by Bill Moyers
Again, we have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. As we said before, economically, we don’t need those people; the American economy doesn’t need them. So as long as they stay in their ghettos and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay for a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. Since we basically have become a market-based culture, that’s what we know, and it’s what’s led us to this sad dénouement. I think we’re going to follow market-based logic right to the bitter end.
Which says?
If you don’t need ’em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you’re doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There’s no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.
But here’s the problem for journalism. When we write about inequality, we use numbers that are profound but numbing. Here’s something I just read: over the past twenty years, the elite 1 percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s income double, from 11.3 percent to 22.1 percent, but their tax burden shrank by about one-third. Now, those facts tell us something very important: that the rich got richer as their tax rates shrank. But it doesn’t seem to start people’s blood rushing.
You start talking about a social compact between the people at the bottom of the pyramid and the people at the top, and people look at you and say, “Are you talking about sharing wealth?” Listen, capitalism is the only engine credible enough to generate mass wealth. I think it’s imperfect, but we’re stuck with it. And thank God we have that in the toolbox. But if you don’t manage it in some way that incorporates all of society, if everybody’s not benefiting on some level and you don’t have a sense of shared purpose, national purpose, then it’s just a pyramid scheme. Who’s standing on top of whose throat?
Why do you think, David, that we tolerate such gaps between rich and poor?
You know, I’m fascinated by it. Because a lot of the people who end up voting for that kind of laissez-faire market policy are people who get creamed by it. And I think it’s almost like a casino. You’re looking at the guy winning, you’re looking at the guy who pulled the lever and all the bells go off, all the coins are coming out of a one-armed bandit. You’re thinking, “That could be me. I’ll play by those rules.” But actually, those are house rules. And most of you are going to lose.
After all these years do you have the answer?
Oh, I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it as fast as I could into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the urban equivalent of FDR’s CCC—the Civilian Conservation Corps—if it was New Deal–type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome. The drug war is war on the underclass now. That’s all it is. It has no other meaning.
There’s very little the police can do.
You talk honestly with some of the veteran and smarter detectives in Baltimore, the guys who have given their career to the drug war, including, for example, Ed Burns, who was a drug warrior for twenty years, and they’ll tell you, this war’s lost. This is all over but the shouting and the tragedy and the waste. And yet there isn’t a political leader with the stomach to really assess it for what it is.
So whose lives are less and less necessary in America today?
Certainly the underclass. There’s a reason they are the underclass. We’re in an era when you don’t need as much mass labor; we are not a manufacturing base. People who built stuff, their lives had some meaning and value because the factories were open. You don’t need them anymore. Unions and working people are completely abandoned by this economic culture, and, you know, that’s heartbreaking to me. I’ve been a union member my whole life and I guess I belong to a little gilded union now. A gilded guild.
The Writers Guild.
The Writers Guild, yes, but I was a member of the Newspaper Guild before that, and I thank them for letting me earn an honest living. Without them, God knows what we would have been paid in Baltimore. But I look at what’s happened with unions. Ed Burns says all the time that he wants to do a piece on the Haymarket.
The Haymarket bombing in Chicago, in 1886.
Yes. The bombing, that critical moment when American labor was pushed so much to the starving point that they were willing to fight. And I actually think that’s the only time when change is possible, when people are actually threatened to the core, and enough people are threatened to the core that they just won’t take it anymore. Those are the pivotal moments in American history, I think, when something actually does happen.
In Haymarket, they were fighting for the eight-hour workday. It sounded radical at the time, but it’s basically a dignity-of-life issue. You look at things like that, you look at the anti–Vietnam War effort in this country. You had to threaten middle-class kids with a draft and with military service in an unpopular war for people to rise up and demand an end to that unpopular war. I mean, it didn’t happen without that. So on some level, as long as they placate enough people, as long as they throw enough scraps from the table that enough people get a little bit to eat, I just don’t see a change coming.
Did this great collapse we have experienced confirm the reporting you had done about what happens when an economic system creates two separate realities?
I couldn’t have conceived of something as grandiose as the mortgage bubble, when you finally look at what caused that, and the sheer greed and the stupidity of that pyramid scheme. We didn’t know it was as corrosive as it was. We didn’t know it was rotted out that much. But we knew there was something rotten in the core. And we knew it from what we were looking at, in terms of Baltimore, and how Baltimore addressed its problems.
Politics is supposed to be about solving the situations you describe. But it’s constantly creating its own reality, right?
It’s about money and it’s about advancement. As a reporter, I got to see some politics. I wasn’t a political reporter per se, but I got to see enough of city politics to absorb it. And Ed Burns taught in the Baltimore city school system and pulled all that through the keyhole for season four of The Wire. I got to see the war on drugs. I got to see policing as a concept. And I got to see journalism.
And when it came to explaining complicated and sophisticated systems and trying to say, “This is what’s going on and if we change this or do that, or if we actually implement this policy, we can, you know ...” The hard work of looking at it systemically, there was no incentive to do it, and nobody did it, and that’s as true in Baltimore today as when I started as a reporter, and I think it’s true in America.
I remain indebted to those reporters who go where I can’t go, who talk to people I can’t reach, and come back with news I need to know. And as you say, you were spit out by the forces at work in the journalistic world. And now journalism is spitting out reporters like teeth.
Left and right. You know, listen, I was not the last. That’s true. And it’s heartbreaking. And I say this with no schadenfreude just because I got a TV gig. It’s heartbreaking what’s happening, and I feel that the republic is actually in danger.
There is no guard now assessing anything qualitatively, no pulling back the veil behind what an official will tell you is progress, or is valid, or is legitimate as policy. Absent that, no good can come from anything. Because there is an absolute disincentive to tell the truth.
You recently told The Guardian in London: “Oh, to be a state or local official in America”—without newspapers—“it’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”
Well, I was being a little hyperbolic.
But it’s happening.
&
nbsp; Yes. It absolutely is. To find out what’s going on in my own city I often find myself at a bar somewhere, writing stuff down on a cocktail napkin that a police lieutenant or some schoolteacher tells me, because these institutions are no longer being covered by beat reporters who are looking for the systemic. It doesn’t exist anymore.
“We were doing our job, making the world safe for democracy. And all of a sudden, terra firma shifted, new technology. Who knew that the Internet was going to overwhelm us?” I would buy that if I wasn’t in journalism for the years that immediately preceded the Internet. I took the third buyout from The Baltimore Sun. I was about reporter number eighty or ninety who left, in 1995, long before the Internet had had its impact. I left at a time when The Baltimore Sun was earning 37 percent profits.
We now know this because it’s in bankruptcy and the books are open. All that R&D money that was supposed to go into making newspapers more essential, more viable, more able to explain the complexities of the world went to shareholders in the Tribune Company. Or the L.A. Times Mirror Company before that. And ultimately, when the Internet did hit, they had an inferior product that was not essential enough that they could charge online for it.
I mean, the guys who are running newspapers over the last twenty or thirty years have to be singular in the manner in which they destroyed their own industry. It’s even more profound than Detroit in 1973 making Chevy Vegas and Pacers and Gremlins and believing that no self-respecting American would buy a Japanese car. Except it’s not analogous, in that a Nissan is a pretty good car, and a Toyota is a pretty good car. The Internet, while it’s great for commentary and froth, doesn’t do very much firstgeneration reporting at all. The economic model can’t sustain that kind of reporting. They had contempt for their own product, these people.
The publishers. The owners.
You know, for twenty years, they looked upon the copy as being the stuff that went around the ads. The ads were God. And then all of a sudden the ads were not there, and the copy, they had had contempt for. They had actually marginalized themselves. I was being a little flippant with The Guardian, but what I was saying was, you know, until they figure out the new model, there’s going to be a wave of corruption.
Are you cynical?
I am very cynical about institutions and their willingness to address themselves to reform. I am not cynical when it comes to individuals and people. And I think the reason The Wire is watchable, even tolerable, to viewers is that it has great affection for individuals. It’s not misanthropic in any way. It has great affection for those people, particularly when they stand up on their hind legs and say, “I will not lie anymore. I am actually going to fight for what I perceive to be some shard of truth.”
You know, over time, people are going to look at The Wire and think, “This was not quite as cynical as we thought it was. This was actually a little bit more journalistic than that. They were being blunt. But it was less mean than we thought it was.” I think, in Baltimore, the initial response to seeing some of this on the air was, “These guys are not fair and they’re mean. And they’re just out to savage us.” But it was a love letter to Baltimore.
You said to the students at Loyola College in Baltimore some years ago, “I want you to go and look up the word oligarchy.” Well, I did just that. I took your advice. I looked it up.
Uh-oh.
It means “government by the few.” Or “a government in which a small group exercises control for corrupt and selfish purposes.” Is that what you saw in Baltimore?
I was speaking nationally, but yes. We are a country of democratic ideas and impulses, but it is strained through some very oligarchical structures. One of which could be, for example, the United States Senate. Or I look at the Electoral College as being decidedly undemocratic. I don’t buy into the notion that “one man, one vote” is not the most fundamental way of doing business. And, ultimately, when I look at the drug war—listen, the only reason that alcohol and cigarettes, which do far more damage than heroin and cocaine, are legal is that white people, and affluent white people at that, make money off that stuff. Philip Morris, if those guys had black and brown skin and were in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, they’d be hunted. Or maybe not anymore; maybe they’d be in control of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. That’s another story. ...
I look at that, and I say, “Yes, money talks.” The idea that what the most people want is best for the most people, the utilitarian sense of democracy still applying in American life—I just don’t see a lot of evidence for that.
So is this what you mean when you say The Wire is dissent?
Yes. It is dissent. It is saying, “We no longer buy these false ideologies. And the false motifs you have of American life.” I look at this and I think to myself, if only you stand up and say, “I’m not going to be lied to anymore,” that’s a victory on some level, that’s a beginning of a dynamic. Can change happen? Yes. But things have to get a lot worse.
If I could put a lede on the body of your work—your journalism, your articles, your essays, your speeches, your books, your television series—it would be this: David Simon says America’s not working for everyday people who have no power. And that’s the way the people with power have designed it to work.
Right. I mean, it would be one thing with an oligarchy if they were doing a better job of it. I would be okay with that.
Making the trains run on time.
Right, but everything from Iraq to Wall Street to urban policy to the drug war, I look at it all and I say, “You know, these guys really couldn’t do much worse.” New Orleans was such a beautiful metaphor for the hollowness at the core of American will, you know? To have seen the president of the United States take the plane down and look out his window and say, “Oh my God, it must be twice as bad on the ground.” Twice as bad? Really? It’s failure of will and imagination and I see it across the board, and I just think, in a way, The Wire is an editorial. It’s an angry op-ed, as if Frank Rich was given, you know, twelve hours of airtime to rant.
Are you, as someone said, “the angriest man in television”?
I saw that. It doesn’t really mean much. The second-angriest guy is, you know, by a kidney-shaped pool in L.A. screaming into his cell phone because his DVD points aren’t enough. But I don’t mind being called that. I just don’t think it means anything. How can you have lived through the last ten years in American culture and not be? How can you not look at what happened on Wall Street, at this gamesmanship that was the mortgage bubble, that was just selling crap and calling it gold? Or watch a city school system suffer for twenty, twenty-five years? Isn’t anger the appropriate response? What is the appropriate response? Ennui? Alienation? Buying into the great-man theory of history—that if we only elect the right guy? This stuff is systemic. This is how an empire is eaten from within.
But I don’t think these good individuals you talk about—the individual who stands up and says, “I’m not going to lie anymore”—I don’t think individuals know how to crack that system, how to change that system. Because the system is self-perpetuating.
And beautifully moneyed. I don’t think we can. And so I don’t think it’s going to get better. Listen, I don’t like talking this way. I would be happy to find out that The Wire was hyperbolic and ridiculous, and that the “American Century” is still to come. I don’t believe it, but I’d love to believe it, because I live in Baltimore, and I’m an American. I want to sit in my house and see the game on Saturday along with everybody else. But I just don’t see a lot of evidence of it.
Do you really believe, as you said to those students at Loyola, that we’re not going to make it?
We’re not going to make it as a first-rate empire. And I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing in the end. Empires end, and that doesn’t mean cultures end completely, and it doesn’t even mean that for nation-states. If you looked at Britain in 1952 and what was being presided over by Anthony Eden and those guys, you’d have said, “Man, what’s going to b
e left?” But Britain’s still there, and they’ve come to terms with what they can and can’t do.
Americans are still sort of in an age of delusion, I think. A lot of our foreign policy represents that. And this notion that the markets were always going to go up, and that once we had invested stocks to death, we could create some new equity out of nothing.
You are a reporter, not a prophet, but who do you think is going to tell us now what the facts are that we can agree on? Is it going to be television? Is it going to be fiction? Is it going to be journalism?
I don’t know. I mean, I think ultimately a little of it’s going to come from everywhere. You know, there have been novels that I read that I thought were genuine truth-telling. And there have been journalistic endeavors that have really come close to being brilliant and blunt and honest, in a variety of formats. And there has been some film and some television. But it’s not like everybody’s rushing to make The Wire. I’ve pretty much demonstrated how not to make a hit show, you know? I make a show that gets me on Bill Moyers.
There are about 749 different shows, dramas and comedies, on television right now, and 748 of them are about the America that I inhabit, that you inhabit, that most of the viewing public, I guess, inhabits. There was only one about the other America. And it was arguing, passionately, about a place where, let’s face it, the economic rules don’t apply in the same way. Half of the adult black males in my city are unemployed. That’s not an economic model that actually works.
VICTOR GOLD
Fifty years ago, Vic Gold and I were both young idealists who voted for John F. Kennedy for president. Except for our awe of the Alabama football legend “Bear” Bryant, that’s probably the last time we ever agreed on anything until now. I went on to serve in the Kennedy administration and then in the White House with President Lyndon Johnson. Vic Gold became a speechwriter and advisor to Senator Barry Goldwater. We were pitted against each other in 1964 when Goldwater challenged Johnson for the presidency and lost. Vic has never forgiven me for the television ads we ran against his candidate, even though I left the White House three years later to atone for my sins and have been a journalist ever since (a bigger sin, perhaps, in Vic’s eyes).