Saturday, April 18, 2009

David Simon on everything

You have to watch the interview with David Simon, co-creator of The Wire, on Bill Moyers Journal.

I’m so full of admiration for Simon’s missions and his skill at storytelling that I feel a little sheepish for blurting earlier on Twitter that he’s a print guy ‘til the death. During the Moyers interview he refined my understanding of where he stands on what brought newspapers to their present condition.

A former Baltimore Sun reporter, he tells about taking the paper’s third buyout some years ago, and puts some context around the current debate about charging for internet content. He explains how constant budget cuts in the service of bigger profits devalued the newspaper product to the point where, when the internet threat finally did come along, the online product wasn’t worth enough to charge for it. 

The larger share of the interview concerns systemic failures in all kinds of institutions—what The Wire was all about. He’s right, you know, that just electing the right guy isn’t going to yank this empire out of its self-imolation. Barack Obama knows that, too. At least that’s what he kept telling us in the campaign, when he talked about change being everybody’s business.

Still, now that Obama’s in office, he’s more centrist than some of us pretended he might be, and he spins a narrative, because that’s the way things work. When Moyers and Simon talked about “juking the stats” as a common thread that runs through the trouble with various institutions like education and law enforcement, I was thinking the real problem is something related to spinning the stats, but broader than that.

Ayn Rand talked a lot about pretending in her novels, especially in Atlas Shrugged. That’s the theme that makes me return to her, despite some of her uglier and now old-fashioned ideas. (I guess you take what you like and leave the rest from any thinker—from Rand with her female characters who thrive on contemptuous treatment, or from Simon and his apparent dismissal of the idea that decent reporting can be published in most any mode. The internet isn’t inherently fluffy and derivative.)

But about pretending. Don’t you think it’s the root of many evils? We delude ourselves personally, all the time. Our leaders and institutions seem to spend a whole lot more effort on framing what they’ve done or will do than they spend in the actual doing. Then we help them. It starts dawning on Dagney Taggart, the railroad exec in Atlas Shrugged, that she’s been enabling the behavior she despises, and she finally comes right out and says “I’m not going to help you pretend.”

Time to be blunt. That was the beauty of The Wire. Raw truth. Can we take it?

I can’t wait for Simon’s new series about post-Katrina New Orleans.