04-19-2012, 11:03 PM
To be fair with Vllad - yes, I am bigoted against cops due to my personal experiences with them in several countries as power hungry thugs and during my short stint working for a crooked criminal defense lawyer whose cases, despite his lack of credibility and ethics, showed me cops were just as crooked as the normal criminals. But hey, thats just my interpretation from my experiences, as your experiences with your cop friends make you think all cops are that way.
Ironically, I could also accuse you of bigotry of you saying all criminals are stupid. During my life I have known people in the drug trade who the government considers criminals and who are, fundamentally, fantastic people who led great lives, never destroyed childrend, etc. Thats the whole point of the Wire, that people are pretty much the same regardless of which group they tend to ally themselves with. Fortunately my cops are scum view tends to coincide with my greater world view that people are scum.
As for the reality of the wire. To say it is as fake as any other TV show is just silly. There are certainly elements which are super dramatized, but there are a good deal of elements in the political issues which are taken directly out of Baltimore reality. Morevore, the realism shouldnt be limited to the police portions since it isn't a police show. It isn't equally realistic as CSI, because CSI's link to realism is that it happens to take place in a police station, whereas the wire has a plethora of people who worked in the individual institutions, be they drug dealing, police dealing, news dealing, education dealing, etc. and, by many people in those institutions in Baltimore did a pretty good job of representing what was going on at the time. Is it reality? No, of course not. Is it closer to reality than neutered prime time broadcast television? Absolutely.
As for institutions wearing you down, thats the whole fucking point of the show. You go into a big institution, be it a drug cartel, police force, a union, a school - even if you are a fundamentally good person, eventually the system and the lack of ability to change shit wears people down, in a way that is different than just being tired of work. That was the argument Simon is making, and I think it is a powerful one. The idea of being a cog in a machine is a pretty universal theme in modern American life, regardless of if you work in the underworld, for the government, or for a big private entity. Some people escape it, but it is a pretty heavy reality for a lot of people and how he actually took scum from the street and showed how the basic functioning of their lives is not all that different from those we pay to protect us, represent us for work, report for us, educate us is pretty "spot on".
Ironically, I could also accuse you of bigotry of you saying all criminals are stupid. During my life I have known people in the drug trade who the government considers criminals and who are, fundamentally, fantastic people who led great lives, never destroyed childrend, etc. Thats the whole point of the Wire, that people are pretty much the same regardless of which group they tend to ally themselves with. Fortunately my cops are scum view tends to coincide with my greater world view that people are scum.
As for the reality of the wire. To say it is as fake as any other TV show is just silly. There are certainly elements which are super dramatized, but there are a good deal of elements in the political issues which are taken directly out of Baltimore reality. Morevore, the realism shouldnt be limited to the police portions since it isn't a police show. It isn't equally realistic as CSI, because CSI's link to realism is that it happens to take place in a police station, whereas the wire has a plethora of people who worked in the individual institutions, be they drug dealing, police dealing, news dealing, education dealing, etc. and, by many people in those institutions in Baltimore did a pretty good job of representing what was going on at the time. Is it reality? No, of course not. Is it closer to reality than neutered prime time broadcast television? Absolutely.
As for institutions wearing you down, thats the whole fucking point of the show. You go into a big institution, be it a drug cartel, police force, a union, a school - even if you are a fundamentally good person, eventually the system and the lack of ability to change shit wears people down, in a way that is different than just being tired of work. That was the argument Simon is making, and I think it is a powerful one. The idea of being a cog in a machine is a pretty universal theme in modern American life, regardless of if you work in the underworld, for the government, or for a big private entity. Some people escape it, but it is a pretty heavy reality for a lot of people and how he actually took scum from the street and showed how the basic functioning of their lives is not all that different from those we pay to protect us, represent us for work, report for us, educate us is pretty "spot on".