Addendum to Episode 4

Things I would have loved to cover in my video about The Wire

• The Stringer of it all
• Status quo politics (2 party system, there are no alternatives)
• Is this a commentary on the police?

It may have taken me two months to make Episode 4 of Copaganda and it may have been the longest piece I’ve ever written or made into a video, but believe it or not, there were still things that I wanted to touch on that I couldn’t quite make work. I am once again writing about The Wire. Spoilers ahead.

THE STRINGER OF IT ALL

Stringer Bell is arguably the most recognizable character in The Wire, despite only being on the show for 3 seasons. He dies in the penultimate episode of Season 3, betrayed by his best friend Avon before he could get to Avon himself. Stringer’s death is one of the few “oh shit” moments in The Wire, and given its heavy dose of dramatic irony and placement at the end of the third act—where Shakespeare would place the climax of his stories—I think it’s worth writing about Stringer’s demise as a microcosm of The Wire’s commentary on capitalism.

There are many reasons Stringer is killed. He ordered the brutal murder of Omar’s boyfriend Brandon, then tried to pit Omar against Brother Mouzone to cover his tracks. He ordered the staged suicide of Avon’s nephew D’Angelo Barksdale. But the final nail in the coffin for Stringer is that his relationship with Avon broke down. He turned on Avon for fear that his war with Marlo would endanger his legitimate business operations.

Throughout the season (and really since we found Stringer in that community college class in season 1), Stringer has tried to transition away from The Game, and build a legitimate source of wealth for himself and his people. He recognizes the stability the legal market offers and sets his sights on trying to join it.

The problem is that the exploitation of The Game isn’t just reserved for drugs. The real crooks—the real hustlers—are the people he meets as he tries to B&B off the ground. He gets rain made by State Senator Clay Davis, and he gets caught up in the bureaucracy of permits and gatekeeping designed to keep new players from joining that market. At the same time, these pursuits alienate him from the world he came from.

As Avon puts it, Stringer is “a man without a country. Not hard enough for this right here. And maybe, just maybe, not smart enough for them out there.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibaw8vmmdEU

“Why don’t they just get out” is a common criticism levied against people born into disadvantaged circumstances. Stringer’s story shows us the flaws of that criticism. He is wildly successful in The Game, and tries to leave it behind, but in the process becomes caught in the middle, unable to move forward into the new world or return to his old one.

STATUS QUO POLITICS

In the video I talked about the resiliency of systems and how difficult they are to reform. Since writing the video we had an election, and that has crystallized a lot of the feelings I had on the topic. It might not surprise you that I’m not a big Joe Biden fan. I certainly did not want an Orange Fascist in charge, but Joe Biden still holds a lot of policy opinions that I am against (opposition to Medicare for All, opposition to the Green New Deal, his imperialist worldview, and his close ties to lobbyists to name just a few).

But what are progressives to do? Not voting for Democrats is a sure-fire way to help the other side, and it’s not like I’m going to vote for Republicans. You can see this dynamic across a number of issues.

Democrats often say they “believe the science” when it comes to climate change, but fail to propose the kind of bold measures that science dictates we must take. But what are you going to do, vote for people who deny climate change’s very existence? Joe Biden says “healthcare is a human right” (co-opting Bernie Sanders’ slogan for Medicare For All) but still wants to leave it up to the private insurance industry and tied to employment. That’s, uh, not what a right is.

In The Wire, the same dynamic is at play. There aren’t bold solutions, the city just keeps using the same tools for the same problems and hoping for different results. Police corruption? Let’s get rid of Burrell and install the next guy and hope he’s not corrupt. Police are ill-equipped to fight a drug war? Well, just keep doing it.

This kind of narrow-mindedness means that we never get real solutions to problems, just solutions that are seen as slightly more or less than what the other side is doing. As a politician, you don’t have to fix anything, you just have to do a slightly better job than the other side. I’m not sure where I heard this joke, but it goes something like this:

Two guys are roasting marshmallows when a bear bursts into a campsite. The first guy starts tying his running shoes. The second guy says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!” The first guy responds, “I don’t have to outrun the bear—I just have to outrun you.”

The few solutions The Wire does pitch fall well outside of the status quo. Colvin legalizes drugs in Hamsterdam, a bold new approach, but is shut down. In season 5, McNulty creates a fake serial killer in order to finally get the funds needed to fund the Marlo Stanfield operation. It’s only these kinds of audacious strategies that are able to nudge the status quo and come even close to addressing the problems at hand.

POLICE?

I got a comment or two on the video saying something to the effect of “cool, but what does this have to do with the police?”

Honestly, I think this is a pretty valid critique. I’m very happy with how the video turned out, but it is certainly less about the portrayal of police on TV than the rest of the series. Part of that is because I didn’t want to rehash the same issues of problematic portrayals of things like police brutality. But part of it was because I do think that capitalism is a useful framework for thinking about what the police are and what we want the police to be.

I was working at my day job this week at Starbucks (give me that health insurance baby!) and we had a (probably) homeless man wander in for the second day in a row. Like the first time, he was loud and disruptive, walking around the store rapping incoherently aside from the odd fuck word. He seemed either mentally ill or on some kind of drugs.

My manager asked him to leave. He wouldn’t. She called the police, but he was gone before they arrived. When they did arrive (in bulletproof vests and with guns), I wondered what would have happened if he had still been there. They probably would have walked him out of the store and down the street before just letting him go. They weren’t going to help him, they weren’t going to be looking out for his best interest, they were going to be defending the corporate interests of Starbucks from him.

There wasn’t really an alternative to calling the police, but it felt like a clearly bad solution. I think that The Wire helps illustrate the myriad ways that this is bad, from the lack of social support, to building empathy with where this man comes from, to the real role of the police in this situation—to protect capital.