Is The Wire Too Cynical?

...Undeterred, Bell stayed active with BUILD and helped gather petition signatures and organize demonstrations...

...Simon's characters are fascinating individuals who reflect a broad array of human emotions and conflicts...

...We're worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more...

...Simon recently told Slate that, "Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less...

...BUILD not only won the nation's first living wage campaign, it has built hundreds of affordable housing units called Nehemiah Homes (named after the Biblical prophet who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem...

...They don't always win, but by their persistence and their ability to recruit people to join them, they have to be taken seriously by the city's power brokers...

...Shakespeare was not wrong because he didn't write about the good kings...

...Lobbied by ACORN and other community groups, Mayor Dixon and the City Council sued Wells Fargo Bank in January for targeting risky sub-prime loans in the city's black neighborhoods that led to a wave of foreclosures that reduced city tax revenues and increased its costs of dealing with abandoned properties...

...He generally views the poor as helpless victims rather than as people with the capacity to act on their own behalf to bring about change...

...Last December, Mathews helped lead a campaign of thousands of janitors in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and the District of Columbia to win a better contract...

...He added, "It's the triumph of capitalism over human value...

...Missing from the story line is what actually occurred in 2004 when two groups—ACORN and the Algebra Project—mobilized parents, students, and teachers to pressure the then-mayor, Martin O'Malley, to ask for state funds to avoid massive layoffs and school closings...

...The Wire ignore[d] all 80 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 the good work the faith community had done," he complained...

...More than 700 Baltimorean cleaners gained from this victory...

...The writers attended to detail...

...The current rate is $9.62...

...It's viable for the few...

...Rather, they mobilize people to win small, concrete victories that improve people's living and working conditions, and whet their appetites for further battles...

...THESE REAL-LIFE organizing campaigns by BUILD, ACORN, and Justice for Janitors were reported in the Baltimore Sun and by local TV and radio stations...

...It's more negative than positive," he observed...

...These community activists are ordinary people who sometimes manage to do extraordinary things...

...Week in and week out, the stories were so relentlessly hopeless that Slate's Jacob Weisberg felt buoyant because the show "is filled with characters who should quit but don't, not only the boys themselves but teachers, cops, ex-cops, and ex-cons...

...Baltimore was trying to cut costs by outsourcing jobs to private firms...

...Mathews, who remembers when every public facility in Baltimore was segregated, only occasionally watched The Wire...

...And, slowly and steadily, their organizations have won significant victories that improve the lives of Baltimore's poor and working-class residents...

...But the show's version of reality was only partly right...

...Last year, about thirteen years after the campaign began, Maryland became the first state in the country to enact a state living-wage law...

...Robert Mathews is a sixty-four-year-old janitor in an eleven-story office building in downtown Baltimore...

...Like most great stories, the main characters were morally ambiguous, but so finely etched that we cared about them...

...They do not expect to turn Baltimore upside down...

...The fourth year of The Wire focused on Baltimore's school crisis through the lives of several young boys barely coping with problems at home and lured by the illegal drug business...

...She coped with how to pay the electricity bill, groceries, and the rent...

...For almost three decades, Mathews has been a union activist, counseling, mentoring, and organizing his fellow low-wage janitors across the city...

...But community activists and leaders like these don't exist in the Baltimore depicted in The Wire...

...From the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, from the liberal American Prospect to the libertarian Reason magazine, plaudits were unanimous for the HBO show, whose large, primarily African American, ensemble cast portrayed cops, teachers, reporters, drug dealers, dockworkers, politicians, and other characters in the real dramas of a major American city...

...This is a problem, but not an aesthetic one...

...As a result of this grassroots organizing effort, Baltimore passed the nation's first living-wage ordinance in 1994...

...It's the triumph of capitalism...

...This, in fact, is how The Wire views the poor...

...Bell earned $4.25 an hour with no health benefits...

...j UST AS THE show found no room for grassroots heroes like Bell and Miles, so too it overlooked the efforts of other community groups involved in successful organizing efforts...

...For thirty years, BUILD—based on the ideas of the late organizing guru Saul Alinskyhas been dedicated to transforming Baltimore's struggling inner-city neighborhoods...

...When the company discovered Bell's activities, it fired her...

...The show does an exceptional job of telling one side of the story," says Rob English, the thirty-eight-year old lead organizer for BUILD, who served for four years as a platoon leader in Somalia...

...Snoop, second in command to drug thug Marlo, explains to a hesitant gang member how she'll retaliate if he doesn't cooperate: "We will be brief with all you motherfuckers—I think you know...

...The Wire reinforced white middle-class stereotypes of inner-city life...

...But I'm disappointed that I never see things like this on The Wire...

...Yet David Simon, the show's creator, found no room to tell any of these stories in the sixty episodes of The Wire...

...The people on the show don't have anything to live for...

...ACORN's young organizers have worked with tenants to pressure slumlords to remove lead hazards in thousands of apartments...

...Viewers may have thought they were seeing the whole picture, but the show's unrelentingly bleak portrayal missed what's hopeful in Baltimore and, indeed, in other major American cities...

...It is...

...This country has embraced the idea that this is a viable domestic policy...

...It would affect 1,500 workers, hired by private bus, security, and janitorial companies...

...After months of agitation, O'Malley was forced to come up with the money and avoid unnecessary layoffs and a state takeover...

...They harness what organizers call "cold anger" and turn it into outrage against injustice rather than indiscriminate rage...

...Liberals like Weisberg are satisfied with the small ray of hope in some of these characters, like Bubbles, who maintain their dignity and pride amid the pervasive turmoil...

...ACORN's members also closed corner stores dealing drugs, improved the city's housing-code enforcement program, and pressured the police department to assign more foot patrols to the ARGUMENTS low-income Cherry Hill section of Baltimore...

...After 30 years of cleaning office buildings, he makes $9.10 an hour...

...The young people have no vision...

...With hundreds of ACORN members attending and one member shouting through a bullhorn, ACORN took over the meeting before police hauled them out of the room...

...BUILD also created a network of afterschool youth programs called Child First that provides free after-school care for over a thousand children every year at the city public schools and involves parents, staff, administrators, church members, and other community members in tutoring, as school volunteers, and in advocacy...

...The community and union activists hit the streets and filed lawsuits to get more money pumped into the school system...

...He was offended by its bad language but also by its unrealistic depiction of the Baltimore he's lived in his entire life...

...One of the veteran housing activists, fiftynineyear-old Bishop Douglas Miles of Koinonia Baptist Church, whose church has been in the forefront of work with at-risk adolescents, watched every episode of The Wire and was outraged at the way the church community was portrayed...

...The show's writers, producers, and directors portray most of the characters—clergy and cops, teachers and principals, reporters and editors, union members and leaders, politicians and city employees—as corrupt, cynical, and ineffective...

...The few heroes depicted in The Wire are individualist renegades and gadflies...

...Simon's worldview is hardly radical...

...A longer version of this article is at http:// www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1104 82 n DISSENT / Summer 2008...

...The problem is that The Wire won't encourage America to care about change...

...Bell organized other custodians to join the living-wage campaign...

...JOHN ATLAS is president of the National Housing Institute and is writing a book about poverty in America through the lens of community organizing...

...PETER DREIER teaches politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles and is co-author of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City...

...These include cops like James McNulty (Dominic West) and Lester Freaman (Clarke Peters) and the stick-up artist Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams), as well as social worker Whalen (a Narcotics Anonymous sponsor played by the singer Steve Earle), the Deacon (an influential West side churchman played by Melvin Williams), and Dennis "Cutty" Wise (Chad L. Coleman), whose boxing program may stop a teenager from succumbing to a life of drugs...

...There are now similar laws in about 200 cities across the country...

...BUILD put together a coalition of churches and labor unions, and lobbied the city to pass a "living wage" law that would increase wages above the federal poverty line...

...Banks have persistently redlined its minority neighborhoods or engaged in abusive, discriminatory predatory lending practices, leading to a recent wave of widespread foreclosures...

...The decent cops, teachers, and government employees relate to the poor as "problems" or "clients" rather than as fellow citizens capable of being organized into a force for change...

...Instead, Simon's portrayal of Baltimore buttresses the myth that the poor, especially the black poor in the city's ghettos, are drug dealers or users, eternally helpless victims, unable to engage in collective self-help and dependent on government largesse, or crime, to survive...

...With its unpredictable plot twists and deft foreshadowing, the show juggled more than sixty-five characters and kept them vividly evil, sad, or humane...

...Anyone who's worked or lived in America's inner-city neighborhoods could recognize the reality of the show's characters and the issues of crime, poverty, drugs, and family stress presented with a combination of sympathy and outrage...

...The law would apply to employees who worked for private firms that had contracts with the city...

...BUILD recruited academics who produced studies showing that it made no DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 79 ARGUMENTS sense for the city government to save money in the short term by underpaying workers who then had to resort to a variety of governmentsupported homeless shelters and soup kitchens to supplement their low wages...

...Economists estimate that the law puts millions of dollars into the pockets of Baltimore's working poor each year and has had a ripple effect pushing up wages in other low-paid jobs in the city...

...IN 1994, a community group known as BUILD (Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development) led a campaign that mobilized ordinary people to fight for higher wages for the working poor...

...In December, after several years of work with Sheila Dixon (as a City Council member and now as mayor) to renew the rundown section of Baltimore known as Oliver—where much of The Wire is filmed—BUILD persuaded the city to transfer 155 abandoned properties to the community group, which will either rehab the homes or tear them down, build new ones, then sell them to working-class home buyers...

...If you want change, you have to believe things can change...

...In December 2003, ACORN organized a confrontation at a board of education meeting...

...IN REAL LIFE, which has a longer run than the television show, the people organized by BUILD, ACORN, SEIU, Algebra Project, and other community, labor, and environmental justice groups maintain a sense of hope and possibility in the face of difficult odds...

...The workplaces, neighborhoods, language, and events portrayed in The Wire have the kind of verisimilitude that justifies the torrent of praise...

...He may think he's the crusading journalist exposing injustice, but he's really a cynic who takes pity on the poor, yet can't imagine a world where things could be different...

...Sonja Merchant-Jones, a former publichousing resident who is active in Baltimore ACORN, notes that "together we've been able to confront elected officials, banks, and the utility companies, and get them to meet with us, negotiate with us, and change things...

...The ordinance would force wages up from $4.25 to $8.80 an hour over three years and then increase each year to account for inflation...

...ACORN, a community organizing group, built a coalition that included public employee unions and the Algebra Project, a group founded by civil rights icon Bob Moses to organize young people around school issues...

...Conservatives have their stereotypes reinforced, since the show depicts most blacks as dangerous criminals, drug addicts, or welfare recipients—culturally damaged, a class of people whose behavior and values separate them from respectable society...

...Feel me: It's what The Wire is all about...

...This refusal to give up in the face of defeat is the reality of ghetto life as well...

...This success encouraged a school-reform effort led by the new superintendent, Bonnie Copeland, and egged on more families to become involved in their children's education...

...Unlike ACORN, BUILD, the Algebra Project, and Justice for Janitors, these do-gooders don't seek to empower people as a collective force...

...Without them, and the organizations they belong to, we are left with a view of Baltimore's poor as people sentenced for life to an unchanging prison of social pathology...

...To liberals and conservatives alike, The Wire reinforces the notion that the DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 81 ARGUMENTS status quo cannot be changed...

...At one point in the show, the boyish but cynical Mayor Thomas "Tommy" Carcetti (Aiden Gillen) lobbies Maryland's governor to help bail out the city's bankrupt public school system...

...After months of protesting, picketing, threatening to strike, and negotiating, the janitors—part of the Service Employees International Union's Justice for Janitors campaign—won a 28 percent pay increase, up to two weeks of vacation, and additional health benefits...

...One of those people was Valerie Bell, a high school graduate working for a private, nonunion custodial firm that contracted with the city to scrub floors and take out the garbage at Southern High School...

...And the dialogue rang true...

...In that way, it did the opposite of what its creator, David Simon, said he wanted the show to do: spur our country to end the plight of the poor and minorities who live in America's inner-cities...

...Police detectives drank "Natty Boh"—National Bohemian— a beer originally brewed in Baltimore...

...They try to help individuals, one at a time, rather than try to reform the institutions that fail to address their needs...

...Dante was not wrong because he wrote about hell...

...But it's missing all the pastors, parents and teachers, principals, young people who are doing amazing work, radically trying to change and improve Baltimore...