'THE WIRE' - WAR OF TRUTHS

It was hard Sunday night watching the finale of "The Wire" and facing
the fact that we will never see the characters again. The richness and
nuance of the show were such that you continually have to remind
yourself that those people do not actually exist -- that when Stringer,
Omar, Boadie, Snoop, and the others were killed, the actors playing
them got up and walked away after the director yelled "Cut!"

I start to wish they'd do a few more seasons -- but actually, I don't.
The show would start drifting into formula -- this season, health care
- -- which would undercut how achingly real it was. Cutting it off now
and leaving so many loose ends keeps it real, so to speak. It really
was, as far as I know, the best show ever to air on television.

Also useful. It was a magnificent demonstration of the futility of the
War on Drugs. The kingpins run their organizations with the diligence
and tenacity of any entrepreneurs, and continue pulling strings from
prison. There are always kids as young as 13 ready to replace runners
sent to jail. There is always a vast market for the product. The war
has less chance of being won than the one in Iraq. Yet a combination
of puritanism, heartlessness, and petty concern for holding on to
office make it so that no politician dares take the problem by the
horns.

Police Chief Colvin surreptitiously allows an open-air drug market
where addicts can be coaxed into treatment and there is no need for
constant scuffles between sellers and the police. When word gets out,
the entire block is blown up.

However, elsewhere, the politics of the show's creator David Simon
disappoint me. In the book on the series, for instance, "The Wire: Truth
Be Told," it turns out that in the first two seasons Mr. Simon intended
an additional lesson: that the flight of low-skill jobs from cities
leaves young men with, essentially, no choice but to turn to lives of
crime. We are supposed to come away from the series thinking that the
black drug runners in season one are plying the trade because there
aren't factory jobs waiting for them a bus ride away like there were for
their grandfathers.

In season two, white Ziggy and Nick can barely get by as longshoremen
because technology has thinned traffic to a trickle in the harbor. Mr.
Simon's lesson, presumably, is that this leaves them with little
choice but to drift into selling drugs, with tragic
consequences.

This is a lesson many social scientists consider a precious wisdom,
but research doesn't bear it out.

Rather, studies by social scientists such as Harry Holzer, the former
chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor and a professor of
public policy at the Georgetown's Public Policy Institute, and James
Johnson, a professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the
University of North Carolina, have shown that factory relocation was
responsible for at most a third of the rise in unemployment of
uneducated young men in the 1980s. Cities where factory relocation was
minimal have seen the same problems with unemployment and drug vending
as ones like Baltimore -- Indianapolis is a useful demonstration. A
causal, as opposed to correlated, relationship among these problems
and deindustrialization has not been demonstrated.

Overall, the literature on this issue grapples with the sad fact that
the problem is less that jobs for people without B.A.s are unavailable
(are jobs with the post office or installing cable exactly out of
reach for someone who wants one?) than that a wide range of factors
discourage people from finding and taking them -- one of them being how
lucrative selling drugs is because of their illegality.

Mr. Simon is right to decry the War on Drugs, but wrong to think
globalization leaves uneducated young men with no choice but to
subject themselves to said War. This kind of pessimism about the
employment situation is presented as sympathetic and often genuinely
intended as such. However, it distracts us from real solutions.

It was similarly uncomfortable watching Simon in season four
portraying No Child Left Behind as mere bureaucratic nonsense. Okay,
results so far have been minor. But the general implication of season
four is of NCLB being imposed on teachers who were doing a fine job,
stopped in their tracks by having to, Lord forbid, test students more
than they used to and focus on reading and math skills. But then later
on, Lester Freamon passingly dismisses the kind of education Baltimore
public schools provide, and we are to nod warmly at his wisdom. Well,
that's just the kind of school that we see NCLB being "imposed" upon.
The question, as always regarding NCLB, is precisely what we are to
suppose would be a better idea?

Nevertheless, the quality of the writing and acting on "The Wire" are
so very good that what comes through is a much more nuanced message
than Mr. Simon often seems to have intended. I think this is also
because actually watching written characters so richly written and
portrayed in such situations makes it hopelessly clear that the idea
that factories moving to the suburbs turns a community into a war zone
simply does not describe actual human beings.