on drugs is actually part of a systemic class war that is "killing the poor" and a shockingly visible sign of "what is going wrong with the American experiment," says David Simon, the co-creator of the 5-season HBO series which many critics agree is the greatest show in television history.

"We are brutalizing the poor at an incredible rate. The drug war is a war against the poor. That is all it is. It's just shameless and it's got to end," said Simon, responsible for what is termed the complete trilogy of modern urban life - The Wire, Homicide: Life in the Streets, and The Corner.

"We don't know what to do with the poor. We don't have work for them. So we're putting them up as someone to be feared instead of part of the American collective,"  Simon added.

Simon, who spoke for 90 minutes today at his alma mater, the University of Maryland, as part of the Dean's Lecture Series, said prison numbers support this class destruction. "America has more of its population in jail than any other country on the face of the earth. When we started The Wire (in 2002) there were 500,000 people in prison. Today, there are 2.3 million. Then, 34% were incarcerated for a violent crime; today that number is 7%," Simon said. "Why are we doing this? It's as if we are saying we don't need these people."

Simon fears there is another dark motive for continuing the war on drugs and increasing the national prison population - corporate greed. "Now we have for-profit companies taking over the prisons," he said. "They want to grow the prison population for money. It (the drug war) hasn't worked for 40 years. It didn't affect anything and yet it goes on. What's happening in Mexico is a holocaust. Our drug war really means that we are willing to fight to the death of the last Mexican or the last 14-year-old on the corner."

He pointed out that despite overwhelming facts to the contrary, many Americans in power still see drugs and the addiction problems that often ensue as a moral issue, rather than an economic and medical one."Morality is really cheap. There's no (legal) work in the inner city. It's destructive, but really it's a rational decision for a kid there to sell drugs. The only people hiring are in the drug trade," Simon said.

Not content with destroying the poor, unbridled corporate greed also threatens to eviscerate the middle class, Simon said. "When we were writing The Wire we were trying to write a cautionary tale about America," Simon said.  "The middle class is being eviscerated. The truth is this was 20 to 30 years in the making. Labor is in decline. Organized labor made this country great. (In the series) the police, the union workers, the immigrant sex workers, the teachers, the news people are all seeing this. Capitalism is a great economic engine. But we're forgetting the need to marry it to a social consciousness. You are a fool if you think capitalism is going to result in social justice."

Now a revered television maker, a respected social critic, and a winner of the the half-million dollar MacArthur Genius grant, Simon said he had no inkling of his future when he was young. His introduction to introspective political and social thought came early by way of his family. "We were all lefties. I remember sitting at the table and having all these incredible discussions. We had a house with a lot of books, a lot of newspapers, a lot of periodicals and a lot of debate.  It was a house to have arguments and I mean that in the best way."

After college, Simon was hired as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. "I was a generalist. I wasn't chasing a career. It was a way of kind of being a voyeur and not growing up," Simon said. "Journalism was a very pure way for me to learn something and then tell a story and then the next day you do something different."

Then he was  assigned to the crime beat.  "There I was, a 22-year-old thrown into covering crime," he said. "I was aloof from the cop culture. I got into 15-minute arguments with the desk sergeants. So the game was on even before I got out in the streets.  I realized I was only being told things from 1 perspective. I was missing some of the things I needed. I had to get out and learn, meet people on their own terms"

As his perspectives widened, Simon's writing blossomed in detail and depth. One of his most famous articles, written in January of 1987,  featured a corporate chart of the complete workings of the large drug gang of Baltimore crime lord Melvin Williams. "It was full of smart people who were really organized. This looked a lot like corporate America." Simon said.

While his articles "gave some people (at The Sun) the fidgets," Simon said "they left me alone and they didn't promote me. It was an inertia that worked out for me. Had they made me cover higher education, I would be a different person today."

Simon wrote a book that was turned into Homicide. Then came another that became The Corner. Finally, Simon took a buyout from the paper and began work on what was to become The Wire, which has been praised as a thorough, riveting, Dickensian-like telling of modern American inner city life.

Throughout his talk, Simon stressed that The Wire was a collective effort among his creative partner Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop and teacher; the writers which included 3 of America's greatest crime novelists - George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane; and the talented cast and crew of the show.  He said he is "shocked by what a long tail" The Wire, which ended in 2008 after 60 episodes and 5 seasons, has grown. For example, it is regularly taught in university campuses like Harvard across the country in courses as varied as drama, urban history, sociology, and ethics.

Simon said that while he is pleased with the public reception the show continues to receive,  he really hopes viewers consider the complex arguments it showcases. "The last thing I ever wanted to do was to sustain a franchise. Drama is life without the boring parts, although some people probably feel we put too many of those in. We were angry (about the state of America) and we were trying to tell about real lives and real problems and spark real arguments and real discussions. We never considered ... the people love Omar so we can't kill Omar or the people want more Stringer Bell,  let's give it to them." 

While most of Simon's talk was extremely serious about extremely serious topics, it was not without its humorous moments. When informed by an audience member that President Barack Obama had, once again just 1 day earlier, repeated during an ESPN interview that The Wire was his favorite TV show and that its moralistic gay hitman Omar was his favorite character, Simon laughed as he remarked, "I wonder what audience he was shooting for. I really need for him to talk about Treme (Simon's new HBO show about New Orleans recovering from the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina)."

Simon also gave shoutouts to his Mother who was in the 2nd row of the auditorium Like her son, she too graduated from Maryland, but there was a major difference. "She was summa cum laude and I was summa come nothing," Simon said.

In his introductory remarks, Simon said he had totaled up the student tickets he had received while a student at Maryland and the generous amount of his speaking fee and "just realized that I got every dollar back." Actually, that wasn't true. As he does with all his speaking fees, Simon turns his speaking money over to a Baltimore group that works with Baltimore kids, a pledge he has been keeping since The Corner was released. That shows concern. That shows compassion. That shows commitment. In essence, even more than The Wire, that shows the real David Simon. I bet his summa cum laude Mother was proud even though Simon expressed her initial concern that "I would use some profanity that she'll tell me later I should be ashamed of."

Tales, Tidbits, and Tips
Although most of Simon's powerful talk was directed to laying out a cogent, compelling argument about some of America's most glaring faults, some solutions were also suggested. They included:

• admitting that even if a person takes no action on the drug problem, we are all actively or tacitly involved. During the discussion, an audio clip was played conveying this idea. In that clip, Omar, a known but moralistically motivated hitman is testifying against a drug dealer and the opposing attorney is trying to portray him as a vicious criminal who would say anything to which Omar replies: "I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It's all in the game."
• if you find you are on a jury that is trying to convict someone of a non-violent drug offense, use your Constitutional right of jury nullification. "You have the moral right not to uphold an immoral law," Simon said.
• encourage the government when it negotiates favorable trade agreements with other countries to makes certain  those countries encourage proper working conditions and promote strong unions. "Tell them to say we're not going to sanction child labor or a dead labor leader in a ditch," Simon said.