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

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

PRESTON "BODIE" BROADUS: Alright, so, if I make it to the other end, I win. D'ANGELO BARKSDALE: If you catch the other dude's king and trap it, then you win.

PRESTON "BODIE" BROADUS: Alright, but if I make it to the end, I'm top dog.

D'ANGELO BARKSDALE: No, yo, it ain't like that. Look, the pawns man, in the game, they get capped quick, they be out of the game early.

PRESTON "BODIE" BROADUS: Unless they some smart-ass pawns.

[...]

DAVID SIMON: It's almost -- he's describing a capitalist pyramid. Where nobody moves. Where there is no improvement in anyone's station. And we were basically setting out a preamble for what the next five seasons would show, with regard to the city. You know, in second season there was a character who said, almost prescient of the of the Wall Street debacle. He said, "We used to make stuff in this country. Build stuff." He didn't say 'stuff' but it's HBO.

But he said, "Now, we just put our hands in the next guy's pocket." And ultimately, some things are serendipitous and you find themes and, you react and the story changes. And, you know, I'm not suggesting we have everything planned to the nth degree. But we knew, for example when we wrote that scene in the beginning of the first season, that by the end of the run those three characters would have been treated as pawns in a chess game.

And we knew that character that cited what was ailing post-industrial America, he happened to be a union captain and one of the longshoreman. That he would be speaking to, at the time, what we were reacting to with Enron and things like-- and WorldCom and the first sort of-- first shots across our bow, economically. That people were trading crap and calling it gold. And that's what THE WIRE was about. It was about that which is-- has no value, being emphasized as being meaningful. And that which is-- has genuine meaning, being given low regard.

BILL MOYERS: I haven't forgotten that moment in Season Two when the F.B.I. comes to the longshoreman, whose union is suspected of illegal activity and tries to make a deal with him. The answer he gives goes right to the heart of what you are saying about our economic system. Watch this.

[...]

FBI AGENT 1: Racketeering, wire fraud, conspiracy to import heroin, conspiracy to violate federal customs statutes, white slavery.

FBI AGENT 2: Today we're only charging the customs violations, Mr. Sobotka. But eventually a grand jury indictment will expose you to a lot more.

FBI AGENT 1: Name names and come clean. You help yourself and your union.

FRANK SOBOTKA: Help my union? Twenty-five years we been dyin' slow down there. Dry-docks rustin', piers standin' empty. My friends and their kids like we got the cancer. No lifeline got throwed, all that time. Nuthin' from nobody... And now you wanna help us. Help me?

[...]

BILL MOYERS: So, whose lives are less and less necessary in America today?

DAVID SIMON: Certainly the underclass. There's a reason they are the underclass. But in an area-- in an era when you don't need as much mass labor. When we are not a manufacturing base those people that built stuff, that made stuff-- that were-- that their lives had some meaning and value because the factories were open. You don't need them anymore.

But also unions and working people are completely abandoned by this economic culture and that's what Season Two was about. It was about one of the forces, one of the walls that basically make the corner culture. And, you know, that's heartbreaking to me. I've been a union member my whole life and I guess its a little gilded union now. Gilded guild.

BILL MOYERS: The Writer's Guild.

DAVID SIMON: The Writer's Guild, yes, but I was a newspaper-- a member of the newspaper guild before that and I thank them for letting me earn an honest living. 'Cause, you know, without them, God knows what we would have been paid in Baltimore. But I look at what's happened with unions and I think-- Ed Burns says all the time that he wants to do a piece on the Haymarket.

BILL MOYERS: The Haymarket strike.

DAVID SIMON: Yes. That-- the bombing, and 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. And that's-- those are the pivotal moments in American history, I think, when actually something does happen.

You know, they were-- in Haymarket, they were fighting for the 40-hour work week. You know? So, it wasn't-- it sounds radical at the time, but it's basically a dignity of life issue. And you look at things like that. You look at the anti-Vietnam War effort, in this country which, you know, 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 the end to an 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.

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

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