I don't usually write about stuff outside the world of cinema on this blog, save for the odd review of a TV show or something. But sometimes things happen that shake your worldview, damage your sense of right and wrong and worthiness and critical direction, and just can't be ignored lest your writing turn to shit and you go insane.
Right now I'm working on an essay on The Wire for a module in my degree. It's all about 21st Century America and has proved to be one of the more enriching experience of my academic life - while I'm still struggling over what, exactly, neoliberalism means, I've come across materials that have changed my world view, analysing everything from the Occupy Wall Street movement to the politics of Homeland. It was a radical experience, yes, and there were times when I felt out of my depth as a mild-mannered student with a modest left perspective. But there were also times when I was angered, incentivised, compelled to take a stance on issues where injustice was being most keenly felt, where the world wasn't programmed correctly or acting in the way I imagined it would be when I was growing up in a small white town in Kent.
One of such instances was studying David Simon's televisual essay to the world of Baltimore, a show about cops and drug dealers and how good guys and bad guys weren't really one or the other - just like real life, I guess. It was a show I'd watched and considered myself a fan of but, unbeknownst to me at the time, it was a show I still didn't really understand. It wasn't until I'd read Michelle Alexander's piece on "The New Jim Crow", or Loïc Wacquant's re-thinking of race in the US, that I began to see the full extent Simon's aims and the intense scrutiny and incredible moral resolve with which he carried the show's details and themes to their eventual end.
On the other hand, reading these materials made me realise that, more than anything else, I couldn't possibly consider myself schooled on the socio-economic state of an American city through watching something on TV. The Baltimore Simon and his team constructed seemed accurate, considered, enriching, and ultimately disturbing in the way it mercilessly chewed up its individuals. But it still existed within the boundaries of hour-long segments of television, composed from actors, sets, lighting, sound design, scriptwriting, music, and so on. It wasn't Baltimore, it just looked a hell of a lot like it.
When I saw reports of looting not two days ago I had a crisis of conscience. Up until that point I had considered The Wire as an abstract concept, with the same distance I had treated Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian when I wrote an essay on it last week. It's a cultural product that certainly has contemporary commentary to offer, more so than most of its type - when discussing the show in seminars, the footage of the death of Eric Garner had been released not two weeks before, and Ferguson still loomed in recent memory. Yet, as ghoulish at it sounds, these were still far removed enough from the content of the course so as not to keep me awake at night. I could forget about it, much as I could forget about the Holocaust after watching Schindler's List, or that, surely to the author's chargrin, I could forget about the horrible details of the Cambodian genocide after reading Michael Paterniti's brilliant article (alright, that's a lie - I've never forgotten that bit of journalism, I'm just able to accept it and move on).
But the riots of Baltimore, while still more than an ocean away, have brought the content of my essay to my doorstep. When I write about the show's sensitive depiction of black communities, or of its intelligent dissection of poor economic landscapes and isolation of structural flaws within the most hallowed of institutions, what am I doing? Nothing. One or two people will read my essay, they will offer feedback, and then they will forget about it. I will not have affected anyone's opinion, I will not have offered anything culturally, I will certainly have done nothing to change anything except, perhaps, my own outlook on race, which will likely be strengthened.
Unlike the terrible events in Nepal, there's no way for me to donate money to Baltimore - even if there was, I doubt it would do anything. You can't throw money at everything, and when the problems run this deep, it's a natural reaction to simply shake one's head in disbelief, maybe write something like this then forget about it until it happens again and again and again. Some have expressed themselves through vocal criticism of the protesters, and I can understand why. Deep-running frustrations of this kind should not be expressed through setting fire to local business, through instigating aggressive acts of violence and bloodshed. But there's a deeper issue running here that seems to become fainter and less boldly pronounced between each news broadcast - thus far the best perspective I've read is from a writer of The Wire itself, though perhaps I haven't been looking hard enough.
I'm going to finish my essay, and maybe I'll get a good mark, and maybe not. It doesn't matter to the people of Baltimore. When thinking about culture, society, and whether the former makes any difference on the latter, it's easy to become pessimistic. Did The Wire effect any kind of change on its city? No. But it tried, dammit, and maybe that's all you can do until people pull their heads out of their arses and say, "Hey, what are we doing here?"
