Deindustrialisation

Baltimore has a homicide rate that's roughly seven times America's national average, and rates for other crimes (aggravated assault, theft, that sort of thing) while not in keeping with the high murder rate are still higher than the national average. A third of the occupants of Baltimore proper (which has a population three times larger than the city itself) are in housing projects, either towers or state-owned terraces. A quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Obviously, there's some stratification - the majority of the crime and poverty is concentrated into a few districts, usually those closest to the decaying industrial centres. While the middle class, especially the white middle class, of Baltimore has been making an exodus to the surrounding towns since the mid-sixties (the city's population has dropped between five and ten percent every decade since 1960, compared with a massive growth period between 1900 and 1940), the poorest sections of society have fermented into a destitute underclass.

The city grew up on trade and heavy industry, first as a port in the maritime age, and naturally progressing to a dockyard and industrial producer as America's industrial revolution kicked off. It became a massive labour centre, eventually the second most populous city in the Union, but with the postwar shift of focus of America's economy from production to services, Baltimore - like the rest of the rust belt, many of whose cities are also home to high crime and poverty rates - was left with a large population and a shrinking source of capital. Although it's home to six FTSE500 companies today, four of those operate in the financial sector and the remaining two are high-end manufacturers.

So, as a setting for a show like The Wire, Baltimore is a good choice for two reasons: firstly, and most trivially, because it's so unpleasant. If the show is about a failed American experiment, then surely Baltimore, with its abnormally high murder rate, is a prime example of that failure. Secondly, however, because it represents in one rusting and momumental motion the one-sidedness of American capitalism and the resistance of that system to meaningful change. The wealth that created Baltimore is still visible in the show, perhaps most notably in its beautiful neoclassical courthouse - if not something built around 1792, when the city was founded, then certainly modelled after the great age of American revolutionary architechture. The courthouse, however, is the enclave of more or less corrupt bereaucracy and legal inefficiency, set up more as an obstacle than an arbiter to most of the black characters. Any money - new money, active money - in Baltimore is on the harbour, mostly in development (an area of the economy closed to those without massive capacity for initial investment) and new businesses which, given America's recent (and socially irresponsible) trend for outsourcing, are unlikely to act as labour sources for the city's well of unskilled labour.

An Endearingly Rephrehensible Reprobate

So a week on (maybe a little less; it's Monday, so named after the moon, and I'm typing on a school keyboard that requires the application of so much force it feels like I'm six again and hammering away at my grandfather's old Smith and Corona) we're still studying The Wire. We're only about two, maybe three episodes into the first season, so really very little has happened in terms of plot - instead, the focus of both the lesson plans and David Simon's teleplays (isn't that a delightfully futuristic word?) has been on character introduction. This afternoon we're tasked to write about Detective James McNulty, Baltimore City Homicide Dept., who is in the tradition of Catholic Irish boys from New England an endearingly reprehensible reprobate.

Jimmy McNulty enjoys a somewhat strained relationship with his commanding officers (although it's sometimes difficult to tell when Sergeant Landsman, a murder police of equatorial proportions, is angry or just amused) and a decidedly strained relationship with his ex-wife, also mother to his two healthy kids. Although throughout the series there is a tension between Jimmy and Elena which is not always entirely asexual, Jimmy's marital difficulties basically stem from his chronic infidelity (one Elena will likely never forgive), to which end he basically has it off with every minor female character who isn't, like Kima, fashionably gay-but-not-butch. (And anyway, in season three, he ends up covering for Kima when she starts cheating on her partner). Because Jimmy is so often seen in the company of hard-drinking policemen, however, and in an atmosphere in which moral boundaries are blurred to begin with, his promiscuity is something to be regarded less as a character flaw and more of a character consequence. In the third season, for example, he explains that "maybe the thing that makes me so good at this job is the thing that makes me so shitty at everything else" - his insatiability, this flaw that means he's never satisfied (either with married life or only apprehending mid-level pushers) is his principal characteristic.

Whether or not the fact that McNulty represents some kind of psychosexual pattern in his writers, or within the American population at large - which would be easier to talk about in broad, sweeping (and blithely Viennese) arguments that bear little correlation to reality and make them therefore perfectly suited for Media Studies - is hard to say. I think it's more realistic to interpret him as an inherently broken character; morally righteous in terms of police work, often butting heads with what he sees as an overly-politicised command, but at another level more reflective of some kind of deep cultural melancholy. A third of American marriages end in divorce, and Jimmy's was no different. He deals with the stresses of alimony and visitation disputes by drinking heavily and engaging in more-or-less mechanical sexual encounters, and almost all of his friends are murder cops.

He does, however, at least try and find a better situation for himself, so there's some redeeming hope. In season three (which I've just finished watching and so feel confident referencing) he finds a political strategist who might be the one to set him back on the rails, or at least stop pissing on them. Although as a Catholic he seems sometimes doomed to perpetual penance, he's still an American, man.

The Sort of Thing Small Blogs Rave About

Recently I heard The Wire described as the sort of thing small blogs rave about. I don't know whether the phrase was original or not, but it was pretty much the neatest description of the series I'd heard since I heard of it last year in Media Studies (not, perhaps tellingly, on a small blog). Although its underlying message of an inherently flawed American dream isn't entirely unique, even within the domain of cop shows, The Wire combines a greasy charm - Detective Jimmy McNulty, famous for his whoring and drinking - with a bleak portrait of the Baltimore ghetto. When you combine this with gritty and atavistic (thanks, Mr. Alexander) realism, you get Clever American Television which is raved about on small blogs.

Although this blog is even smaller than the smallest of those, and not even in this infantile stage guaranteed consistent updates, I'll try and keep my raving short. Basically, a summary would be that I'm pleased to be studying this particular television series in English this year. Which, happily, brings my preamble to a close.

The words 'great' and 'literature' came up in class today (well, actually, 'greatest text', but there are bones to pick out of that). We were told to talk about the greatest text we'd ever read, or, in the cases of video games and films (or HBO dramas), played or watched. I wrote about my favourite, which was the one that came to mind soonest: Slaughterhouse 5. Wikipedia explains that Slaughterhouse 5 or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) is an anti-war science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier called Billy Pilgrim. It also mentions that reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five have been mixed since the 31 March 1969 review in New York Times newspaper that glowingly concedes: "you'll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner".

Slaughterhouse 5 is probably not as significant a postmodern work as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and it both weighs less and deals with issues of less Biblical significance than either Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Dante Aligheri's Inferno, or even the Bible. Its prose is, well, prosaic (The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty), but too silly to be anything like Hemingway, who was prosaic and gritty, or Bukowski, who was a gruff alcoholic left alone too long to brood. What Slaughterhouse 5 has that these books don't isn't much, but its delightful silliness and vastly different atmosphere make the tragedy in it much simpler and much more human. Vonnegut sketched it out by filling in the space around it, and by doing that made room for a lot of warmth.