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CITY, VOL. 14, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2010

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/10/060709-21 © 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.525338

Where do Bunnys come from?From Hamsterdam to hubris1

Antony Bryant and Griselda PollockTaylor and Francis

The Wire has not only been identified as one of the greatest television studies of the destitu-tion of the modern American city through the genre of the police procedural, but it has alsobeen hailed as a modern work of tragedy. The strength and depth of its characters conferupon them the tragic status of brave and courageous individuals battling the vagaries offate. For Simon and Burns, the contemporary gods are, however, the faceless forces ofmodern capitalism. While acknowledging the necessity for such a cultural reading of thedramaturgy and genuinely tragic pathos achieved by the collaborative writing and creativevision led by David Simon and Ed Burns, this paper challenges this reading since it risksreducing African Americans to passive, albeit tragic victims of all-powerful forces. It alsoinhibits the possibility of imagining agency and action. Tracking one character, ColonelHoward ‘Bunny’ Colvin, who has not been fêted or celebrated in the subsequent popularand academic debates about The Wire, the authors argue that Colvin represents a figure ofexception in the overall scheme. In several key spheres—creative policing, the drug tradeand in education—he is a figure of action. Thus the paper reads this character through theprism of the political theory of Judith Shklar who denounces ‘passive injustice’ and indiffer-ence to misfortune, calling for informal relations of everyday democracy and active citizen-ship in line with a series of diverse critics of contemporary American urban social relations(Lasch, Sennett). The question of action as itself a form of diagnosis and responsibility leadsback to Gramscian concepts of the organic intellectual and to Hannah Arendt. Withoutlosing sight of the fact that The Wire is a fictional drama, the paper argues that narratolog-ical analysis of one character can contribute imaginatively to the field of social and politicaltheory while using its affective capacity to situate the viewer/reader in the dilemmas ofsocial practice that the crisis portrayed in The Wire so forcefully represents.

Key words: The Wire, modern tragedy, passive injustice, Judith Shklar, respect, social action, misfortune, citizen-ship, class difference and ethnic disadvantage

Introduction—tragedy and hubris; fiction and history

he Wire is an American TV policedrama series produced by HBO andwritten by David Simon, a former

journalist on the Baltimore Sun, and Ed

Burns, a former police officer with theBaltimore Police Department who alsoworked as a teacher in Baltimore’s publicschool system. The Wire ran from 2 June2002 until 9 March 2008; over five seasons,comprising 60 episodes. Although keycharacters run throughout, each series

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focused on a different facet of Baltimore inthe following order: the scourge of the drugtrade and police attempts using surveil-lance and wire taps to break up a drug traf-ficking operation associated with AvonBarksdale, a character based on a specificdrug gangster in the city; the mainly Polishwhite stevedores negotiating the decline ofthe Baltimore docks also infiltrated by thedrug trade; the political machinery/machi-nations of city government while exploringa daring, but unauthorized experiment indrug legalization; the failures of the publiceducation system and its tragic wastagelargely of African-American children; printjournalism and the profit-led corruption ofthe media at the Baltimore Sun. Key socialand political institutions such as unions,schools, the police and the political estab-lishment are exposed as dysfunctional,obstructive and corruptible, while theircriminal counterparts in the various drugorganizations function as a dark mirror fora portrait of one contemporary Americancity. Hailed for its innovations in televisualstyle, use of music and discovery of a richvein of acting talent that has changed thelives of many of the young African Ameri-cans who took on the telling roles, TheWire follows on from earlier ground-break-ing police procedural TV dramas usingensemble casting and continuous storylinessuch as Hill Street Blues (NBC, SteveBochco, 1981–87) and NYPD Blue (ABC,Steve Bochco and David Milch, 1993–2005),while also developing out of Simon’s earlierwriting and production about Baltimore’spolice: Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC).Moreover, its specific feel for the life on thestreet derives from Simon and Burns’experience writing the book The Corner: AYear in the Life of an Inner CityNeighbourhood (1997), which later becamea six-part TV miniseries that aired April–May 2000. Both were based on a year-longobservation in 1993 of a drug market onone corner in West Baltimore. Author ofClockers (1992), Richard Price appraisedthis book:

‘The Corner is an intimate, intense dispatch from the broken heart of urban America. It is impossible to read these pages and not feel stunned at the high price, in human potential, in thwarted aspirations, that simple survival on the streets of West Baltimore demands of its citizens. An important document, as devastating as it is lucid.’2

The recipient of many awards, The Wire iswidely regarded as one of the best televisiondrama series ever. It has also attractedacademic accolades for both its socio-politi-cal analysis of urban decay, and the compel-ling dramatic and literary quality with whichthis social devastation is portrayed televisu-ally. The series can be appreciated both for itsvalue as an innovative and compelling modeof sociological analysis and exploration usingnarrative as its method, and its achievementin aesthetic terms as finely drawn drama. TheWire deserves, we shall argue, an interdisci-plinary reading that enables us to derive fromthe literary dimensions of its characters andsituations more than sociological insight.Rather it delivers a more political message.

If we start from the approbation lavishedon The Wire as social drama, we will find thatSimon and Burns have been hailed as majorwriters of modern American tragedy. Flawedbut compelling characters struggle against atragic destiny inflicted by unseen but all-powerful forces indifferently shaping andoften destroying their fragile lives howevermuch they seek ways out. Not gods, butmodern capitalism combined with venal ormerely obstructive institutions and theravages of the drug trade are the heartlessarbiters of their fate. Thus in a Guardianinterview with David Simon, significantly atthe Hay Literature Festival in May 2009,Charlotte Higgins (2009) stated:

‘The Wire’s characters tend to be powerless in all kinds of crucial ways, hampered from full freedom of will and action by anything from an inflexible and corrupt police bureaucracy to endemic poverty and lack of aspiration. They are trapped in their circumstances, and the narrative offers them

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little chance for redemption or escape. This conception of his characters—locked in destinies that they cannot escape—chimed with Simon’s interpretation of Greek tragedy, in which he sees characters as just as trapped—by the will of gods rather than by the unseeing inflexibility of institutions.’

Higgins quoted David Simon himself:

‘Greek tragedy became one of the influences in terms of the tone and intent … a framework for what we were doing with The Wire … [ancient Greek cosmology] doesn’t seem to speak to us as postmoderns—we barely believe in a monotheistic deity leave alone a pantheon of gods who are capricious, jealous and venal. We want to believe that we are in control of our lives. But when we started looking at where America was headed politically and economically, Greek tragedy started making a lot of sense. It’s not like we decided to put Medea here, Antigone there, but the tone and temperament of Greek tragedy seemed suited to the moment.’

Higgins suggests that this depth of engage-ment with Greek tragedy might explain thenaming of the brooding villain of Season 2simply as ‘The Greek’. If viewers had notfully grasped these intentions by Season 5,writers Simon and Burns make the point intheir distinctively knowledgeable fashion in ascene where a corrupt senator, Clay Davis, isinterviewed going into court [5.07].3 He isshown prominently carrying a copy ofPrometheus Bound, which he refers to as‘Promethus Bound’, and from which hequotes the line: ‘No good deed goes unpun-ished’, identifying the author as Asylius—pronouncing it as ‘A-silly-ass’.

The Wire can also be understood as acontribution to the tradition of works offiction and documentary that bring criticalsocial issues to wider public notice. The Wiremight be placed with social portraits ofLondon in the novels of Charles Dickens(1812–70), or with Steinbeck’s Grapes ofWrath (1939), the 1974 non-fiction work ofStuds Terkel (1912–2008) and John HowardGriffin’s Black Like Me (1961). But in its

tragic vein, the series operates in a specificallymodern, American dramatic tradition repre-sented by Arthur Miller (1915–2005) whoraised aspects of contemporary Americanworking-class life to tragic dimensions inplays such as A View from the Bridge (1955)and novellas such as The Misfits (1961).Miller focused on the worlds of Americanimmigrants and displaced cowboys, endow-ing their everyday struggles for survival inmodern America with heroic and hencetragic stature.4 If this case can be made for itsliterary or dramatic genealogy, The Wireneeds to be taken seriously, with searchingquestions asked about the series itself and itsramifications.

The problem with the specific orientationof the analysis of The Wire as tragedy,however, lies in the centrality of the tragichero. In Aristotelian poetics, the first theori-zation of tragedy, the core of tragedy is theindividual as the locus of fate and the pathosof the doomed human struggle against itsinevitable consequences. In classical poetics,tragedy is a product of hubris—overweeningpride—including the delusion that the indi-vidual can defy the fate decreed by the gods.In his hubris, in his faulty judgement ratherthan any kind of bad character, the herobecomes tragic precisely by actively contrib-uting to a destiny he has tried hard to undo,or of which he has tried to take control(Oedipus being one of the starkest exam-ples).5 We want to argue here, however, thatif The Wire is read only through the lens oftragedy, even if socially situated, its claims tosignificance in representing contemporarysocial and political realities are radicallyundermined.

We wish to stress the importance ofwidening the scope of consideration of theseries to incorporate attention to currentsocial, economic and political forces afflictingurban American life across the axes of classand race as configured for our inspectionthrough a specifically televisual dramatiza-tion. Taking a lead from Friedrich Engels(1820–95), who wrote one of the primarytexts of socio-economic analysis of early

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industrial capitalism, The Condition of theWorking Class in England in 1844 (1844;English edition 1885), The Wire can be seento represent the ‘condition’ of the African-American underclass in the context of de-industrializing, but redeveloping northerncities in the USA. The concept of The Wire asan example of ‘social science fiction’ suggestsan utterly new relationship between agrounded social analysis and a fictional modeof representation; but as with Engels, theknowledge both produce asks questions of apolitical nature.

In his important work The Politics ofAesthetics, French philosopher JacquesRancière responds to an interviewer’squestion: ‘Is History a Form of Fiction?’—history being both what we are empiricallyinvolved in and the narratives created for it.He wishes to undo false dichotomiesbetween real or social truth and fiction, whilealso dismissing those who say we can have noaccess to such ‘truth’ because all historicalwriting is already a kind of fiction quawriting. Fictionalization can be more effec-tive than what seeks to be non-fictionalhistorical and documentary representation,and thus Rancière argues for the politicaleffects of aesthetic transformation of socialreality. Going back again to Aristotle’sPoetics, he contrasts the apparent randomnessof historical events to the logic revealedthrough fiction.

‘Poetry owes no explanation for the “truth” of what it says because, in its very principle, it is not made up of images or statements, but fictions, that is to say arrangements between actions. The other consequence that Aristotle derives from this is the superiority of poetry, which confers a causal logic on the arrangement of events, over history, condemned to presenting events according to their empirical disorder.’ (Rancière, 2004, p. 36)

If history as a series of events occurs in anempirical disorder, poetry, that is, fiction,‘confers a causal logic on the arrangements ofhistory’, revealing necessity and creating

verisimilitude. Thus fiction is to be under-stood neither as fantasy nor falsehood; itcreates a logic for the arrangement of actionsthat produces intelligibility from the chaos ofthe events that constitute the social or thehistorical as they are lived and experienced.The Wire, as ‘social science fiction’, thenoffers one way of making sense of the incho-ate nature of contemporary urban existence.

Simon’s claim that The Wire can be read asa form of modern tragedy implies that it is aliterary representation of modern urbanAmerica; hence it reveals to us the fatednessand helplessness typical of tragedy. We areconcerned that such a claim for the seriesmight too easily provide a comfortinglyasocial reading of fated poor black folks, left-behind white folks and do-gooder black andwhite liberals being betrayed, if not by gods,then by equally amoral, impersonal forces ofeconomic structures and modern politicalinstitutions. Does such a narrative lead us toa fatal pessimism, however drenched in socialtruth, or is there something in this fictionthat challenges this tragic notion of fate,despite itself, by means of advocating a formof social action or responsive agency on thepart of participant citizens?

In what follows we seek to negotiate whatmight seem to be two contradictory posi-tions. Indeed, we shall be focusing on therole of a single character in a fiction thatmight lead us back to the poetics of tragedywe wish to disavow. On the other hand, weshall argue for the function of the fictional asa mode of evoking otherwise invisibleknowledge of the potential for personalaction in the sphere of the social–political.We, therefore, propose to focus on one char-acter, not as a tragic and flawed hero, but as aproductive figure of exception. This characterfunctions as a person who is subject to thepathos of hubris and endures failure anddisappointment. He is a vulnerable personstruggling against capricious forces. But he isa person who, nonetheless, acts and, in a way,has the last, cynical word in a context of inac-tion. In Series 5, he will remark: ‘Yeah, well Iguess … there’s nothing to be done’ [5.09].

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Bunny Colvin

In preparing this paper we have read manycommentaries and discussions that The Wirehas now stimulated in the media and increas-ingly in book-length studies. Almost none,however, makes more than passing referenceto the character Bunny Colvin—this includeseven Simon’s own, recently published andfairly detailed account which mentions all thekey characters save the one whom weconsider crucial to this social science fiction ofmodern America (see Alvarez, 2009).

Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin played by RobertWisdom first appears, albeit briefly, inSeason 2; Episode 9 ‘Stray Rounds’. As adrugs-related street gunfight breaks out overpossession of a corner between Bodie’sBarksdale team and another group wantingto take over the territory, an innocentbystander, a nine-year-old African-Americanboy, TT, is tragically killed by stray bulletsshot from the cross-fire that ricochet into thebedroom where he is seeking to hide fromthe danger. Called back from an official tripto Washington, Major Colvin visits the crimescene and registers his disaffection anddespair. Told to ‘hit the corners and takesome scalps’ by his senior officer, he declares‘it’s f….g pointless’. What? ‘This whole mess,chasing this shit from one corner to the nextlike it was some plan.’ The scene sets him upas a man who feels beyond the ‘drill’ and isunconvinced that simply going through thepointless motions of quick arrests getsanywhere near the depth of the drug problemfacing the police.

Colvin, however, becomes a major presencethroughout Season 3. He initiates an experi-mental legalization of drugs, confining thetrade to three, almost vacant lots in the West-ern District of Baltimore, which is underhis command. He is also shown to be a keyfigure in the lives of two central charactersfrom the first two seasons. His newlypromoted sergeant, Ellis Carver, the sidekickof the dangerously idiotic Thomas ‘Herc’Hauk, is gradually transformed bothprofessionally and personally under Colvin’s

guidance, and we also learn that the anarchicbut determined McNulty, one of the centralcharacters of the entire series, was formerly atrainee under his command.

Colvin’s strategy has a substantial impacton drugs-related crime in the Westerndistrict, but in a manner that proves to bepolitically intolerable. He ends his careerwith the police, after 30 years, disgraced;busted down from Major to Lieutenant withthe resulting loss of pension, and in need of anew job after Johns Hopkins University,informed by Commissioner Burrell, rescindsthe post of security officer that had previ-ously been proffered.6 He is thus set up forSeason 4 where he is no longer the controver-sial initiator of the dramatic action, butfunctions instead as a bemused witness toanother site of social disaster: the publicschool system.

Drawn into a university research projectaimed at heading off future offendersthrough early identification and interven-tion, Colvin graphically demonstrates to theutterly bewildered white academic, DavidParenti, that the targeted age group—18–21year olds—are already irretrievably lost,beyond any form of redemption or redirec-tion. Instead, Colvin suggests focusing onGrade Eight, middle school students aged14–15, and he helps Parenti establish aproject that is also experimental and counterto official policy. Disruptive ‘corner kids’are removed from their classrooms to facili-tate a more conducive learning environmentfor the others; those selected being givenspecial attention in a specialized settingsupervised by several adult advisors andteachers.

Colvin demonstrates in the sessions withthe corner kids, that they have perfectlyadequate powers of analysis and resourcesfor dealing with the exigencies of street lifeand ‘The Game’. Yet they are not able totranslate these skills and apply them in other,less deadly, contexts. One student, ZenobiaDawson, however, clearly has some inklingof a wider world when she supplies the strapline to the episode—‘We got our thing, but

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it’s just part of the big thing’ [4.08]. Theirsocialization and insights are orientedtowards a brutal but fathomable street econ-omy and its life or death code, while negoti-ating the tasks and even the assumptions ofthe education system appear disablinglybaffling—producing a defensive behaviourthat is as aggressive as it is destructive tothem for it dooms them even more to failurewithin even this impoverished offering ofeducational skills.

The pathos of the limitations of theirsocialization are vividly exposed when asmall group—including Zenobia and anotherbright but disruptive student NamondBrice—manages to work together tocomplete an exercise requiring collectiveproblem-solving. Their reward is dinner,hosted and paid for by Colvin, in a well-known Baltimore fine-dining chain: Ruth’sChris Steakhouse.7 There Colvin witnessesthe disabling discomfort of the winning kidsamidst what is an ordinary site of modernAmerican middle-class sociality: a restaurant.The young people are dumfounded at thewaitress’ ability to memorize complicatedspecials, and the expectation that the dinerwill be able to recall them and chose betweenso many variations in the preparation of basicmeat or fish. (Actually, we must admit wealso find ourselves bemused by this aspect ofAmerican restaurant culture.) They are alsoshown to be intimidated by the wholepanoply of public eating—the use of differ-ent cutlery, seating, conversing and accessinga cultural menu of socialized public life.Dining is never a part of the socializingrituals of this social fraction as is evidencedby the numerous scenes in the series in whichtake-away meals and fast food figure as thetypical source of nourishment.8

Yet, in this restaurant scene, Colvin doesnot function as the middle-class, assimilatedAfrican-American judge of their poor,projects-based lack of manners, sophistica-tion and socialization. His sympatheticallyobserving presence, as portrayed by RobertWisdom, accentuates the pathos of brightand energetic young people being disabled

by their remoteness from such ordinaryactivities of contemporary America, exam-ples of which they might well have seen onTV which, as Simon has argued, regularlyrepresents the affluent and middle-class life-styles of that society. It is so close, a car-rideaway, but utterly alien.

‘Well, there are about 350 television shows about the affluent America, the comfortable America, the viable and cohesive nation where everyone gets what they want if they either work hard or know someone or have a pretty face or cheat like hell. That America is available every night, on every channel in the Comcast package.’ (David Simon, The Guardian, 6 September 2008)

This can be contrasted to the key charactersof Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell whohead up the Barksdale drug-selling operationin West Baltimore, enjoying the vast profitsof the drug trade which allow them to live inthe glittering downtown world of luxuriouspenthouses, fine food and drink, and a well-dressed lifestyle of effortless consumption.But although there are intimations that evenas street kids Avon and Stringer always knewexactly what they wanted, it is far moreevident that neither is fully at ease in thesurroundings of privilege and affluence towhich their huge profits give them access.Avon himself never quite adapts, and readilyreverts to the role of gangsta, particularlywhen he moves into his safe-house duringthe turf war in Season 3 [3.06]. Even StringerBell finds himself out of his social depth inseveral regards when he strays from his ownworld. For instance, his unease is evidentwhen he is shown attending the evening classon business accounting (Season 1); later he istaken for a ride by Clay Davis and AndyKrawczek when he strives to convert thedrug wealth and become a businessman andproperty magnate [3.11].

In Season 4, when Colvin takes up a role inan academically funded social scienceresearch project, he is seen very much as aconduit or bridge for the total outsider,David Parenti. But Colvin cannot confine

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himself to an essentially passive role. Heproves to be not only a capable and intelli-gent observer, but also an active participant.Colvin identifies the paradox that is NamondBrice, a child being formed for the game by asoldier father, Wee-Bey, a lieutenant ofBarksdale doing time for the attemptedmurder of a cop, and a venal mother. Thegame is a life for which Namond is shown tobe lacking the capacity to perform thenecessary violence it decrees: kill or be killed.Colvin negotiates for Namond’s future withhis father, the imprisoned Wee-Bey, offeringthe lad a surrogate family environment in hisown home and thus providing another kindof fathering and mothering that might openup an alternative future for Namond, nurtur-ing his wit, warmth and liveliness, his verbalskills and intellectual curiosity.

As a character, Namond Brice resemblesother vulnerable characters who do not quitefit into the world of street violence, forinstance, Wallace and D’Angelo of Season 1.In another way, Namond mirrors the brightand loyal Bodie on whose corner he begins towork. Through Colvin’s intervention, TheWire makes Namond cross from almostcertain death on the corner to life on Colvin’sstoop. The final shot of Season 4 visuallyunderlines the distinction that Colvin hadmade earlier to Parenti about the conflictingsites of the socialization of African-Americanyouth: the corner and the stoop. The stooprepresents not only an emotionally support-ive environment but offers also an ethicalshelter within which to grow up, founded onrespect for and the presence of responsibleand respectful adults.

In radically different roles or guises inSeasons 3 and 4, therefore, the character ofColvin emerges as a site of reflection, experi-mentation, but most significantly, of action.His action is other-directed on the basis ofwhat Rudolf Bahro (1935–97) termed socialor synthetic knowledge: awareness of thesocial system’s shaping of individual socialdestinies (Bahro, 1978). Father of two grownup children, Colvin actively takes on the roleof a social father in the historically specific

African-American situation. Social theoristshave argued that the emasculating trauma ofenslavement tragically deranged the paternalfunction with black families. Chattel Slaverydestroyed African fatherhood and the longshadow of enslavement has generated a much-documented if equally contested, recurringsocial structure of absent black fathers (Davis,1983; Spillers, 1987; Morehouse ResearchInstitute and Institute for American Values,1998). Colvin’s negotiations with Wee-Beyacquire dual significance in so far as both menare shown to be caring for Namond’s future.The two African-American men shown asfathers who are presented in The Wire,D’Angelo (Seasons 1 and 2) and Wee-Bey, areboth exceptions to the ‘myth’ of the absentblack father, yet each is separated from theirsons as the price demanded for being ‘soldiers’in the game.

What Colvin’s gesture towards NamondBrice offers him is access to language and alarger world that is celebrated by Colvin’sfinal appearance in the series in Season 5. Heand Lolita Colvin proudly attend a BaltimoreSchools Debating Competition at whichNamond is speaking about the AIDS crisis inAfrica. This scene also delivers a confronta-tion with Thomas J. Carcetti, the recentlyelected white reforming Mayor of Baltimore,making a showcase appearance at the compe-tition as part of his campaigning [5.09]. Thisscene presents us with a humbled Carcetticoming forward to apologize to a still furiousColvin for Carcetti’s role, as a councillor andmayoral candidate, in exposing the legaliza-tion experiment to the authorities that led toColvin’s disgraced dismissal from the policedepartment. Yet, here having listened toNamond Brice acquit himself with eloquenceand passion, Carcetti never acknowledges thebody-blow his subsequent mayoral adminis-tration dealt to the other experimentalproject, at Edward Tilghman Middle School,of which Namond is the sole beneficiarythrough Colvin’s personal action. Carcetti’sadministration had dismissed Colvin’s pleasand refused the project further financialsupport.

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This scene is critical as the representationof the political gulf between the two men, butalso of the ethical divide between them: evenif both appear to be committed to socialimprovement, to fighting crime and improv-ing education. Carcetti, the politician, neverrisked his personal ambition in the manner inwhich Colvin risked his career to try out aworking solution to a real problem. Now justplain Mr Colvin, Bunny ultimately has noplace, no official role, no function. He endsthe series, we argue, as the sum of his actions.

The failures of the Hamsterdam experi-ment, as the legalization episode comes to beknown through Herc’s mispronouncedreference to the free drug sales in the Dutchcity of Amsterdam, and the later schoolsproject are not, however, tragic. Colvin is notbetrayed by institutions standing in for godsdetermining fixed destinies from which thereis no real escape. He is shown to have hadconcrete suggestions for change, and he isbetrayed by human venality, political distrac-tion, party politics, the low tax base of thecity caused by white flight to the suburbs,and the resultant disgrace that is theAmerican inner-city public school systemwhen the policy of ‘no child left behind’operates by faked statistics rather than realengagement with children and their educa-tional needs. Let down by superiors andpoliticians, Colvin is not deterred. This char-acter’s life is a series of actions, of attempts tomake a difference guided by a compassionatesensibility oriented towards the lived worldsof the largely invisible citizens. Citizens arethe people whom Simon and Burns, andfiction in general, cannot bring to the fore inthe making of hero-centred tragic drama.Colvin’s gaze upon the visible scene of copsand gangsters, police and drug-dealers,invokes those less visible others upon whoseunscripted lives these sensationalized eventsimpinge, creating the desperate fabric ofunliveable lives coming into view only inbrief but highly indicative scenes of the twocommunity meetings with local police thatbracket Season 3 and Bunny’s interview withthe surviving elderly home-owner and

resident of one of the lots marked out forHamsterdam [3.04 and 3.07].

Because of an intervention by a man suchas Colvin we could believe that a boy likeNamond Brice could have something of alife, the kind of life that care, active parenting(for instance, the scene in which LolitaColvin appears, reminding him to take hisplate to the kitchen) and sustained educationcan open up. It is precisely as a figure repre-senting both attention and action, even if atthe end it amounts to no more than a familialgesture towards one young man, that Colvincounters the ostensible concept of modernAmerican society as doomed and tragic. Thuswe want now to open up a discussion of apolitical reading of The Wire throughColvin’s exceptionality.

Context for Colvin

Colvin is a mysterious character in the dramaseries. We are not given many details abouthis back story. There is no indication of howpeople like Bunny Colvin emerge from whatthe American city and crime fiction havethrown up as the dramatically entangledoppositions and relations between police andcriminal: the black man of the law and theblack man who breaks the law. How do weget beyond conflating a social disgrace ofinstitutionalized racialized poverty with thedestiny of African Americans per se?

In a recent novel by crime writer GeorgePelecanos, Hard Revolution (2004), set inWashington, DC between 1959 and 1968,this polarization is dramatized as the enigmaof character differences within one family.Darius and Alethea Strange have two sonswhose lives dramatically diverge. The elderends up as a disabled drug-dealing Vietnamvet. Lured into crime by some childhoodfriends, he is murdered for ‘grassing’ them inorder to protect a local shopkeeper as agesture in his attempt to turn himself backonto the straight path. The younger son joinsthe police as one of only two AfricanAmericans in his squad: remember this is set

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in the 1960s. This pairing recalls Paul Haggis’film, Crash, also dating from 2004, whichpresents the same dichotomy in the form ofthe unexplained contrast between the profes-sional, policeman son Graham Waters of adrug-addicted mother, and her other sonPeter, a petty street criminal whose unpro-voked murder, by a cop, sets the film’s narra-tive in motion.

In The Wire, we are given hints aboutpotentially formative experiences for some ofthe key characters, which may in part explaintheir different trajectories and situations. Forinstance, standing on the balcony of anexpensive penthouse, and just before theirmutual betrayal, Avon Barksdale andStringer Bell reminisce about their childhoodas street kids when they dodged surveillanceas they ran wild on the as yet un-reclaimedwaterfront, dreaming enviously of risingfrom the dirt and darkness to this masteringvision from the skies above the now twin-kling city far from the desolated spaces inwhich their money is made from street-sideabjection and misery.

Another important scene in Season 3 [3.05]brings homicide detective Bunk Morelandtogether with the anarchic, rifle-toting OmarLittle who steals from the drug-dealers tomake his living. Here we learn that they bothattended the same school: the real lifeEdmondson High School, famous for itsfootball team, which opened in 1955 and runsconcurrent highly academic and technicalvocational streams.9 This small but crucialexchange dramatizes the ways in which blackkids from West Baltimore get divided intorough lads and ‘schoolboys’. The scriptedconversation between the two men tells usthat as a lad, Bunk had wanted to run withthe rough ones; but knowingly, they senthim packing back to his father (the fatherbeing an important figure in all of this seriesin terms of presences and absences), whomade it clear that he had to attend to hisstudies, his education, his sport—lacrosse—and his destiny as ‘strictly a suit and tiemotherfucker’. In Season 1, D’Angeloencourages one of his gang, Wallace, who is

unable to do the counting of the money, toreturn to school because, with his nativeintelligence, he could get to Yale or Harvard,indicating some knowledge of one of theroutes of opportunity and advancementthrough education.

We learn very little, however, aboutColvin’s past. The character profile for theseries tells us he joined the Baltimore PoliceDepartment in 1973, working in the WesternDistrict, and also Pensey and Fremontwhere, among other things, he trained theraw recruit Jimmy McNulty, evidentlymaking him a cop in something of Colvin’sown image, albeit lacking his sagacity andself-awareness.10 Colvin rose through theranks, and nearing the end of 30 years’service is the district commander, in BPDterms, Major, of the Western District.

Since the series provides us with little orno analysis of the conditions forming theColvins of this world, it seems as if we arebeing led to assume that while the key blackplayers all share some aspects of modernAfrican-American experience in the innercity of Baltimore, their differing distributionof possibilities is merely a matter of eithergood luck or of purely personal initiative andinclination. From a sociological perspective,however, we can assume that the differentialoutcomes are the result of the invisible butcrucial aspects of class difference within theblack majority in the city itself. Contrary tothe idea that all are fated, we must attend tothe real, social processes that regularlydistribute some to poverty, the game, drugabuse and others to school teaching, religiousleadership, politics or a career in the police.

Indeed Bunk and Bunny come from thesame city as Omar and Prop Joe (boss of theEast Baltimore drug ring who creates andmanages the Coop of drug-dealers across theentire city), and even Police CommissionerBurrell (who attended the same East Balti-more school as Prop Joe11), but they arrive atdifferent social possibilities. So it is not fatethat determines their lives, but contingentfamilial and economic backgrounds thatinvolve owning houses, being in paid work,

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having resources to sustain socializing rituals,and above all access to the personal andemployment options provided by anextended education. For this reason it isSeason 4, centred on the inadequacies andinjustices of the US public school system,which encapsulates much of the potency ofthe series. Testimony to the influence of EdBurns, who has become over-shadowed tosome extent by David Simon in the aftermathof the series, this season drew on Ed Burns’direct experience teaching eighth grade inthe Baltimore education system that has adrop-out rate of 71%.12

Closer look at Bunny

So how does Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin fit intoall this, and what does he represent? How iscreating the space of possibility named BunnyColvin a significant dimension of the politi-cal and social analysis performed by TheWire, despite the fact the writers nevermention Colvin as one of their key charac-ters, and despite the fact that on all the blogsand TV and other chat shows, it is neverColvin who is highlighted in the way thatOmar, Stringer Bell, Ellis Carver or Marloare regularly rolled out? As an honest, dedi-cated policeman, a man with courage, visionand values, Colvin might be regarded asexceptional amidst the self-serving, theovertly corrupt, the ambitious, self-regardingand even the sadistic and self-destructiveworld of the police department. He is a Balti-morean, from the all-black neighbourhoodsof West Baltimore, where he moves withcomfort, authority and influence. He is alsothe product of the increasingly racializeddivision of American cities, formed bymassive white flight to the newly built post-war suburban developments that left theinner cities to downtown commerce andlargely African-American communities;unable to move they are, nonetheless, dividedinto variegated social and economic frag-ments. As such, African Americans form adisproportionate number of the poorest,

although The Wire shows that black folks arenot alone in the ethnically zoned declininginner cities. Season 2 centres on the Polishworking-class communities struggling tosurvive their disappearing industrial base andalso the street drug trade from the perspec-tive of poor white folk.

Although Simon clearly thinks that incontemporary America—the land of oppor-tunity and limitless potential—the under-class, particularly the black underclass arenot structurally in control of their lives andso are unable to take up any of these oppor-tunities, The Wire also reveals diversitywithin the socio-economic limitations onchoice. Thus we see a city such as Baltimorecreating spaces for African-American politi-cal elites, social and religious leadership, andin the police. Burrell rises to becomeCommissioner of Police, serving an African-American mayor, Clarence Royce, supportedby a black President of the Council and otherinfluential councillors, senators and commu-nity leaders. There is clearly an affluent blackmiddle class, perfectly exemplified by themise-en-scène of political aspirant Marla andpolice lieutenant Cedric Daniels’ suspi-ciously opulent home with its silver dinnersettings, cut glass and formal dining arrange-ments [1.02], also by the well-appointedapartment of Kima Greggs and her partnerCheryl, a TV journalist [1.01].

Invisible citizens

In the political history of Baltimore in theperiod of preparation (1993 onwards) andpreceding the dramatization of The Wire, anAfrican American, Clarence Burns, didindeed become Mayor of the city, in 1986,following the resignation of the incumbent.He was, however, defeated in the election of1988 by Kurt Schmoke who became the firstelected African American, remaining in officeuntil 1999. Schmoke himself appears in a bitpart in The Wire in Season 3 in a perfectlySimon/Burns-style twist. He is one of theHealth Inspectors called in to advise fictional

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mayor Clarence Royce on the handling ofthe Hamsterdam drug legalization scandal.Schmoke, Mayor during Simon’s researchperiod and the years he worked at the Balti-more Sun, was a sportsman who playedlacrosse (Bunk’s favoured sport) and won afootball scholarship to Yale, where hecontinued the political activism and commu-nal service from his high school days at therenowned Baltimore City College. In officehe notably campaigned against adult illiter-acy, poor schooling and was firmly setagainst strategies such as the ‘war on drugs’;instead favouring legalization, needle-exchanges and other health initiatives.13

Beyond the great divide of underclass andpolitical elites, we now want to draw atten-tion to something that we both constantlyremarked on as we were watching The Wire.To put it bluntly: they just left out the goodguys. The Wire is the fictional creation ofSimon and Burns produced to tell us some-thing important about Baltimore as an indic-ative site of a contemporary American crisis.As fiction, The Wire stresses and dramatizessome issues at the expense of others since it isnot a documentary. Yet we find it troublingthat their legitimate emphases on what iswrong give us so little to explain how anyonefrom East or West Baltimore might manageto avoid the sort of trajectory that leads todealing, pushing, using. This other spacemight be termed the world of citizens;Reginald Cousins aka Bubbles makes exactlythis point when Kima Greggs, a policedetective, praises her informer’s seeminglyencyclopaedic knowledge of people living inWest Baltimore. Bubbles replies to the effectthat he knows everyone apart from ‘citizensand shit’ [3.10].

So the central street characters in The Wireare non-citizens; those in, around, caught upin, affected by the game, and with whomthose involved in the police interact in adifferent way. Once again, Colvin is thecharacter who bridges these worlds, lament-ing, against the grain of Simon and Burns’dramatic logic, the danger of merely seeingthe city as a warzone between the criminals

and the police, rather than understanding therole of the police as policing a communitywith and on behalf of the citizens.

In some scenes we do catch glimpses ofsome of these citizens—the old lady who stilllives in one of the Hamsterdam zones;Omar’s grandmother; Miss Julia (Randy’sfoster-mother); Cutty’s former girlfriend, theelegant teacher. Many of these evidentlycome from a different era as is indicated bySlim Charles referring to Omar’s grand-mother as ‘a bona fide coloured lady’ [3.09].There are also the various people who, on hisrelease from a long prison sentence, help theex-Barksdale soldier Dennis Cutty Wise getback on the straight and narrow; the minis-ters, the teachers, medics, nurses, some policeand, of course, The Deacon. Although withthis character Simon and Burns are perhapsbeing deliberately arch in casting MelvinWilliams in the role, given that Williamshimself is a notorious convicted dealer andmurderer, almost certainly the prototype forAvon Barksdale.

While Simon and Burns are entitled tocreate their logic of the fiction, as viewers,we are equally entitled to ask: ‘Where are thecitizens?’ How come that the backgroundthat gives rise to Omar, the Barksdales,Stringer Bell (his right-hand man and busi-ness partner), Marlo (the ruthless, emergingdrug king), various bad cops and crookedpoliticians, also gives rise to Bunk, the detec-tive Lester Freamon and, of course, Colvin?We are not alone in raising this issue. TheYale sociologist whose classic works Code ofthe Street (1999), Streetwise (1990) and APlace on the Corner (2003) document blackinner-city life with noted clarity and sympa-thy, Elijah Anderson, makes exactly thispoint. In The Wire Anderson sees ‘a bottom-line cynicism’ that is at odds with hisperception of real life.

‘I am struck by how dark the show is.… The show is very good … It resonates. It is powerful in its depiction of the codes of the streets, but it is an exaggeration. I get frustrated watching it, because it gives such a

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powerful appearance of reality, but it always seems to leave something important out. What they have left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.’ (quoted in Bowden, 2008)

Police and policing

What we have set out so far is a dichotomy: wehave a fictional dramatization that presentssocial destiny as tragedy and hence seeminglyineluctable. Through impressively fine script-ing and superb acting, it produces affectingand empathetic African-American charactersfor types who have otherwise served theAmerican television industry as its staple andusually violently disposable fodder in theportrayal of criminality and poverty. This isset against our questioning of that fictionalrepresentation because it overstates the ‘darkside’ and the forces ranged against the Afri-can-American underclass, leaving only fainttraces of counter-forces and other kinds ofcharacters. In this light we argue that closerattention to Bunny Colvin is crucial in makingthese traces visible. It might be said thatColvin is the symptom of The Wire. He repre-sents a possibility that is indeed written intothe script, carrying into the drama some ofBurns’ own experiences in the police and ineducation. Yet as a born and bred BaltimoreAfrican American, he describes somethingother than Burns’ encounters as white manwith public schools and drug corners. It ispotentially because as a character Colvin, real-ized by Robert Wisdom’s gravitas combinedwith humour and insight, marks an interrup-tion to the dramatic logic of Simon and Burnsin their Dickensian investigation and expo-sure, that his function and significance has notbeen picked up by the enthusiasts of the series.

From his position as both insider andobserver, member of the Baltimore city’sblack population and as a police major withalmost 30 years of service, Bunny Colvin

understands the paradoxical nature of effortsto control or ameliorate the social problems.He manages to take these sensitivities into newcontexts; and when he meets—perhapsinevitably—defeat and despair, he stillmanages to find insight and take some measureof control. Colvin is a magnificent literarycreation, overlooked and over-shadowed.

We need to return to Season 3 where weare given a clearer sense of his worldview,particularly in his mentoring of Ellis Carver,a newly promoted sergeant. Carver is trans-formed from an unstable, gung-ho partner ofa white policeman, Herc, into a potentiallyfine police officer through his contact withColvin. That transformation is revealed whenCarver bravely battles the system to save oneof the parentless, but fostered school kidsRandy, with whom another reformed badcop turned teacher, Roland Prezbylewski, isworking from institutionalization followingthe police failure to protect his home from anarson attack that injures his foster-mother(another example of social family care versusbrutalizing institutions). In one notable scene[3:10], Colvin explains to Carver that policeneed to be part of the community they serve,not an external force that comes in to makewar on the criminals.

‘This drug thing, this ain’t police work. No, it ain’t. I mean, I can send any fool with a badge and a gun up on them corners and jack a crew and grab vials. But policing? I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And soon the neighborhood that you’re supposed to be policing, that’s just occupied territory.’

In essence, his vision might be considered tobe broadly similar to the image of the policethat was projected in the UK many yearsago—far too long ago for many readers

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perhaps to remember—by PC George Dixonaka Dixon of Dock Green (1955–76). Colvinadds:

‘Soldiering and policing ain’t the same thing. Before we went and took the wrong turn and started with these wargames, the cop walked the beat and he learned that post.’

Of course, nothing of race, drugs or povertyintruded into the homogeneous vision ofBritain in the 1950s at Dock Green—noteven any hint of regional accents! In 1950sBritain policing depended on coppers on thebeat, access to local knowledge and an under-standing amongst the generally law-abidingcitizenry that the police were there to watchand protect, with a view to general well-being of a shared social environment. This iswhat Colvin refers to as ‘police’ as opposedto ‘soldiers’.

But we are not inviting readers to becomedewy-eyed about this halcyon, but by-goneage of community policing that was firstpromulgated in 1949 with the film The BlueLamp (Dir. Basil Dearden). We need to askabout the politics of this idea. In 1988, a BBCfilm revisited the deeply embedded culturalmemory of friendly bobby Dixon of DockGreen and the kind of policy/society rela-tions it represented, using the device of a timereverse drama called The Black and BlueLamp written in 1986 by Arthur Ellis anddirected by Guy Slater. Here the young thug,Tom Riley who shoots PC Dixon in the orig-inal film (an act that nevertheless did notprevent Dixon starring in the subsequent TVseries for many years!) finds himself trans-ported through a time-warp into the late1980s, where he discovers that the policingmethods of the 1980s are far more brutal thanthose in the genteel 1950s. At the same time,the play undoes the rosy past by revealingthat back in the day Dixon headed a paedo-phile ring!14

The point is thus not to dwell on nostalgiafor an idealized vision of policing of yester-year, but to acknowledge an astute analysis ofthe effects of language, of the terms used, onthe manner in which the work of policing in

modern societies is undertaken. If membersof a society, however criminal, are named andthus imagined as ‘enemies’, and the police are‘front line troops’ ‘taking scalps’ (recallRawls’ advice to Colvin following the killingof the child TT in Season 2), key aspects of thedaily administration of law and order becomemilitarized and the deviant or law-breaker issubjected to the rules of war. (This topic hasbeen explored in many articles in City, forexample, Graham, 2009.) Hence Colvin’sattempts to restore the place of the citizensand the community to visibility within thepolice work, balancing the police’s inevitableintimacy with the criminals with an equalplace in the everyday lives of the citizens, ismade more striking in a police force that,unlike many others in cities of similar histo-ries and traditions, uses military titles for itsranks above lieutenant—Majors, LieutenantColonels, Colonels [and then DeputyCommissioner and Commissioner].

Hamsterdam

Now we shall look more closely at theHamsterdam experiment. As a result oftolerating and confining the drug traffickingwithin three designated derelict areas of WestBaltimore, crime levels drop, the well-beingof those living in the vicinity of the cornersimproves immeasurably, with people comingout to sit on their stoops just like in the oldtimes that Colvin so fondly recalls in hisconversations with Carver. But hubrisfollows. How could it not? In keeping withSimon’s much vaunted idea of The Wire astragedy, we deliberately use the term hubrismeaning exaggerated pride or self-confi-dence. Colvin is guilty of hubris in severalregards. Firstly, he fails to think through hisown strategy; the local economies centred onthe corners rely on a host of hoppers, runnersand others in the drug-related division oflabour. All of these become superfluous inthe permissive zone of Hamsterdam. WhatColvin in Season 4 terms ‘corner kids’,simply no longer have corners to keep them

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‘gainfully’ occupied and able to supportthemselves and those who depend upon their‘income’. Recall that Season 1 shows theteenager Wallace earning and caring for a‘family’ of several abandoned kids; inSeason 4, another teen, Michael Lee leaveshome with his brother Bug and school friendDuquan Weems, and are set up in their ownhouse by Marlo Stanfield, the drug-dealer forwhom Michael leaves school to workcorners. Colvin’s sergeant in charge of over-seeing the Hamsterdam lots, Ellis Carvercomes up with a partial and make-shift solu-tion in the form of creating sports activitiesfor the kids, and he is also helped out byCutty when he tries to recruit some of theboys for his boxing gym. Secondly, Colvinplaces his colleagues in the invidious positionof having to turn a blind eye to a whole rangeof crimes and misdemeanours, even having tosecure the release of dealers transporting there-up when they are caught by yet othercolleagues using the wire-tap. Thirdly, hefails to understand that giving free rein todrug-taking also necessitates facilitatingsupport strategies such as needle-exchanges,HIV testing and various other health initia-tives, aspects that The Deacon suggests. Lateracademics and social workers eulogizeHamsterdam to the Mayor as an opportunityfor such much-needed heath interventions.Finally, Colvin fails to anticipate the wrath ofhis superiors which he will suffer once wordgets out about what is going down in hisdistrict. He imagines himself invulnerable:but his wrathful superiors punish him bydisgrace and reduced pension. They alsointimidate him by threatening reprisalsagainst the colleagues under his command,something that they themselves could not bethreatened by, since they have no loyalty toanyone but themselves and their own careers.

It is clear that the writers used theHamsterdam concept as an opportunity toair a debate about the highly contentiousissues around drug legalization, favoured inhis time in office by Baltimore MayorSchmoke.15 In recent years, however, therehave been some significant reversals in the

USA of the policies relating to legalizationand toleration of drugs and related aspects ofprostitution.16

The Hamsterdam strategy certainly provesunacceptable in Baltimore. Yet interestingly,a combination of Colvin’s strategy withLester Freamon’s painstaking paper-chasingand investigations has actually provedsuccessful in High Point, North Carolina(starting in 2003). As the Economist reported(Anonymous, 24 October 2009), local resi-dents reacted against effectively being impris-oned in their own homes while the streetswere ruled by drug-dealers, pimps and pros-titutes. The police strategy of street rips wasineffective, simply exacerbating the antago-nism between police and the largely African-American population. As a result of localpressure the police changed tack and startedtalking to community leaders, and fromthem learned that the major drug-dealersamounted to no more than 16 people, ofwhom 3 were habitually violent.

The police ‘patiently compiled dossiers oneach of them’ (the Lester Freamon approachin The Wire) then arrested and prosecutedthe violent ones, giving others a choice—either stop dealing and stop carrying guns, orface prosecution. At meetings with a‘community co-ordinator’, and with othermembers of the community in attendance—including family members and neighbours—the dealers had to agree to reform or risklengthy jail sentences. The policy provedremarkably effective, returning the streets tothe community and making the neighbour-hood liveable once more (Colvin’s objective).Drug dealing still goes on, but behind closeddoors; in any case the policy was not focusedon drugs, but rather on giving a better qualityof life to a terrorized neighbourhood. (Todate not only has the policy continuedsuccessfully in North Carolina, but severalother similar sized towns and cities havefollowed suit.)17

Colvin’s position can be seen to encompassboth nostalgic conservatism and progressiveliberalization; the latter predominates inSeason 3, but in Season 4 the balance shifts.

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Here we see Colvin invoking similar imageryto that used in his conversations with Carver.But whereas the Hamsterdam experimentmight be seen as a battle between Colvin andthe progressives on one side, and the politicalstatus quo fearful of the response of conserva-tives on the other, in Season 4, it is the politi-cal status quo, anxiously avoiding offendingthe progressive orthodoxy in education thatultimately brings down Colvin and theschooling experiment. In Parenti andColvin’s project to identify and work withthe disruptive corner kids, allowing the othersthe space and tranquillity to get on with theirwork in the now more peaceful classroom,Carcetti’s political advisors only see the riskof being seen to use ‘tracking’ and ‘segrega-tion’. The Bush administration’s mantra: ‘Nochild left behind’, is seen to lead to faked testscores masking the real facts of all being leftbehind. As academics we may, rightly,complain about the impact of ‘quality’,‘research’ and other assessments that are partof the ‘audit culture’ (Strathern, 2000); buthere we see its full, debilitating, impersonaland ultimately tragic impact.

If Colvin was guilty of hubris with regardto Hamsterdam, he is certainly not inSeason 4. Indeed he and Miss Duquette, adoctoral researcher in psychology, are theonly adults to emerge with any credit fromthe pilot programme. The shocking treat-ment of Randy Wagstaff, despite Carver’sefforts to help him, the slide into drug addic-tion of Duquan and the mealy mouthedrationale for terminating the classroomexperiment, all contribute to and extend theinstitutional critique of The Wire still further.

Institutional critique

The Wire is clearly taking a shot at all theinstitutions of modern society, and Simonmade this clear in a response on a blog(Yglesias, January 2008):

‘Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against

rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression.… The Wire is dissent;’

He continues that The Wire

‘… argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment.… I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now—and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory)—well, perhaps they’re playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.’

The target of Simon’s dissent is thus what hecalls the ‘institutions of a capital-obsessedoligarchy’. In an interview with Eric Duckerof Fader Simon reflects on what he read inpreparation for writing The Wire.

‘The stuff that spoke to me is the Greek drama in which fated and doomed protagonists are confronted by a system that is indifferent to their heroism, to their individuality, to their morality. But instead of Olympian gods that are throwing lightening bolts and fucking people up for the fun of it, we have post-modern institutions. The police department is the god, the drug trade is the god, the school system is the god, city hall is the god, the election is the god. Capitalism is the ultimate god in The Wire. Capitalism is Zeus.’ (Ducker, 2006; cited in Sheehan and Sweeney, 2009)

‘Capitalism is Zeus’ has some dramatic ‘grab’,which is probably what Simon intended; butfor our purposes and for readers of City it isnot sufficient simply to evoke capitalism inthe abstract. The challenge is to conceptualizea political process for social change beyondthe failed political experiments of appliedMarxism, or ‘actually existing socialism’,

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without completely jettisoning Marx’s andEngels’ passionate denunciations of capital-ism’s fundamental cruelty. In Colvin, we havea character who perhaps ‘understands’ thisproblematic better than his creator, Simonhimself.

This claim opens the way to the analysis ofmodern American democracy provided byone of the most perceptive political theoristsof recent decades—Judith Shklar (1928–92):teacher of and influence on many politicaltheorists including Michael Walzer, JohnRawls, Richard Rorty, Isaiah Berlin, JohnDunn, Quentin Skinner and Seyla Benhabib.Shklar is perhaps best known for her papers‘Putting Cruelty First’ (1982) and ‘TheLiberalism of Fear’ (1989).

Shklar saw her work as part of thenecessary delineation of the ‘physiology ofinjustice’, favouring what she termed a liber-alism of permanent minorities, or a ‘bare-bones liberalism’. As someone who herselfhad to flee Latvia as a young Jewish childwith her family, she was acutely aware of thenature and effects of racial injustice. And asan immigrant, she became a grateful citizenof the USA. Yet while admiring the conceptof American democracy, she nonetheless sawit damaged by the tragedy of its birth, andpermanently tainted by the injustices ofslavery and the risk of tyranny.

As much as she attacked the failure of electedofficials, public servants and others, Shklar’smost relevant concept for our analysis ofColvin’s role is that of passive injustice, whatwe term the transgression of the bystander. Ina biographical portrait of the thinker, SeylaBenhabib explains the concept as follows:‘Passive injustice results from the failure ofrepublican citizens actively to uphold justiceand support those informal relations of(quoting Shklar) “democracy of everyday life,in the habits of equality, and the mutuality ofordinary obligations between citizens”’(Benhabib, 2004, p. 532; see also Shklar, 1992).

Benhabib (2004) continues:

‘To overcome passive injustice requires a citizenry imbued with a sense of social

justice, the rule of law, and the protection of equal rights. A citizenry full of vigilance and a public officialdom with a deep sense of rectitude are pivotal to the realization of liberalism.’ (p. 532)

And she concludes: ‘It was not the origins ofsuffering and injustice that were importantbut the possibility of alleviating them; what isunforgiveable is doing nothing whensomething can be done’ (p. 533—stressadded).

If Simon expresses his anger and disap-pointment at the failure of the American‘utilitarian and democratic experiment’,Shklar adopted a more ironic tone. Railingagainst injustice—passive as well as active—and highlighting the necessity for informalrelations of democracy to be present, as wellas a strong and clear legal framework,together with vigilant and responsible citi-zens, honourable public servants, reliable andfair bureaucrats, Shklar was well aware thatmore was needed than the rule of law.Without civic courage and independentjudgement, there is a danger of the sort ofdumb legalism and political calculation thatThe Wire shows to be all too prevalent inmodern American society.

Misfortune

Shklar’s work also raises another importantissue: misfortune. Misfortune comes acrossfar more obviously perhaps in Simon andBurns’ earlier work, The Corner (1997), thanit does in The Wire, although it clearly doescome starkly into play with regard to thetrajectories of for instance school friendsDuquan and Michael. For Shklar, misfortuneleads all too readily to injustice; splitting oneoff from the other becomes a political andmoral decision. The wealthy and relativelywell-off can afford either to insure againstmisfortune, or have sufficient resources toovercome such occurrences; the less fortu-nate have neither option, and the foundingidea of the welfare state or its equivalent is

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that everyone should be protected againstsome aspects of misfortune.

This raises the issue of the extent to whichgovernments should insure their citizensagainst, or rescue them from, the risks ofmisfortune—something that can be seen asboth an essential and moral obligation. Thisis a key component of what John Rawlspopularized as ‘distributive justice’ (1971);Shklar, together with Simon, clearly belongsin this camp.

In contrast, there is the view that suchgovernment strategies can lead to a culture ofdependence and sense of both victimhoodand entitlement that undermines individualaction and personal aspiration. In West-SideStory (1957), Stephen Sondheim encapsulatesthis in the song ‘Gee Officer Krupke’ sungby the white street gang, The Jets.

‘Dear kindly Sergeant KrupkeYou gotta understandIt’s just our bringin’ upkeThat gets us out of handOur mothers all are junkiesOur fathers all are drunksGolly Moses, natcherly we’re punks.’

This is echoed in the polarized debatesaround President Obama’s health careplans—a US presidential aspiration since atleast the 1930s. Various critiques of entitle-ment have always emanated from the conser-vative right. But in recent years, such critiqueshave been joined by voices from moreunexpected sources on the left. So while weare under no illusions about the politicalviews from which his trenchant critiqueemerges, we would certainly commend thewritings of Theodore Dalrymple (2001, 2005)(aka Anthony Daniels), including those inCity, to anyone trying to understand thenature and experience of the underclass inliquid modern times. Indeed Dalrymple’sanalysis and insights resonate with the recentwritings of progressive social analysts such asChristopher Lasch (1991, 1994) and RichardSennett (2002), who operate from positionsand orientations starkly different from thoseof Dalrymple.

Son of a white, working-class, singlemother who became a social worker in theChicago projects, Richard Sennett’s work isparticularly interesting, given that he wasborn and grew up on one the most notorioushousing projects in Chicago: Cabrini Green:‘The very name [is] synonymous with gunsand drugs and cheated lives’, as he is quotedin an article in the Chicago Tribune. In areview of his part-memoir, part-essayRespect: The Formation of Character in anAge of Inequality (Sennett, 2002), JennyTurner (2003) writes:

‘Society cannot function, Sennett considers, without a certain classicism of demeanour. Institutions and rituals allow people to interact as properly social beings, leaving the endless imbroglios of their more intimate selves at home. In the current book, the big question is about how to “cross the boundaries of inequality with mutual respect” Sennett is unimpressed with answers that have to do with spontaneity and kindness, which he terms “social jazz”. His own answer has as much to do with acting as with charitable impulse. Respect, in some sense, has to be performed.’

Sennett argues that there are three factorsthat weaken and undermine mutual respectsummarized by David Pitt as

‘… unequal talent (Do we give too much weight to someone’s ability to do something special?), dependence on others (we somehow construe dependency as shameful), and hurtful compassion (some forms seem morally self-serving)’.18

Criticized for a swerve to the right, Christo-pher Lasch, like Sennett, offers an analysis ofthe breakdown of American society, and thebeginnings of a remedy centred on new insti-tutions and relations. Although they eachapportion blame and identify causes indifferent ways and degrees, they certainlyencompass Dalrymple’s targets as well asShklar’s and Simon’s. Hence they recognizethe strengths and sources of solidarity thatwere afforded by family, community and

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religious faith in the past, even if these wereat the same time somewhat of a mixed bless-ing, and are certainly not now available assimple restoratives.

The paradox of these twin critiques—oneaimed at a capital-obsessed oligarchy (Simon)and the other at the liberalism or progressiv-ism (Dalrymple and Lasch) from which thefirst critique often emanates—is embodied inBunny Colvin, particularly the ways inwhich he initiates actions and responds totheir consequences. As the narrative in TheWire shows, Colvin himself is quicklybrought up against the issues that accompanyand confound his strategies. In effect, theinstitutions set up to respond to the drugsproblem rapidly become part of a newproblem and so need to be replaced by otherinstitutions and practices.

Reading the character Bunny Colvin as asignificant but overlooked moment in thefictional world of The Wire created by Simonand Burns, he represents the possibility ofrespect and action as a refusal of passive injus-tice and institutionalized indifference tomisfortune. But this character does not holdany answers. His own modesty is matched byhis genuine disappointment at his failure, andof others who do not even try. Unlike his finalironic response to the discomforted andexposed politician, Carcetti: ‘Yeah, well Iguess Mr Mayor … there’s nothing to bedone’, Colvin represents the figure whoknows that at least something must be done;action must be attempted, even if fragile,provisional, contingent and grounded in whatcan only be called a liberal consciousness.

Moving away from the Modern Americanschool of political liberalism, and reachingback into the earlier 20th century to theprofound reflections on class, the intellectualand pedagogy in the writings of ItalianMarxist Antonio Gramsci (2001), we want tosuggest that Colvin might be read as anexample of the ‘organic intellectual’. Consid-ering all people intellectuals, capable ofrational thought, Gramsci focused on thesocial function of the intellectual, differenti-ating the traditional intelligentsia who

scientifically describe and analyse socialconditions, from the organic intellectuals,who arise from within or identify with theworking class, or in the American situation,class–ethnic group. Organic intellectualsenunciate, in the language of culture, namelyof experiencing, the conditions of living,feeling and knowing within specific classconditions, even if by virtue of educationthey no longer participate fully in the classedconditions they are able nonetheless toknow and represent. Robert Wisdomcommented on how he developed Colvin asa character. Alvarez quotes him saying ‘As ablack man, I can speak the language of thatforeign country—invisible America—but Idon’t know the spiritual devastation.’ Whilehe admits that he had to flip ‘those feelingsdemanding the character ask himself hardquestions about a job that on the surface isabout helping people but became a tool forcareer advancement and financial security’(Alvarez, 2009, pp. 208–209). It is perhaps asa result of Wisdom’s own, dramatic interro-gation of this divide between embourgeoise-ment and social responsibility, that we caninvoke Gramsci’s famous phrase that theorganic intellectual, like Colvin, exhibits a‘pessimism of the intellect; optimism of thewill’: ‘I’m a pessimist because of intelligence,but an optimist because of will’ (letter fromprison, 19 December 1929).

We can furthermore dignify Colvin, thistroubled, flawed and angry character with areference to the thought of Hannah Arendt.In his book Society Under Siege (2002),Zygmunt Bauman offers Arendt’s owncitation from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing(1729–81)—’I am not duty-bound to resolvethe difficulties I create.’ And then Baumanquotes Arendt herself from Men in DarkTimes (1967).

‘Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination [that] may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under

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almost any circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them on earth.’ (Bauman, 2002, p. 51)

Conclusion

We do not know where Bunnys come from,nor what finally makes others such as Cuttyor Poot, respond to a damaged past with acapacity to work at something, rejectingviolence and ‘The Game’ as a path tosurvival. We are dealing with characters and awork of televisual fiction that leaves suchquestions unanswered even while promptingthese readers at least to pose them. The inter-est of The Wire is, however, that despite itsown purpose to reveal and even to revel inthe tragic in contemporary American cities, itproduced the troubling ‘space’ of exceptionthat is Bunny Colvin. Between the necessar-ily honest analysis of American urban societyhorribly damaged by the drug trade, thesupine political establishment playing atdemocracy without practising its deeperliberal project, and the need for social hope,can brilliant televisual fiction pose key politi-cal questions? Can it call directly to us, theviewers, to be more than delighted consum-ers of visual culture, however brilliant, or tobe more than even critical intellectuals read-ing each other’s research, and to identify withthe Bunnys of this world? Let us leave thelast word to Colvin himself in his exchangewith a socially bewildered but already paci-fied academic David Parenti as they wait forthe elevator after their school project hasbeen terminated by indifferent politicos inthe Carcetti administration [4.13].

Dr David Parenti: ‘We get the grant, we study the problem, we propose solutions. If they listen, they listen. If they don’t, it still makes for great research. What we publish on this is gonna get a lot of attention.’

Colvin: ‘From who?’

Dr David Parenti: ‘From other researchers, academics.’

Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin: ‘Academics?! What, they gonn’ study your study? [chuckles and shakes head] When do this shit change?’

Notes

1 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the CRESC Conference on ‘The Wire: Social Science Fiction’ (Leeds, November 2009), which introduced the concept of social science fiction—i.e. that story-telling and drama can produce sociological knowledge. Of necessity, the paper contains several spoilers, and the authors have assumed that readers will already have seen the series in its entirety.

2 2 http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780767900317&view=quotes (accessed 31 May 2010).

3 3 For instance, Season 5; Episode 7.4 4 Various articles in City have pointed to the

necessity for finding ‘better ways of telling the story’; for instance, in Catterall’s article, ‘Is It All Coming Together? Further Thoughts on Urban Studies and the Present Crisis: (2) What Time is this Space?’ (2004).

5 5 Alex Preminger, ed. (1965) ‘Tragic Flaw’, in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, pp. 864–865. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

6 6 It is important to note that Colvin could not anticipate this punishment. In the narrative he remarks that they can do nothing to him since he is on the point of retirement. Mayor Royce tries to make Deputy Police Commissioner Burrell take the rap for the failed experiment and the failings of authority, but Burrell manoeuvres himself into the position of Police Commissioner by threatening to expose Royce’s initial plan to bring in teams of legal and health advisors to see if there was a way to gain credit for the Hamsterdam experiment as a politically daring shift of the drugs problem away from being a matter for law enforcement alone to being a health issue. Thus while Colvin might have anticipated some fall-out, the writers used the episode to expose the potential for genuine debate, and it is only Burrell’s political fight for his own professional life that allows the punitive downgrading to be visited on Colvin alone.

7 7 http://www.ruthschris-waterst.com/ (accessed 28 June 2010).

8 8 We want to distinguish between socializing rituals and the more famous formulation of the civilizing process articulated by Elias in The Civilizing Process (1994). We are not suggesting any teleology that would place socio-economically

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disadvantaged teenagers on a lower rung of a process, with restaurant dining as ‘more’ civilized.

9 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmondson/Westside_High_School_(Baltimore,_Maryland) (accessed 28 June 2010).

10 10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_%22Bunny%22_Colvin (accessed 28 June 2010).

11 11 Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School East Baltimore, http://www.publicschoolreview.com/school_ov/school_id/35941 (accessed 28 June 2010).

12 12 Interview with Ed Burns, HBO, http://www.hbo.com/the-wire/inside

13 13 The Wire is firmly anchored in Baltimore, using real-life locations and clearly identifiable people and places. On the other hand, as Jeri Johnson points out in her discussion of Joyce and Woolf (2000), cities operate as ‘essentially imaginary spaces’ as well as material realities. Needless to say one can now sign up for The Wire tours of Baltimore, just as one can trace the events of Bloomsday in Dublin—particularly on 16 June itself.

14 14 As the story continues it turns out that Tom Riley has a present-day doppleganger who is a homosexual and that PC George Dixon was the head of a paedophile ring who organized ‘babysitting parties’! We also see policemen beating up suspects so badly they die and a shoot out inside the police station, but the most memorable scene is the ending where the Tom Riley of the present day is transported back to the 1950s where on being informed that the CID want to grill him screams ‘WOT YA FINK I AM? A F—KIN’ SAUSAGE’, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418531/

15 15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Schmoke (accessed 2 July 2010). See also Rafael Alvarez (2009) The Wire: Truth be Told, p. 205. Edinburgh: Canongate.

16 16 Several reviewers have remarked on the absence of prostitution in The Wire, except in the trafficking scenario in Season 2. In his article ‘The Escalating Breakdown of Urban Society Across the US’, The Guardian (Weekend), 6 September 2008, p. 24, Simon states in his defence: ‘We did not contemplate immigration. We largely ignored sex-based discrimination, feminism and gender issues. We spoke not a word about the pyramid scheme that is the mortgage crisis, or the diminishing consumer class, or the time bomb that all of our China-bought debt might prove to be. Nor did we glory in the healthy sectors of the American economy, in the growth industries of the information age. We did not embrace Brooklyn Heights and West Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and Marin County. Hell, we didn’t even rest for more than a day or two in Roland Park or Mount Washington or Towson—those Baltimore neighbourhoods that define a viable, monied

America. We spoke to the other part of town, the forgotten place, the one they don’t tell many stories about, at least not in the medium of entertainment television. It was a story rooted in truth, but it wasn’t the only story or the only truth. Who, but a second-rate mind, would claim otherwise?’

17 17 Updated reports on the High Point strategy can be found at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/journals/262/high-point-intervention.htm; http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/journals/262/evaluating-high-point-intervention.htm (accessed 2 July 2010)—NB: the report by David Kennedy explains the power of the mutual misperceptions emanating both from the community and the police, offering remarkably similar accounts to those in The Wire, particularly as encapsulated by Colvin’s words.

18 18 Available at: http://www.amazon.com/Respect-World-Inequality-Richard-Sennett/dp/0393325377 (accessed 2 July 2010).

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