David Simon in Real Time on Real Time
May 19th, 2009 by RussLast week, Bill Mahr’s HBO series, Real Time, featured drug policy guru and tv production savant, David Simon. Having created The Wire, one of the most nuanced and insightful television series ever, Simon has ascended to the rank of soothsayer amongst progressive political talking heads.
Too weighty to be a simple panelist, Simon was invited onto the show in a specially dedicated interview segment to discuss his take on Obama’s drug policies, amongst other things. One striking point made by Simon, was his avocation for jury nullification. Jury nullification is a mostly archaic court occurrence whereby the jury decides to acquit a defendant regardless of the evidence held against him. Simon argued that all juries should use this practice to protest the overzealous prosecution of non-violent drug crimes.
Just another instance of Simon’s forward thinking in the land of no creativity. If the legislators, magistrates, and attorneys won’t act, the people certainly should.
Creator of ‘The Wire’ Interviewed on Bill Moyers
April 23rd, 2009 by Russ
Few contemporary television producers have either the time or the inclination to go about the business of exposing corrupt bureaucracies and hypocritical leaders when it’s so much easier to provide empty entertainment. David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire, is a welcomed exception to the rule. His portrayal of Baltimore street life in the midst of the War on Drugs has been lauded as one of the finest television dramas ever created. This week, Simon appeared as a guest on PBS’s Bill Moyers’ Journal, to discuss his work.
A former career journalist with the Baltimore Sun, Simon found it prohibitively difficult to intelligently discuss any social ills in the course of writing a column. He recalls:
I was trying to explain how the drug war doesn’t work. And I would write these very careful and very well-researched pieces. And they would go into the aether and be gone. And whatever editorial writer was coming behind me would then write, ‘Let’s get tough on drugs.’ As if I hadn’t said anything. Even my own newspaper. And I would think, ‘Man, it’s just such an uphill struggle to do this with facts.’
Simon goes on to explain that the hustlers and street folk portrayed on The Wire often have no viable choices but to participate in the only economy they have access to — the drug economy:
In some ways it’s the most destructive form of welfare that we’ve established, which is the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It’s basically like opening up a Beth Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, ‘And you guys are all steel workers.’ To just say no? That’s our answer to that? You know, the economic model does not work. You know, listen, the only reason that alcohol and cigarettes, which do far more damage than heroine and cocaine, are legal, is that white people and affluent white people at that, make money off that stuff.
Through the show, Simon is able to give the urban underclass a chance to share their side of the story. He characterizes their struggle as follows:
The fact that these really are the excess people in America, we — our economy doesn’t need them. 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.
Thanks to David Simon and The Wire, many Americans who aren’t trapped in the forgotten circles of urban life now get it too.
A full transcript of the interview is available here.
