Rewatching "The Wire" is a great backdrop for Robert Reich's new piece on the resurgence of Social Darwinism

The "chicken nugget" scene from Episode 2 of Season 1 of The Wire

KID NO. 1: Man, these shits is right. yo.
KID NO. 2: Mm-hmm.
KID NO. 1: It's good with the hot sauce too, yo.
KID NO. 2: Most definite.
KID NO. 1: Yo, Dee, you want some nuggets?
D'ANGELO: Nah, go ahead, man.
KID NO. 1: Man, whoever invented these, yo, he off the hook.
KID NO. 2 [drawn out, dubiously]: What?
KID NO. 1: Mm. Motherfucker got the bone all the way out the damn chicken. Till he came along niggas be chewin' on drumsticks and shit, gettin' they fingers all greasy. He said, Later for the bone, nugget that meat up, make some real money.
KID NO. 2: You think the man got paid?
KID NO. 1: Who?
KID NO. 2: The man who invented these.
KID NO. 1: Shit, he richer than a motherfucker.
D'ANGELO: Why? You think he get a percentage?
KID NO. 1: Why not?
D'ANGELO: Nigga, please, the man who invented them things, just some sad-ass down at the basement of McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players.
KID NO. 2: Naw, man, that ain't right.
D'ANGELO: Fuck "right." It ain't about right, it's about money. Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down in that basement and say, "Hey, Mr. Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you"?
KID NO. 1: Shit.
D'ANGELO: Man, the nigga who invented them things still workin' in that basement for regular wage, thinkin' up some shit to make the fries taste better, some shit like that. Believe.
KID NO. 1: He still had the idea though.

by Ken

Sometimes I think digital-cable On Demand is a blessing, sometimes a curse. No, I don't mean the pay services, but the ones that are free, or rather included in the humongous sum I pay every month for my cable bill. It was bad enough that HBO's On Demand service recently started rerunning The Sopranos from the start, when I hadn't rewatched the early seasons in many moons, putting them up four episodes at a time. When I discovered it, they were already up to episodes 5-8, which I wolfed down. Then I went back to my VHS set of Season 1 and filled in episodes 1-4, since which I've been going crazy waiting for episodes 9-12.

So then I noticed that on the HBO On Demand series list, right below The Sopranos there was The Wire, so I checked to see what they had up, and it turned out to be episodes 1-4. As I've written, I had originally tried to watch the pilot episode when it was first aired, and found myself confused and not especially interested in puzzling it all out. It was only several seasons later that I dipped into the series and found myself riveted, and then managed to catch up on the earlier seasons via a non-HBO rebroadcast offered on an oddly unpredictable schedule in the wee hours of the morning, with commercials inserted. (Thank you, DVR!)

I remembered that The Wire can't be watched casually; it requires full attention. Which protected me from dipping into the On Demand offerings for a good couple of days. When, naturally, with HBO On Demand still stuck on episodes 5-8 of The Sopranos, I took the plunge into The Wire, and even though I'm pretty sure I had actually seen episode 1, I was amazed at how much seemed totally unfamiliar, and in this connection I'm not counting the wealth of detail regarding situations and characters which would have been harder for me to absorb back when I didn't know the characters (even allowing for the considerable haziness that's set in since I finally traversed the series the first time).

It's a lucky thing that both The Sopranos and The Wire engage in such riveting story-telling, because otherwise it would be all too easy to become hopelessly mired in awe at the contributions of the huge numbers of people, behind as well as in front of the cameras, involved in such productions, as marshaled by creator-overseers David Chase (The Sopranos) and David Simon (The Wired). All of these people have gone on to other things, many of them concerned chiefly with keeping a roof over their heads and their families fed, and so it may not be in the forefront of their daily thinking that they contributed to such landmark productions, both of which carved out significant chunks of our social fabric and explored them in remarkable breadth and depth. When you do a job really well, it stands a chance of staying done.

After I'd laboriously done the transcription of the scene at the top of this post -- which is to say before I found it posted on YouTube, which would have made the transcription far less laborious than doing it from On Demand -- I was directed by Nation of Change to a swell new post by Rober Reich, "The Rebirth of Social Darwinism," in which he asks, "What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want?"

I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, laws against child labor, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. . . .

What Reich has to say gibes neatly with a pair of pieces I sort-of-wrote about earlier this week, Reich's own "Restore the Basic Bargain" and Jeff Madrick's "American's New Robber Barons."

Season 1 of The Wire dates back to the prehistoric time of 2002, when it was possible for most Americans to believe that this terrifying portrayal of inner-city life had nothing to do with them. By then more and more Americans had already tumbled to the expedient of walling themself off from lower-class nastiness behind gated walls and fences.

By, say, 2009, when the final season of The Wire had already concluded, a shitload of middle class and upper-middle-class and even lower-upper-class Americans were learning that once people with the wherewithal start walling themselves off, it's a natural progression to narrowing the perimeter of those walls, eventually to protect only the wherewithalliest. (Jeff Madrick in his piece devotes a fair amount of attention to debunking the idea that the protected class is as large as the top 20 percent, arguing that 1% is an altogether reasonable number, though the reality is probably more like .1%.)

It seems safe to say that the upper half (or whatever fraction) of the 99% never saw it coming. Hell, incomprehensible numbers of them still don't. Unfortunately for them, for most of us in the 99%, Social Darwinism doesn't have "cutoff " points. The Social Darwinians get to decide who stays in the magic circle with them, and the fewer people they let inside their gates, the fewer people they have to share their booty with. Of course, as Bob Reich pointed out in that earlier piece about the rupture of the old economic "basic bargain," whereby the workers who produce goods are paid fairly enough to be consumers of the goods they produce, and you have an economic as well as social system capable of sustaining itself.

If you want to see what it looks like when that system begins to break down, The Wire is an excellent place to look.

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