The Current Events book club has been reading David Simon's 
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets this month, which has already prompted some of the usual cross-questioning about who inspired what in his critical universe, which real-life personalities can be found in which fictional characters. Over 25 years, Simon has created a kind of continuum of ideas and personalities that keep cropping up in different media. Think of Armistad Maupin's Tales of the City, only spread across fictional and non-fictional TV and two books, set in a city slowly dying as the bodies of its citizens are felled by violence and drug abuse.
Simon is a former police beat reporter from the Baltimore Sun. He took a year off from that paper to write Homicide, which was adapted into a Peabody Award-winning semi-fictional show of the same name on NBC. Later, he and Ed Burns wrote The Corner, a critically acclaimed book which became an Emmy-winning HBO mini-series and later served as much of the inspiration for the Peabody-winning The Wire, whose brilliant characters, Dickensian scope and wrenching social commentary have earned it the distinction of "most important show of all time" from too many TV critics to mention.
In each of Simon's books and adapted series, the city of Baltimore itself stands out as the most fundamental character. We might identify with a cop here or an addict there, but the thing that stays or forces their hands often is the city. It's what ties minority drug slingers on Fayette and Monroe to the Irish of "Billytown," and both to the evolving racial composition of the police. In The Wire in a dramatic way and in Homicide and The Corner in a public-policy way, it is the city that acts like a modern avatar of the ancient Greek gods and fates. It's not character, or one tough cop who won't take no for an answer or one God-fearing addict with two hands yanking on his bootstraps but rather the forces of economics, zoning, education, town councils, police blotters and public health that occupy the pantheon of our lives and are indifferently regnant over our circumstances.
This is pretty rough stuff, and I pointed this out to the poster with whom I was discussing the books in instant messenger. Sometimes you have to put these books down for a little while and walk away, overcome. But this is good; this points to their strengths as journalism. The book
The Corner — and, by extension, the show The Wire, which took much from it — can be bleak, although humorous exchanges and indelible characters tempter the bleakness of the overall message. This is, perhaps, where the adjective Dickensian fits best. Doubtless we might have enjoyed Oliver Twist less if we lived in the London of the time, and the discomfort at recognizing the reflection of our own society in these works shouldn't facilitate our turning away from them.
The writing in The Corner is immersive and reflects the immersion required to create it. Simon and partner Ed Burns — a veteran Baltimore homicide detective and public school teacher — spent a year hanging out on the corner of Fayette and Monroe, at the heart of the west Baltimore drug trade. Eventually, as people realized they weren't there as a gimmick, the neighborhood opened up to them. The result is a year in the life of Fayette and Monroe seen through local addicts, a youth-group director and the McCullough family, which is riven with addiction and poverty.
The McCullough's story in particular is gripping and can be read like a novel, hoping that young DeAndre will get out of the drug game, that his father Gary and mother Fran will manage each to beat their addictions and rebuild their lives apart if not together. In the process of rooting for them, we see how few options they have left. An area so impoverished hasn't the resources to meet the tax burdens of quality schools, which students won't be in anyway because they need to work — at jobs they have to commute to just to reach an area with enough local economy to create business — for a minimum wage whose toil, lack of compensation and lack of mental or creative reward cannot possibly compete with the riches to be found from slingin' out on The Corner.
The struggles these people face can be overwhelming for the reader — hence what I said about needing to put it down for a bit — but obviously they were a bit much for Simon and Burns. Some of the best parts of the book come when they feel they've related enough of the reality on the ground to switch to a polemic tone, and start dropping knowledge with a fury. While not excusing crime, they humanize the people we meet by casting their struggle within the greater context of what they call a War on the Underclass.
Simon and Burns depict a War on Drugs that has, at least in Baltimore, mutated into a long siege of its victims. While their overall politics lean left, civil libertarians of all stripes will probably squirm at explanations of "Indicted Corners" and "Drug Free Zones," where the act of loitering in sometimes capriciously designated areas is assumed by the police to be evidence of drug activity and thus probable cause for search and seizure. Those who would lionize the welfare state see one that functions as little more than a farce, where programs to rescue people from the disease of addiction require exactly the sort of collected documentation and composed behavior that is precisely what you can't expect from someone in the grip of a disease that requires the program. And those who would see failure as the absence of initiative, an absence of seizing an opportunity with both hands will be hard-pressed to find many.
It's easy to dismiss The Corner as an angry book. Simon's career often seems fueled by the explosive energy of curiosity meeting outrage. But there's a lot of hope to The Corner as well, beyond hoping for each McCullough to finally make it. It's the hope the reader feels that any citizen can turn their story around, that shared impulse we have to see other people improve their lot and escape from poverty and fear.
Perhaps most fiercely it's the hope that Simon and Burns have that they can convince readers that these various Wars on _____ we create cannot be treated as discrete entities. The tragedy of drugs in America is not something fought only by tactical squads flying around the city in conversion vans: locking up the users won't make the dealers go away if the dealers have few other alternatives; and locking up the dealers won't eliminate the yawning dependency inside each addict. Everything is connected in the Simon universe. His hope seems to be that eventually all of us will be as well.
Simon is a former police beat reporter from the Baltimore Sun. He took a year off from that paper to write Homicide, which was adapted into a Peabody Award-winning semi-fictional show of the same name on NBC. Later, he and Ed Burns wrote The Corner, a critically acclaimed book which became an Emmy-winning HBO mini-series and later served as much of the inspiration for the Peabody-winning The Wire, whose brilliant characters, Dickensian scope and wrenching social commentary have earned it the distinction of "most important show of all time" from too many TV critics to mention.
In each of Simon's books and adapted series, the city of Baltimore itself stands out as the most fundamental character. We might identify with a cop here or an addict there, but the thing that stays or forces their hands often is the city. It's what ties minority drug slingers on Fayette and Monroe to the Irish of "Billytown," and both to the evolving racial composition of the police. In The Wire in a dramatic way and in Homicide and The Corner in a public-policy way, it is the city that acts like a modern avatar of the ancient Greek gods and fates. It's not character, or one tough cop who won't take no for an answer or one God-fearing addict with two hands yanking on his bootstraps but rather the forces of economics, zoning, education, town councils, police blotters and public health that occupy the pantheon of our lives and are indifferently regnant over our circumstances.
This is pretty rough stuff, and I pointed this out to the poster with whom I was discussing the books in instant messenger. Sometimes you have to put these books down for a little while and walk away, overcome. But this is good; this points to their strengths as journalism. The book
The writing in The Corner is immersive and reflects the immersion required to create it. Simon and partner Ed Burns — a veteran Baltimore homicide detective and public school teacher — spent a year hanging out on the corner of Fayette and Monroe, at the heart of the west Baltimore drug trade. Eventually, as people realized they weren't there as a gimmick, the neighborhood opened up to them. The result is a year in the life of Fayette and Monroe seen through local addicts, a youth-group director and the McCullough family, which is riven with addiction and poverty.
The McCullough's story in particular is gripping and can be read like a novel, hoping that young DeAndre will get out of the drug game, that his father Gary and mother Fran will manage each to beat their addictions and rebuild their lives apart if not together. In the process of rooting for them, we see how few options they have left. An area so impoverished hasn't the resources to meet the tax burdens of quality schools, which students won't be in anyway because they need to work — at jobs they have to commute to just to reach an area with enough local economy to create business — for a minimum wage whose toil, lack of compensation and lack of mental or creative reward cannot possibly compete with the riches to be found from slingin' out on The Corner.
The struggles these people face can be overwhelming for the reader — hence what I said about needing to put it down for a bit — but obviously they were a bit much for Simon and Burns. Some of the best parts of the book come when they feel they've related enough of the reality on the ground to switch to a polemic tone, and start dropping knowledge with a fury. While not excusing crime, they humanize the people we meet by casting their struggle within the greater context of what they call a War on the Underclass.
Simon and Burns depict a War on Drugs that has, at least in Baltimore, mutated into a long siege of its victims. While their overall politics lean left, civil libertarians of all stripes will probably squirm at explanations of "Indicted Corners" and "Drug Free Zones," where the act of loitering in sometimes capriciously designated areas is assumed by the police to be evidence of drug activity and thus probable cause for search and seizure. Those who would lionize the welfare state see one that functions as little more than a farce, where programs to rescue people from the disease of addiction require exactly the sort of collected documentation and composed behavior that is precisely what you can't expect from someone in the grip of a disease that requires the program. And those who would see failure as the absence of initiative, an absence of seizing an opportunity with both hands will be hard-pressed to find many.
It's easy to dismiss The Corner as an angry book. Simon's career often seems fueled by the explosive energy of curiosity meeting outrage. But there's a lot of hope to The Corner as well, beyond hoping for each McCullough to finally make it. It's the hope the reader feels that any citizen can turn their story around, that shared impulse we have to see other people improve their lot and escape from poverty and fear.
Perhaps most fiercely it's the hope that Simon and Burns have that they can convince readers that these various Wars on _____ we create cannot be treated as discrete entities. The tragedy of drugs in America is not something fought only by tactical squads flying around the city in conversion vans: locking up the users won't make the dealers go away if the dealers have few other alternatives; and locking up the dealers won't eliminate the yawning dependency inside each addict. Everything is connected in the Simon universe. His hope seems to be that eventually all of us will be as well.
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