I Am NOT the Beastmaster

And the Categories Are...

It started out as a cheap and easy way to fill posts and spark discussion in the fall of 2006. It's evolved into one of the standbys of my Wire blogging, the neverending game to determine who's the nastiest, dumbest, or wiliest schemer in a cutthroat world--the Asshole Sweepstakes.

I thought I'd celebrate the end of the greatest show ever made for television with a big awards ceremony and retrospective, but an "Asshole Sweepstakes" is too crude for such a momentous occasion.  Instead I've decided to name them the Andres, in honor of Andre "Bubbles" Royo's famous street Oscar.  And I've expanded the contests to include two new honors that I've been tracking for a while without labels.  Here they are, the categories for the First Annual Fifth Anniversary Andre Awards...

Biggest Asshole: What makes an asshole?  Is it murdering people, importing heroin, mismanaging a police department, or wrecking a city?  In your book or mine, sure, but many of those actions actually serve the institutions that set the perverse logic of this show.  The institutions demand nothing less.  That doesn't make the guilty parties good people, just good workers in a sick economy.

What makes an asshole is more than just the scale of the damage.  It's the violation of the codes that are supposed to govern your trade, or the pure glee taken in doing it.  It's ordering the murder of your best friend's cousin, while you're screwing his girlfriend, while he's in prison taking a sentence for you.  It's calling a hit on Sunday morning.  It's humiliating a district commander in front of his peers before you fire him; insulting a security guard so you can invent an excuse to kill him; warping a child's mind and sending him out on the corners because you've gotten used to your idle lifestyle.  It's making life miserable for everybody else purely because you can.  It's always being ready to do the cruel or selfish thing, whether it's necessary or not.  Isn't that what makes an asshole?

Mm, sure. That and a sphincter muscle.

Dumbest Asshole:  And then you have the incompetent workers, the bad decisions, the...

Oh hell, just look at Herc.

 

Craftiest Bastard:  This is not to say they are not assholes.  Sometimes they are the most destructive characters on the show.  But a bastard does not abuse his or her assholery, applying to one end and one end only:  their own advantage.  Whether they use their gifts for advancement, profit, or simple self-preservation, the crafty bastards are consummate professionals.

And while they may break a few eggs along the way... roll back a few programs, bust a few unions... they are exceptionally competent at what they do.  Remember, siccing the Major Crimes Unit on Frank Sobotka wasn't just ruining hundreds of lives in pursuit of a petty grudge--it was a great hunch about how much money Sobotka had and where he was getting it.  It was solid police work rooted in strong local knowledge, the knowledge The Wire most respects, and it made the entire rest of the series possible.  Underestimate the Craftiest Bastard at your own peril.

Heart of Gold:  I nearly called this one "Teacher of the Year," but these characters aren't always teachers.  Whether they mentor young officers, bring addicts into twelve-step programs, teach troubled kids, legalize drugs, or carry a shotgun under their trenchcoat, these characters are the moral centers of their seasons.  Though not always of every season, Lester Freamon.

Most Improved:  Speaks for itself.  The Wire isn't unremitting tragedy.  Every year a character or two will try to straighten themselves out, find a new job, a new mentor, or a new lifestyle.  Some backslide and some don't, but they remind us that postmodern America isn't as bad as it looks.  Or rather, it is as bad as it looks, in spite of the fact that a few people still manage to get themselves right.

By the way, I wasn't planning to choose all my examples from the police; I guess I must think of them as the show's protagonists.  I suppose you could do the same with the street characters, since they've been around just as long and offer at least as many options.  It would be educational to see who lines up with who.  Here's one point that flies in the face of season three's parallel structure--the criminal counterpart to Bunny Colvin is not Stringer Bell.  It's this guy:

   

To whet your appetite for the upcoming Andre Awards for season five--for which suggestions will be welcome--I thought I'd run through the past seasons.  The season four Andres were set pretty firmly in my mind, but I had to assign them retroactively for previous years.  I'm drawing a few blanks, so any suggestions (or disputations) are welcome here, too.

Season One:  The Barksdales

Biggest Asshole:  Bill Rawls
Dumbest Asshole:  Wallace (runner-up, Wendell "Orlando" Blocker)
Craftiest Bastard:  Ervin Burrell?  Maurice Levy?
Heart of Gold:  Omar Little
Most Improved:  Cedric Daniels (runner-up, Roland Pryzbylewski)

Season Two:  The Port

Biggest Asshole:  Stringer Bell
Dumbest Asshole:  Ziggy Sobotka
Craftiest Bastard:  The Greek
Heart of Gold:  Beatrice "Beadie" Russell
Most Improved:  absolutely no idea, though Daniels pulls off a great career move

Season Three:  Hamsterdam

Biggest Asshole:  Bill Rawls
Dumbest Asshole:  no idea, but when in doubt go with Herc
Craftiest Bastard:  Tommy Carcetti (runner-up, Marlo Stanfield)
Heart of Gold:  Howard "Bunny" Colvin
Most Improved:  Ellis Carver (with a late-season challenge from Jimmy McNulty)

It's not impossible that Bunny Colvin is both the Heart of Gold and the Dumbest Asshole in season three.  Clarence Royce also drops the ball pretty badly.

Season Four:  The Schools

Biggest Asshole:  DeLonda Brice
Dumbest Asshole:  Thomas "Herc" Hauk
Craftiest Bastard:  Stan Valchek
Teacher of the Year:  Howard "Bunny" Colvin
Most Improved:  Namond Brice

Interesting how the show's nominal protagonist, Jimmy McNulty, is never the noblest, craftiest, most selfish/antisocial, or dumbest character.  That's probably as it should be, with the caricatures generally displaced to the borders of the story.  Even more interesting, McNulty only shows the capacity for improvement in a couple of seasons, and he's always eclipsed by other characters who make bigger changes.

Of course, this year he may be on pace to win two Andres at once.

And what about this year?  Who should win for season five?  Start mulling it over now, but save your thoughts for the next post, when I handicap the races and give you the insider predictions... and since I choose who wins, they're pretty far inside.

In the meanwhile, I'd love to have a full list for the awards ceremony.  Who should win for the past four seasons?

"Time to 'fess up"

Another terrific episode as The Wire builds toward what looks to be a huge finale.  It's no accident that the well-received weeks eight and nine (which weren't included in the screeners all the critics received) have focused on the wiretap investigations that are the bread and butter of this show, playing down the less successful newspaper storyline--although that plot makes some great advances, too.

The arrests of the Stanfield organization (including Cheese Wagstaff--good on you, Omar) look like a typical Wire false dawn, much as we saw at about this point in previous seasons.  McNulty's shit is critically fucked, as they say, so many different ways that I can't see this case holding up in court, with the possible exception of Bunk's honest arrest of Chris Partlow--and even that's tainted.  Nevertheless, the busts were great fun to watch. I notice they were all coordinated on the ground by Sydnor; back in season one Daniels lobbied hard to get him on the Barksdale detail, and we're seeing how good that decision was as he grows into the roles Freamon and Daniels once filled.  He's the best hope for a future Major Crimes Unit, as long as he doesn't go down with the ship.

I have no intention of naming or linking to the guilty parties, but it's absolutely appalling to read fans on other Wire blogs complaining about Kima "snitching" on McNulty and Freamon.  Set aside for a moment the fact that the serial killer story was always a house of cards, already tumbling... or that Kima does it the right way, taking steps to protect Carver and telling him to protect his people.  What kind of Wire fan could watch Randy's story in season four and still berate someone for snitching?  What show have they been watching?

The Colvin scene had absolutely nothing to do with any of the plotlines, but it was great seeing Bunny, Namond, and the Deacon just the same.  The encounter with Carcetti, especially Colvin's final rejoinder, would have made a fine epilogue for the series (although I'm sure the writers have something even better in store).  The Mark Bowdens and others looking to dismiss The Wire will no doubt cite Colvin's "there's nothing to be done" as proof of the show's bleakness, but I read it very differently:  Colvin is saying there's nothing to be done if people like Carcetti don't have the political will to do anything.  Which is to say, if their constituents don't have the will to demand that they change.  It's the Carcettis who offer nothing but despair and the status quo, and the writers have made it pretty clear what they think of Carcetti.  ("Be creative?"  A new low, even for Steintorf.)

And then Namond provides just the right amount of levity at the end--another note-perfect reading from Julito McCullum.

The newspaper plot takes a couple of good turns this week.  First, there's almost no Templeton, Klebanow, or Whiting--though still more than enough.  I'm sorry to say that with only one episode to go none of them have risen above one-dimensional caricatures, and "the Dickensian aspect" has now been beaten over my head as many times as "we'll have to do more with less." 

Second, and more important, Gus gets out of the office, stops waiting for stories to come to him, and investigates his fabulist in three scenes that do a lot to re-establish his value as a journalist and as a protagonist.  Offices are always suspect places on The Wire, sites of isolated and detached management on a show that values local knowledge and field work.  (The MCU office avoids this tarnish because it is literally connected to the street through its wiretaps and surveillance teams.)  Haynes seemed to wither in those middle weeks when he was confined to his desk, but episode nine gives us exactly what the newsroom scenes have needed--less newsroom.  I wish this had started weeks ago.  I'd love to see more of the returning reporter as private eye, and besides, the fallout when Haynes formally exposes Templeton should have been good for a couple of episodes of politcking at least.  Another mark against the ten-episode season.

The visit to Walter Reed also provides an understated but undeniable reminder of the consequences of fabrication.  Haynes is only investigating Templeton's lies, but every shot of amputated veterans is a worst-case scenario for what happens when politicians make up their own facts and reporters don't call them on it--or join in.  I would have loved for season five to have shown the cozy relationship between government and the media a little more directly, perhaps with city hall as the vehicle, but this is probably the most elegant way the writers could have alluded to the nationally, globally destructive lies of the war in Iraq.

Finally, getting back to false dawns, Bubs appears to have reached a place of peace, or at least a willingness to forgive himself, in his anniversary speech.  (And he looks healthier than ever.)  But he still hasn't quite confessed about Sherrod yet--I don't think his story is over.  Maybe he'll do it in print for Mike Fletcher, airing out his sins for the whole city to read?  That would be a fitting end, and a note of hope, if a season built around lies ended with Bubbles finding the biggest possible audience for his harrowing truth.

Other Wire business:

• Cool Lester Smooth knocks the Bunk off his three-week reign of the title quotes!  If this post had gone a different direction I would have gladly used Colvin's line to Carcetti, which is one of the most heavily weighted in the series.

• Dukie's job with the junkman turns out to be less Adena Watson and more Gary McCullough.  That ending isn't much better.

• Back in the first week of the season, I was told I was too quick in calling Herc the Biggest Asshole for working for Maurice Levy.

Always go with your first instinct, kids!  Herc's not only spying on his friends and feeding information to Levy, he's doing it to help Marlo--and he just might get the sociopath who cost him his last job off the hook.  (If Freamon and McNulty haven't already made a successful prosecution impossible.)  With that, he officially has no redeeming features whatsoever.  He's officially the Biggest Asshole of this episode, and depending on what happens next week he's the inside favorite for the Biggest of the season--which would place him high in the running for Biggest worldwide.  If you think there's a bigger one, your case had better be bulletproof.

Ummm...

Jack Nicholson has made a video endorsing Hillary Clinton, featuring clips from some of Nicholson's most famous characters saying things that sound vaguely pro-Clinton when taken out of context.

So apparently, the Clinton campaign--which the Huffington Post says released the video--thinks it's a good idea to have their candidate endorsed by a ghoulishly disfigured mass murderer, a deranged writer who talks to ghosts, a corrupt Gitmo commander who covers up the murder of his own troops, and a spoiled rich kid who likes to sexually harass hapless waitresses.  The best guy in the bunch is the woman-beating private eye who fails to punish political corruption and incest.

Maybe they just want us to forget the "3 a.m." commercial.

Clinton/Torrance '08:  You keep asking us all the questions first but WE DON'T MIND WE REALLY DON'T MIND WE'RE HAPPY TO ANSWER THEM HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY.

Prosecutor Obonda and Congressman Clay

If The Wire does nothing else for American society, it's still made an indelible impression on Maryland politics. Clay Davis isn't just drawn from a couple of disgraced Baltimore politicians. He's so perfectly archetypical that a number of local bloggers and commenters--and apparently a few journalists--have started using Clay as a synonym for corrupt machine politicians like Maryland's Al Wynn, recently voted out of office in a primary challenge from local activist Donna Edwards.

I was reminded of Wynn when Clay Davis took his crack at "Prosecutor Obonda" in episode seven, and when he insinuated that Rupert Bond was doing the work of white puppetmasters the week before that. Wynn is an Obama supporter (as is Edwards), but he, like Clay Davis, was perfectly happy to argue that his opponent was a pawn of white interests bent on bringing down a black politician. In the days before the primary, Wynn's supporters in the real estate and credit industries funded a barrage of ads that attacked the netroots-supported Edwards because she was funded by "super-rich people from out of state who don't get our community." Emphasis very much in the original.  (Edwards, like Wynn, is black, so he couldn't aim the smear directly at her. He did say she was part of a "vast, dare I say, left-wing conspiracy.") Davis merely went one step further, implying that his prosecutor was inauthentically, insufficiently black--the last remnant of an odious argument floated by Clinton surrogates in the days before South Carolina. (BET founder Robert Johnson compared Obama to Sidney Poitier in much the same way that Davis linked Bond to Obama. That was positively genteel compared to Andrew Young.)

Those attacks generated a powerful backlash in the primaries--a backlash that The Wire failed to see coming. You can tell this season was written and filmed a year ago; looking at the Maryland primary results, I'm guessing no defendant in a Baltimore courtroom would try to link his prosecutor to Barack Obama today.

I had thought the shared race-baiting cemented the Clay Davis-Al Wynn connection until Wynn entered the cast of The Wire this week, in heavily doctored form, as Congressman Upshaw. The scene where Carcetti goes to DC to put down a Prince George's County challenge for the governor's mansion alludes to the 2002 gubernatorial race, when Democratic Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend passed over black DC-area Democratic prospects to choose a former Republican from Annapolis as her running mate, and generally neglected the DC suburbs (which are increasingly rivaling Baltimore for power in the Democratic party and the state). Plenty of people in the DC area were not pleased by the snub, including Al Wynn, who had been using his congressional seat to position himself as a kingmaker in state and county affairs. Wynn is even rumored to have squeezed Townsend for money if she wanted to keep him from throwing his Get Out the Vote operation behind the Republican candidate, and to have done the same with Tommy Carcetti Martin O'Malley four years later.

Townsend went on to lose her race, the first time Maryland elected a Republican governor in nearly forty years (since that paragon of class and ethics, our gift to the nation, Spiro Agnew). That loss had little to do with Wynn per se and a lot more to do with Townsend's inept strategy and lackluster campaigning--upon hearing that Townsend endorsed Hillary Clinton, this Obama supporter breathed a sigh of relief--but it set up Wynn to pretend he had more influence than he did. He continued to play kingmaker and to vote against his constituents, at least until Donna Edwards scared him in 2006 and unseated him in 2008.

That upset is an indication that maybe things aren't as hopeless as they sometimes seem on The Wire.  Sure, the show's done elections before, and the challengers have won, and they have learned how little they can change. But the Donna Edwards victory removes a Clay Davis Democrat from office, and Al Wynn was failed by the tactics that let Clay wriggle off the hook.

I write this as a P.G. County native and a proud graduate of the Prince George's County public schools.  Held together with glue?  Look out, Upshaw--maybe the netroots of the Wireworld are coming for your ass, too.

Missing Persons

A comment thread for all you Wire fans:  With only two episodes left in the series, who else needs to put in an appearance?  (No fair giving away anything from episode nine, On-Demanders.)  Here are some of the choices:

Prez, Namond, and Colvin.  This is the most essential one.  These characters were the emotional core of season four, and Colvin was the show's moral conscience for two seasons straight.  I'd like to see how they're doing.

Cheryl.  We've already seen Kima's ex this season, but we haven't seen her in her professional capacity as a television news worker.  That seems like an obvious connection this season--and I'd like to see television news splayed out on the examination table the way newspapers have been, if there's time.

Claude Diggins.  No real need to see the Marine Unit boat pilot again.  I just like this character because he has possibly the most Baltimore name (and face) in the entire series.

Caroline Massey.  Whatever happened to the Major Crimes Unit's chief westside translator and coupon clipper?

Officer Walker.  Presumably he's still out there, shaking down children and homeless people.

Marcia Donnelly.  I'd love another look at the toughest and one of the best administrators in the series.  Even if she royally screwed up with Dukie.

Wee-Bey and DeLonda Brice.  Admit it.  You know you want to see DeLonda again.  Plus I'm curious to see if she can snag Asshole of the Year for a second year running on a single cameo.

Shardene.  Is she still with Lester?  I would guess so--as this week's bar scene makes clear, he is still Cool Lester Smooth.

Stan "Super Bastard" Valchek.  Because one brief scene just isn't enough.

I don't expect to see all of them--although you can fit a lot of faces into a series-ending montage--but I hope we see most.  Prez, Namond, Colvin, and maybe Wee-Bey and Marcia Donnelly strike me as pretty much essential.

Who did I miss?  Who do you need to see one more time?

"Slow on the draw he was"

Spoiler alert.

No fucking joke.

We all knew Omar wasn't going to outlast this season, didn't we?  Given that he was originally supposed to die after just seven episodes back in season one, I didn't think the writers would be inclined to pull any punches.  And given that he was the ultimate individualist in a world where the institutions always win, I think it would have been a cop-out if he'd lived to rob another day.  His death was almost necessary for the show's critique of the postmodern economy.

But the way he died... that was a shock.  Alone, friendless, gradually abandoning the stalwart code that had always set him apart. Gunned down by Kenard, the show's youngest character and one of its most odious, not in any dramatic showdown--no newspaper-tumbleweeds blowing across the alley this time--but in a liquor-store ambush free of any heroism.

That, too, was necessary.  The Wire has always been dangerously attached to Omar, willing to inflate him to legendary stature while it knocked everybody else off their pedestals.  Some episodes it seemed like there was nothing he couldn't do:  he out-policed McNulty, out-informed Bubbles, out-lawyered Levy.  Back in season three, Bunk made a noble effort at showing Omar, and us, the dangers of romanticizing a stick-up artist, but it didn't take. [*]  (My one regret about Omar's sudden death is that we didn't get another Bunk confrontation.  Although I did love Crutchfield rubbing his framed arrest last season in Bunk's face--asshole, though far from the episode's biggest.)  Before long Omar was back to plotting epic heists, dissecting organizations that eluded Lester Freamon's panoptic bespectacled gaze, pulling some Spider-Man shit.

This season has ground down Omar the way it grinds down everyone else, showing him the cost of being a loner.  First it showed him he wasn't really alone.  When Marlo couldn't strike at him, he struck at those Omar cared about, just as the authorities do every other time they are confronted with someone who thinks he can buck the system.  Marlo's strategy is no different from Rawls threatening Colvin's subordinates or gutting Major Crimes--just a little bit bloodier.

With his allies left behind or quickly killed off, Omar had to operate as a true loner for the first time since the end of season one.  (As an aside--why didn't Renaldo come back with Omar, and maybe bring a cousin or two?  Granted, he'd probably be dead by now if he had, but a few more guns might have turned the tables in that apartment ambush, or dictated a different strategy.  It's telling that Omar refused Renaldo's help; he had to know he was coming back to Baltimore to die.)  He still made an amazing run, escaping Marlo's ambush and subsequent manhunt, disrupting several of his corners and stash houses, killing a couple of enforcers, destroying all the drugs he seized, and putting the fear of God into Marlo and his soldiers.  It was a holy retribution, the hero posed against exploding cars--the stuff of the spaghetti westerns Omar had always half stepped out of.

But something was different this time.  Omar was cursing.  Breaking his promise to Bunk that he wouldn't do any more murders.  His code was fraying, either falling apart out of desperation or becoming subsumed into the Omar Little caricature he was playing.  All that was left was the violence and the vengeance, and this week's episode made it clear just how little that was worth.  His epic battles against the westside drug dealers ended with him standing alone on a deserted corner, howling for an enemy who would never face him. A gunfighter without a gunfight.

At least the other self-made caricatures--and there have been many this season--provide a little more levity.  This week's best comedy comes at the FBI profiling unit in Quantico, whose director has remade himself into a living, breathing basic-cable cliché.  (I thought it was a great touch to give him a southern accent--aren't these characters, the homespun directors, always southerners?  At least in the Bush years?) The director is selling the same thrill-of-the-hunt bullshit McNulty fed Teresa D'Agostino back in season three, but Kima's Unabomber comeback reminds us that real police work is more often a matter of diligent legwork or simple luck.  And, indeed, while McNulty has been casting himself in the hoary role of tormented cop hunting a serial killer, Bunk has come tantalizingly close to nailing Chris Partlow through sheer dogged investigation.

In a great reversal from their self-promoting director, however, the unit's profilers know their job; their profile exposes the gaping holes in McNulty's serial killer plot and nails his frustrated ego.  Wasn't it Bunk who said a couple weeks ago that he might learn something about himself?  The FBI profile tears down all the pretenses Jimmy lives by, not just the ones he built in season five.  No wonder he suddenly starts coming clean with Kima and Beadie; all his fictions lie in ruins.

Which brings us back to why Omar--the gunfighter, the superhero, the last honest criminal in Baltimore--had to die.  His death is a renunciation of fiction and its comforts.  Which, in true postmodern form, still follows the rules of the fiction it renounces:  as one character says in Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring, "in your Westerns, the gunslinger is always bested, ultimately, by an upstart."

And Omar might just get a little postmortem revenge.  Yes, that scrap of paper will help Lester take Omar's organization down, if there's still time, but I'm thinking more of the lasting damage he's done to Marlo's reputation.  The kingpin of all Baltimore went into hiding when one man with a broken leg came after him.  A man who was ultimately shot by a ten-year-old, doing what Marlo and his soldiers couldn't.  People have to notice that.  You can be sure Michael has, with the lectures he got about Junebug and the importance of maintaining your reputation.  All this season I've been wondering if, just as the corrosive Barksdales were replaced by the sociopathic Marlo, Marlo might himself might be replaced by a budding sociopath named Michael Lee.

Now the stakes are even higher.  I wonder if someday soon, sooner than we would think possible, Marlo or Michael or their successors will be replaced by a full-blown psychopath named Kenard.

May his reign be short.

Other Wire business:

• Give it up for Leander Sydnor, this week's craftiest bastard.  I guess that Prez consultation won't be necessary after all.  Clearly Sydnor's been learning at the feet of Freamon (for good and ill--I love Kima's shock and disgust when she learns he's in on the scam too).  In fact, his able management of the surveillance teams shows that he's becoming a good teacher and supervisor in his own right.  If any shred of the MCU survives this scam--and it may be as doomed as Omar--Sydnor might be the only guy who can carry the torch and start training a new unit.
• Loved Freamon's bluff in the bar, even if it shows a disturbing willingness to compound his lies.  I guess once you start fabricating, you can't stop.  In any case, I'm glad the Clay Davis plot isn't quite over.
• Leaden expository dialogue makes an unwelcome return to the Sun scenes. Jeff Price has been a reporter for at least four years; would he really not know the Pulitzer schedule?
• And then we have Terry Hanning--the one good story Templeton got, and he still couldn't write it clean.  Does Templeton have any redeeming features?
• Also, when was the last time Gutierrez had a line of dialogue?  She brought the serial killer story to the Sun, and Templeton has run off with it.  How does she feel about that?  I bet that would be a much more interesting conversation than the Pulitzer infodump.
• I wanted to use Terry's line about "A lie ain't a side of the story" for this week's post, but it didn't have much to do with Omar and the writers snagged it for their epigraph anyway.  And so, as always, I go running back to the Bunk...

[*] Update:  Alan Sepinwall reports that one of the kids who was playing Omar back in season three--the kids who were Bunk's best argument against the romanticization of Omar--

was Kenard.

And that would be one reason why The Wire, even in this problematic season, is still the best television show ever made.

"Ain't you the little king of diamonds?"

Do you know how hard it is to choose title quotes that don't come from the Bunk?  He had two or three keepers this episode alone.  That's not so much a reflection of his Wildean wit (or the Baltimore police version thereof) as it is a sign that he's become the moral center of this show.  With Lester falling hard, Haynes confined to the newsroom, Colvin nowhere in sight, and even Omar going back on his word, it's up to Bunk to remind us how the system was supposed to work.  And remind us he does, through acidic little asides or simply the roll of his eyes as Jimmy digs himself and the department deeper and deeper into his lies.  So many of the shots in this episode position Bunk with his back to the other characters, face to the camera, as if we are the only people he can confide in, the only people who can share his outrage.  Nobody in his world can be trusted.

The scene where he tells off Landsman and refuses to drop his casework brought me to my feet the first time I watched it.  A knowledgeable professional tells off his supervisor, refuses to play along with the bureaucracy's meaningless rituals, and gets away with it by the sheer force of his moral indignation:  that's one of the best victories on The Wire right there.

Sadly, this being The Wire, that victory is hard-fought and largely meaningless.

One of Mark Bowden's criticisms of The Wire was its seemingly unremitting bleakness, its sense that progress is impossible.  Sure, there are heroic individuals like Walon or Bunny Colvin who can help people on the interpersonal level that the show prizes; there are seasoned professionals like Haynes or Daniels or, until recently, Lester Freamon, who do important jobs and do them well; there are even institutional players like Tommy Carcetti or, for that matter, Joe Stewart and Stringer Bell, who intermittently dream of reform.  But their reforms fail.  Their institutions remain unchanged--or grow worse.  If there's any merit to any of Bowden's charges, this would be the one. And Exhibit A would be the trial of Clay Davis.

The trial shows season five's narrative compression at its worst.  I can forgive the show the dramatic license of putting the trial within a week or two (at most) of the arraignment; it's not like they have the luxury of waiting another season.  But squeezing the whole trial into half an episode, and letting Davis off on such transparent pandering, ruins the entire subplot--which up until this week was one of the season's best-executed storylines.

For a couple of weeks now, the writers have been planting all sorts of indicators that Davis's trial might not turn out to be the slam-dunk that it seemed.  Bond deciding to try the case himself for political points, and cutting down the number of witnesses.  Bond and Carcetti shutting out the federal prosecutors.  Davis martyring himself in the local media.  Possibly even Freamon and Sydnor getting distracted by their illegal wiretap, and neglecting the case they've been detailed to.  There are plenty of plausible, well-advertised ways Davis could skate on his charges.  Instead, Richard Price and David Simon make him so silver-tongued that he runs roughshod over Bond and turns the courtroom into his cheering section.  It reduces Bond to an idiot who doesn't know how to run a trial in his own city.  It reduces the judge to an idiot who can't run her own court. It reduces the jurors and gallery members to idiots, too.  Would the entire courtroom buy into Davis's act?  Would they all, every one of them, burst into applause?  That's not Baltimore, it's Springfield.

I hope Davis's strained reality show references weren't intended to be part of this season's media critique.  Yes yes, everything in the media is fake, we understand that--but by making Davis's trial so wildly implausible, Price and Simon insult our intelligence as viewers of this season and our emotional investment as viewers of the last four.  A plotline that's been building for five seasons came crashing down in half an hour so the show could score a cheap, obvious point.  And it takes other, better scenes down with it:  McNulty turning into the homicide unit's money faucet is funny (as is his inadvertent, unwilling transformation into middle manager--absolutely the last character suited for the job and even he knows it), but then it's too obviously twinned with Davis's testimony.  Whatever else was done right in episode seven, the Davis trial is a huge step backwards.

The newspaper plot fares about as well.  After getting it right last week and showing us how good journalism is made, the writers brought out the expository sledgehammer again.  Did we need to see Fletcher told not once but twice to "write how it feels"?  I mean, it's nice to see Bubs stepping back into his informant role--and very interesting, maybe very telling, that he refuses payment this time.  That scene may have shown a quiet but profound development in his character, but it does nothing for our understanding of Fletcher or the Sun.

The episode is much better on Haynes's discovery of Templeton's fabrications (which are not exactly subtle anymore).  He practices the other side of the David Simon model of good journalism:  while Fletcher is standing around listening to people, Gus cultivates his local connections and draws on their knowledge to blow a hole a mile wide in Templeton's lies.

Connections can turn back on you, though.  The Wire has never flinched from comparing the war on drugs to the war on terror or the war in Iraq, and Templeton and Gutierrez repeating McNulty's concoction carries more than a hint of Judith Miller and other journalists who parroted the Bush administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction.  I'd love to see the consequences of such uncritical coziness come back to bite the Sun, but I don't know if we have enough time left in this brutally foreshortened season to broaden the critique beyond the absurd particulars of this case.  The show has gotten so caught up in the logistics of the serial killer deception that it's starting to lose sight of the institutional problems that deception was supposed to highlight.  Maybe something will happen in the next three weeks to point the blame back where it belongs:  police departments that value stats and money above good police work, sure, but also newspapers that value access more highly than the truth.

Other Wire business:

• Richard Belzer and Jay Landsman in the same bar?  Good thing Delaney Williams didn't walk in or my TV set would have been sucked into the resulting tear in spacetime.
• So, is everybody else assuming they'll work in a Prez cameo when Lester seeks a consultation on Marlo's clock code?  I'd like that.  Maybe we'll even catch a glimpse of Marcia Donnelly or Namond...
• Dominic West can do an amazing American accent and a truly shitty Bawlmer one.
• From the trailers for next week:  I think I already have my quote, and it's not from the Bunk.
• I don't know where they plan on taking Dukie and the junkman, but as an old Homicide fan I'm getting seriously bad vibes from those previews.

Adena Watson bad.

"I don't fuck with no make-believe"

Lots of people changing strategies this episode, for better and for worse.

The biggest strategic blunder was Marlo's, and he made it last week.  As long as he took the high-discipline, low-tech approach he could keep the MCU at arm's reach.  (Budget problems helped.)  But as soon as he switches back to using phones, he's fucked.  Tapping phones is what the MCU does, and no gimmick, no innovation will fool them for long.  Marlo, your arms are too short to box with Lester Freamon.  Too bad the fake case Freamon cooked up with McNulty is pulling away resources away right at the moment of his breakthrough.  (On the other hand, without the serial killer he wouldn't have the wire.  Call it a wash, on this case and this case only?)

Omar makes a much more effective strategy change this episode--since he can't get to Marlo personally, he'll go after his reputation and goad him into coming out of hiding.  Maybe not the safest play to make when he's got no help and one bad leg, but it's the only one he's got.  I also love the scene where he jacks up Fat Face Ricky with nothing but a beer bottle and his own reputation.  Reputation is power, and he's crippling Marlo as best he can.

(Fat Face Ricky, by the way, is my new favorite drug dealer.  Nice call on the connect.  Will he and Slim Charles help take out Marlo and Cheese?)

Bunk falls back on a time-honored strategy, working the vacant murders like murders instead of waiting for misfiled lab work or a nonexistent wiretap case to hand him a lead.  He's rapidly becoming this season's frustrated moral conscience, its Bunny Colvin figure.  (Haynes has been a little too passive the last couple of weeks.)  His claim on that position would be a lot more comfortable, of course, if he'd just stepped in and prevented McNulty from starting the serial killer story in the first place.

The writers reward Bunk for his dedication to old-school police investigation by giving him a couple of breakthroughs.  Unfortunately, the homicide scenes have two of the more egregious examples of narrative compression this season--we never see Kima get the tip that puts the Junebug triple on Marlo, and Bunk comes up aces on his second random name search.  I get the feeling both of those investigations would have been much more prolonged and the payoffs more satisfying if HBO had shelled out for twelve or thirteen episodes instead of ten.  But apparently that money was better invested in another series about a psychiatrist.  Next spring, a bold new drama about a suburban family--with a twist!

(It's hard to get too pissed off at the only network that would ever air this series, let alone keep it going for five seasons.  But god damn it, people--ten episodes???)

Templeton makes a quiet, highly effective change of his own, finally shutting up and writing a decent story.  (And he writes it by practicing the David Simon style of journalism, just standing around and listening--although he cuts a distinctly anti-Simonic figure with his notebook and his Kansas City Star t-shirt.  Way to blend in.)  Looks like Templeton could become a real journalist some day, in much the same way Carver finally became a real police, and it's nice to see Haynes encouraging this development--but I'm assuming Gus will discover his fabrications soon, maybe even next week.  We need a good couple of weeks of Whiting and Klebanow rallying around their star pupil and Haynes struggling against the institutional cover if the fabulist plot is going to have a decent payoff.  And Haynes needs the conflict--like I said, he's been too inactive the last couple of episodes.

The actor who played the Marine veteran was terrific.  None of the jittery tics that most homeless or veteran characters get saddled with.  Kind of like Templeton, he underplays the scene and lets the horrific story sell itself.

The actor who played Larry was good, too, although he went in the other direction--beyond "tics" into total psychotic dysfunctionality.  Thanks to Larry, McNulty is finally starting to have some doubts even as he pulls off his most elegant deception yet.  (And good on the writers for not sending McNulty down the obvious, unthinkable route of killing homeless himself.  This is The Wire, not The Shield.)  He's telling himself that he's helping Larry out, but he belatedly recognizes the humanity and the suffering of the people he's been exploiting.  Maybe he'll make a strategic change of his own.

Or maybe not.  After McNulty called Freamon a supervisor's nightmare, Christy turned to me and said, "I think Nixon just went to China."

Other Wire business:

• "That's some Spider-Man shit there."  Indeed.
• Love the crime lab as the anti-CSI.  I guess forensics isn't so sexy when you're on a budget.
• Putting former Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley's criticisms of The Wire into Tommy Carcetti's mouth--that's beautiful.  That's the good meta.
• This episode was a great glimpse of both Carcetti the idealist and Carcetti the canny political strategist.
• Very effective use of the past-season cameos this week.  The ribbon-cutting at the docks was poignant (though amusing to watch Carcetti claim responsibility for a project that began back in the Royce administration!) but the Randy scene was heartbreaking, especially that shove on the stairs.  It doesn't get any easier to watch the second time around.

This Is Too Cool

I haven't been shy about praising the Clay Davis scenes from last week's Wire; they were the moment that this season's media critique sprang to life for me.  But I've just learned something that makes that subplot even more delicious:  the first radio host who interviews Clay is Larry Young, a former Baltimore state senator and current Baltimore radio personality.

Ten years ago Young, a state senator from Baltimore's west side, was censured and expelled from the state senate for ethics violations.  As a result, in the words of the Baltimore City Paper, Young "is regarded as a hero, or at least a sympathetic victim of white oppression, by lots of Baltimoreans."  Clay Davis is crying in the microphone of someone whose career trajectory has a few parallels with his own.  (Which is not to say that Young is the only or even the primary source for Davis.  I don't think it's any accident that when Davis gets arraigned, one of the characters goes out of his way to mention it's at the Mitchell courthouse.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.)

But it gets better. Larry Young also showed up in the original Homicide, David Simon's book, where he was largely responsible for a clusterfuck of a case that involved an imaginary abduction, a false police report, a convenient press leak, and a sham trial.  (Simon never exactly spells out the root of the trouble, but his implications are clear enough that one of the entries in this Washington Post sidebar drips with irony.)  The primary detective on that case, Donald Worden, has also appeared on The Wire, as have two of the superior officers who protected him from the political fallout when some department brass leaked an investigation that was supposed to be confidential.

And that's one of the things I love about The Wire.  You don't need to know any of this background to appreciate the storylines, but when you do they get that much better.  And Simon has an amazing knack for bringing all these disparate voices together--as a radio host, Young opposed the appointment of Edward Norris as police commissioner.  Norris, after some ethics troubles of his own, now plays homicide detective Ed Norris on The Wire (and has his own Baltimore radio show--can a shot at that be far behind?).  Somehow, he's able to get all these people to play these sly, knowing, sometimes deeply unflattering roles.

He certainly did with tonight's cameo...

Heroin, or, The Economic Logic of Late Capitalism

Of all the corrupt and declining institutions on The Wire, none are more corrosive than the drug gangs.  It's not just the product they're selling, which destroys lives and eats away at neighborhoods; it's the business itself, a shadow industry run by sociopaths who betray their own people when there's a dollar to be made or a risk to be avoided.

But it wasn't always like that:

The users, an army unto themselves, were serviced daily in back alleys and housing project stairwells by men who were, on some level, careerists, committed to distribution networks that paid them, protected them, paid their bails, and took care of their people when they went away to Hagerstown or Jessup.  These men were professional in outlook, lethal but not reckless, and by and large, they lived with an acknowledged code, to wit:

They didn't use what they sold.  They didn't serve children or use children to serve, just as they wouldn't sell to wide-eyed virgins looking to skin-pop for the first time.  They carried the threat of violence like a cloak, but in the end, they didn't shoot someone unless someone needed to get shot.

[...]

This earlier generation stayed serious, cautious.  On a business level at least, they understood responsibility and were therefore responsible with the package.

That's David Simon and Ed Burns describing the heroin trade of the 1960s and 1970s in order to set the historical context for the very different world they would record in The Corner (1997). The Corner is essential reading for any Wire fan, both a compelling story in its own right and an important precursor to the fictionalized ethnographies of The Wire.  (You'll find an Amazon link over in the new "World of The Wire" sidebar.) Almost every Bubbles caper has its origins in the trials and tribulations of the book's hard-working dope fiends, and a lot of the school material from season four first appears there.  And in one amazing chapter, Simon and Burns explain nothing less than the origins of the world as we know it today.  They do it by telling the story of the Baltimore drug gangs.

According to Simon and Burns, the drug trade's transformation from the managerial criminal industry of "Little Melvin" Williams to the anarchy of the 1980s and beyond emerged from a confluence of factors:  Federal prosecutions put away most of the criminal leadership by the mid-1970s.  Cocaine and crack arrived in the 1980s.  Mandatory minimums and the war on drugs flooded the jails with so many small-time dealers that jail time became nonexistent and arrests meaningless.

But mostly it came from a massive economic shift that's touched everything else in our culture:

With heroin alone, the sources of supply seemed finite and organizational; access was limited to those with a genuine connection to the New York suppliers, who had, in turn, cultivated a connection to a small number of importers.  The cocaine epidemic changed that as well, creating a freelance market with twenty-year-old wholesalers supplying seventeen-year-old dealers.  Anyone could ride the Amtrak or the Greyhound to New York and come back with a package.  By the late eighties, the professionals were effectively marginalized in Baltimore; cocaine and the open market made the concept of territory irrelevant to the city drug trade.

It didn't stop there either.  Cocaine kicked the dealer's code in the ass, because as the organizations gave way, so did standards.  On every corner, street dealers began using minors, first as lookouts and runners, then as street-level fighters.

[...]

When children became the labor force, the work itself became childlike, and the organizational structure that came with heroin's first wave was a historical footnote.  In the 1990s, the drug corner is modeled on nothing more complicated than a fast-food emporium, an environment in which dealing drugs requires about as much talent and finesse as serving burgers.  No discretion; no precautions; the modern corner has no need for the applied knowledge of previous generations.

This is a brilliant analogy.  The drug trade shifted from an organized industrial cartel to a franchised service industry, with all the attendant degradation of labor that comes with a service economy.  Unfortunately, when skilled workers are replaced with unskilled ones in this particular sector, people start dying.  The switch to child labor brought with it a random, impulsive violence on a scale unlike anything seen in the old days, and there was no one left in charge to restrain it.

There is no singular connection, no citywide cartel to enforce discipline and carve up territory.  Looking up the skirt of the wholesale market from Fayette and Monroe, the drug sources are random and diffuse. [...]

The product itself is, by and large, ready to sell.  Gone are the days of uncut dope on the table and four or five gangsters battling the scale, trying to get the purity down and maximize profit.  Gone are the cut-buddies, who could wield the playing cards and mannitol with skill to ensure a proper package.  Much of what sells on a Baltimore corner is purchased as a prepackaged item with little assembly required.  A G-pack of a hundred coke vials, sold on consignment, can make you one thousand dollars, with six hundred kicked back to the supplier.  Do that a couple of times, then ride the bus or the rails to New York, catch the IRT up to Morningside Heights or the Grand Concourse and lay down the grip; what comes back is precut product, with the equivalent number of vials all neatly wrapped.  No math, no chemistry--a sixth-grader with patience and a dull blade can fill the vials and be on a corner inside of an hour.

Deprofessionalization.  One of the dirtiest words in The Wire, even if you'll never hear it phrased exactly that way (which is probably for the best).  It's no less a problem for the drug gangs than it is for the unions or the police.  Bodie gets saddled with corner boys who can't count; Cutty is tasked with educating trigger-happy soldiers who can't tell when one of their own is holding out.  If The Corner is telling the full story, disciplined street-level gangs like the Barksdales or Marlo's people are the anomalies.  Most of the dealers are morons--morons with vials of coke and bags of heroin and loaded guns.

Their professional standards are ailing for the same reason everybody else's are.  The Wire is a show about the decline of liberal society, about how institutions formed in the age of embedded liberalism, Keynesian policy, the welfare state, and the long postwar economic boom now struggle, adapt, or die in an age of neoliberal policies that remove even the most modest controls on the ability of capital to move wherever it wants and do whatever it wants.  The show uses the lens of criminal investigations to dramatize the consequences of the shift from a late-modernist economy regulated both internally by managed competition and externally by liberal government to a postmodern economy that erodes all regulations, all limits, all codes.

The social devastation depicted in The Corner and The Wire is a direct consequence of postmodern turns in both the global economy as a whole and the drug trade.  (Macroeconomic and more localized shifts which come together in the figure of the Greek--global capitalism personified as the god of all gangsters.)  The centralized, code-bound organization of Melvin Williams and his peers--the liberals of crime--has given way to an anarchic profusion of franchises built on easy money, cheap labor, and flagrant violence.  This is why Proposition Joe dies; this is why Stringer Bell dies; they both thought they could bring back the centralized cartel, the command economy, the code of professional ethics in a world that now regards the first two as fossils and the last as a sign of weakness.  It's Marlo's world now.

Nor is this devastation limited to the gangs or their neighborhoods.  The pains of the post-industrial economy are most obvious in the union story of season two, but all of the institutions in The Wire are feeling the same pressures.  The Sun's owners are laying off reporters even though the paper is still profitable, because their only responsibility is to maximize their stockholders' returns.  Teachers have become nothing more than warm bodies who stand at the front of the room and recite test questions.  Veteran reporters, veteran police--even veteran slingers like Bodie--are chased out of their own organizations because they're too highly-paid, too likely to bristle, too willing to challenge the bosses.  They're replaced with kids who write what the editors want to see, break heads the Western district way, kill whoever Marlo wants killed and take whatever terms he offers.  They're all temps; they just don't know it.

And Bubbles.  Poor Bubbles.  In seasons three and four he's a street entrepreneur, a dope-fiend small business owner, the hardest-working man in Baltimore.  If those comforting Ben Franklin myths about the self-made man were the whole story, if poverty and homelessness really were a matter of being poor and homeless by choice, Bubbles would have pulled himself out of it long ago.  And once he registers on a stick-up man's radar, there's nothing to protect him.  Even with tighter police connections than any other fiend in Baltimore, he has no safety net and he can't count on anyone else to look out for him.  A work ethic isn't enough anymore.

With its fifth-season focus on the mass media, The Wire has also begun turning its attentions to some of the cultural effects of the postmodern turn.  The current season has shown us a media industry that's completely disconnected from the world it's supposed to be covering, generating a torrent of column inches and radio chatter and televised bloviating that misses the real stories unfolding in Baltimore.  Those are stories of fabricated events and rigged games--notice how references to juiced baseball players keep cropping up around the reporter who is himself juicing quotes--but they are also stories about economic downturns, political corruption, environmental pollution, bureaucratic incompetence, educational failure, the problems of a real world that barely registers with its self-appointed watchdogs.  The media dwell in a world of simple narratives that are more fiction than fact:  the Dickensian aspect, the Passion of Clay Davis, and of course the masticating serial killer on the loose.  Our culture is governed by an "ontological dominant" (to borrow a phrase from Brian McHale) of multiple, mutable, and fabricated realities--a concept that sounds all well and good when you're talking about postmodernist literature, but it's horrifying and depressing when you realize the same phenomenon holds true for journalism.

The Wire is telling the biggest story in the world, the story of a profound shift in the way western societies are organized.  It's nothing short of amazing that David Simon, Ed Burns, and company have found a way to tell that story without getting lost in the macroeconomics, spouting off political statements instead of dialogue, or trivializing it down to maudlin, reductive pap.  They are telling a story about the devaluation of labor and the degradation of human life without forgetting that their characters are first and foremost human beings. The Wire rises and falls on their stories as they all struggle to get by in a global economy that follows the logic of the heroin market.