Those really are just like Tiny Tim’s little crutches, aren’t they?

“God bless us, every one. Indeed.”

About Omar’s jump. I like how so many are locked into the “doesn’t seem possible!” aspect of it, but really, how many of us have any experience falling from 4 stories up? How do we know what is and isn’t possible? It doesn’t seem possible!? Well, Omar just jumped, you almost thought he was trying to fly across to the next building. What happened after he jumped didn’t matter so much, because he had a lock on the outcome had he stayed at the upper elevations in the gunfight…he’d be dead.

Being able to analyze his possibilities and leap to an uncertain fate – that is Omar, still. An ultimate calculation he seems uniquely qualified for. Heh.

The “meta rabbit-hole” is so perfect a phrase… yet how we are telling the story of our time is choking off the oxygen to a whole other world of possibilities, including solutions that might actually help. This idea leads to the meat of that wonderful CJR piece. One example there, focus on some people with SSI who aren’t THAT disabled, get a bunch of people cut off SSI; but ignore that some people got on SSI at the tail end of some other cut back so they wouldn’t starve to death or wind up under a bridge.

But now we as a society are living with the fact that an entire segment of our population is homeless, under a bridge, and a whole other segment is a paycheck away from it. We live with it, but we don’t see it, and for most of us, we choose not to.

And the bigger lie is: it isn’t important we know or care too much about it, and homelessness/poverty doesn’t affect us, even as less than 10 percent of the population takes control over more than half the nations wealth. Know what they say about the bigger the lie, right?

The end quote from CJR wins with me, and I did love all 9 pages of the article. Although it is a shame the right story isn’t being told in the newspapers, The Wire tells us a story as important as anything being said, in any medium we have. How long before “gated communities and a police state” enters mainstream discourse? Not soon enough…

Stupid little chicken-and-egg that simplifies the issue way too much, but this post got me thinking about it and I honestly don’t know the answer.

even more ironic because it’s fucking Krawczyk that says it-he’s like the white collar crime Zelig of The Wire- he’s got his hand in all the pockets, yet he blends into the background and never gets caught.

Re Nicky being a paycheck away from homeless, remember when we last saw Nick, he was entering the fucking witness protection program!!!! He really is Nobody, or he should be. This is the last place he should be, yet for some reason, he’s returned in broad daylight, only to be referred to as “nobody.”

And the vet, poor bastard can’t get over the image of “look ma, no hands.” Instead of knowing that at least he’s better off than the man with no hands (“I met a man with no feet”), he says, “He’s doing better than me.” They can spend thousands to give a man his hands back but they don’t even believe in what it is that destroyed the other man’s mind. There’s a story there. Randy has a story, Nick has a story, so does his friend under the bridge, so does every single person under that bridge. So does Larry, now known as Donald.

t’s the story that’s important, and as long as the story makes sense and has themes and plots and symbols, we are all happy to consume it.

see also spocko’s comment here

I was thinking about this in relation to Nicky Sobotka’s seeming “cameo”, heckling during Carcetti’s redevelopment presser. When Carcetti asks “who was that?” he’s told “It was nobody, Mr. Mayor. Nobody at all.”

The irony is that Carcetti’s current public focus is the plight of the homeless, and as we know, one of the homeless living under the bridge is former stevedore Johnny Fifty. And former stevedore Nicky may or may not be one bounced check away from homelessness himself.

There is little difference between the two men, and yet one is officially a “nobody” and one is officially “the primary focus of Carcetti’s administration”. The face that Carcetti has never and will never actually meet or get to know either man is beside the point. It’s the story that’s important, and as long as the story makes sense and has themes and plots and symbols, we are all happy to consume it. Regardless of the fate of either Johnny or Nicky. Easier to care about “the homeless” than to care about “a homeless person named Johnny”.

The Wire shows us that nobody knows the whole story. Even The Wire doesn’t show us the whole story…what it shows us is that the whole story is unknowable, all the pieces so spread out and so interconnected that the machine cannot be perceived by any one person. Carcetti dedicates a new waterfront development which put people out of work and made them homeless so that Carcetti can publicly display righteous anger at their plight…while being proud of the investment that made them homeless in the first place.

Mario Savio tells us:

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.

But The Wire tells us that, man, you don’t even know where the gears are at. Those things you think are levers are fakes, the real apparatus is both invisible and hiding in plain sight, and the gears…fuck, you’re a gear. Give up.