Bill Moyers Talks Drugs, Crime, Journalism and Democracy with Creator of 'The Wire'

By Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal. Posted April 21, 2009.

How can you not look at that? Or watch a city school system suffer for 20, 25-- how can you-- isn't anger the appropriate response? What is the appropriate response? Ennui? You know? Alienation? You know, buying into the notion that 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.

BILL MOYERS: 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 by you-- as you say, the system it self-perpetuating.

DAVID SIMON: And moneyed. And beautifully moneyed. I mean, you know-- and 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. You know? And 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.

BILL MOYERS: Do you really believe, as you said to those students at Loyola, that we're not going to make it?

DAVID SIMON: 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. I mean, you know, empires end. And that doesn't mean cultures end completely and it doesn't mean that even nation states... You know, I mean, if you looked at Britain in 1952 and what was being presided over by Anthony Eden and those guys. You'd have said, "Man, you know, what's going to be left?" But, you know, 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. And a lot of our foreign policy represents that. And a lot of our-- you know, 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 magic. Out of nothing. Out of-

BILL MOYERS: Derivatives and all-

DAVID SIMON: Out of bad mortgages. No, look, it's a new stock. Bring more money. I mean, the insanity of that is-- it was fun being compared to Gibbon, I'll take that. But-

BILL MOYERS: I must say you are a reporter, not a prophet. But sometimes-

DAVID SIMON: Exactly.

BILL MOYERS: -what happens emerges from the way the facts were reported. That you need to know what reality is, as best you can, before you can choose which way to go. Who do you thinks going to now be telling us 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?

DAVID SIMON: I don't know. I mean, I think ultimately a little of it's going to come from everywhere. You know, there have been books of-- 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-- more WIREs. I mean, you know, we-- I've pretty much demonstrated how not to make a hit show, you know? I make a show that gets me on Bill Moyers. But-

BILL MOYERS: I know, but-

DAVID SIMON: But I don't--

BILL MOYERS: -critically acclaimed.

DAVID SIMON: -but I don't get a show that, you know, that makes a lot of money for a network. There are about 749 different shows, dramas and comedies on television right now that you can watch. You know, 748 of them are about the America that I inhabit, that you inhabit.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

DAVID SIMON: That most of the viewing public, I guess, inhabits. There was 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.

BILL MOYERS: But I want to close with some poetry. Some poetry that I don't know whether you created or whether you discovered. But it's that unforgettable moment in THE WIRE when we hear "Goodnight Moon." Tell me about that before I play it for the audience.

DAVID SIMON: You know, I'm going to-- I'm going to tell you that that is straight from a book that I totally admire. CLOCKERS by Richard Price. And Price wrote that episode. And he recreated it right out of the novel. It's almost a benediction for the city. And it is the thing that, you didn't get it if you were a politician or a police commander or a school superintendent, and you were running on your rep. You didn't get that THE WIRE was actually a love letter to Baltimore. From your point of view, what it was, was just this nightmare that you had to like argue against.

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Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

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