The Moral World of "The Wire" (practice paper, September 2014)

PARTICIPATION ASSIGNMENT #2 'CRIME DRAMAS'

The Wire, S4E12: 'That's Got His Own'

Original airdate: September 3, 2006

Stepan Serdiukov

AMST 442: Television and American Culture

October 9, 2014.

Of all the shows aired on American cable and network TV in the 2000s, probably none managed to both receive substantial, ever-persistent critical acclaim and cult following, and not to win any major industry awards, as was the case with The Wire, a crime drama series created by David Simon and produced by HBO. Its gritty realism (or, rather, verisimilitude) in the portrayal of urban poverty, and unrelenting social criticism of American policing not only garnered The Wire a place in the pantheon of the greatest shows ever, but made it a fixture in at least three universities' course catalogs1.
Thematically, the show is so rich, that one doubts if the academic interest to it ever ceases: The Wire, like the novels of Dickens, to which it is often compared (and just like any significant cultural text), welcomes all sorts of scrutiny, based as much on its substance as on its style. This paper is going to deal with the moral world of The Wire—specifically, of its episode “That's Got His Own,” penultimate in the fourth season, premiered on September 3, 2006.
The episode is set in Baltimore, Maryland, the main scene for all The Wire seasons. Richard Sparks, in his 1992 treatise of television crime stories, notes that “the vast majority of both British and American series are set wholly or predominantly in the great cities.” Baltimore was the early and obvious choice for the showrunner David Simon to place his characters in, because The Wire is based on his experiences as a police beat reporter for The Baltimore Sun in the 1980s. However, it also begs to note the additional, symbolic layer here: Baltimore is known as a city where Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the detective fiction, lived and worked.
The episode's main plotline, the 'criminal' one, is concerned with Omar Little, a renowned stick-up artist, planning and executing a robbery of the drug shipment belonging to his enemies, in order to avenge their attempt to frame him earlier. Revenge is also a motivation for another crime, that a homeless drug addict Bubbles unwittingly commits, when his friend Sherrod dies after injecting the 'hotshot' of heroin that Bubbles wanted to use on another addict, who often robbed him on the streets. The 'cop' plotline takes the viewer to witness the work of BPD Detective Lester Freamon, who discovers the connection between the bodies of murdered people being found in abandoned buildings, and the local drug-dealing gang. Two of the places where the crimes take place, are public: the housing projects where Freamon keeps finding the cadavers; and the unused warehouse where Omar takes the heroin shipment by force and cunning.
Describing the common cop show tropes, Sparks mentions 'indoors' as a space of reflection and intimacy for the characters. The crimes committed in private residences on TV are, therefore, usually portrayed to be especially heinous, with thugs invading quiet homes and terrorizing the inhabitants (the author takes his examples from Miami Vice). As regards this episode of The Wire, it is interesting to see such cliché being served to us in an unusual way: Bubbles and Sherrod make a home out of a decrepit apartment. Since they have no right to be there, and both are destitute, unkempt drug addicts, the viewer is at first ambiguous about the setting: is it public or private? In just a few minutes, we are first assured that it is, indeed, private, as we see Bubbles wake up in the morning, start friendly banter with his younger protege, and, amazingly, take time to carefully make his bed of rags; and then shocked as we see death destroying the good mood of the scene, when Bubbles discovers Sherrod dead on the floor, having injected the hotshot meant for an enemy.
This, however, isn't a central crime of the episode: the honor belongs to Omar Little's stick-up operation. As mentioned above, his chief motivation is revenge. Omar is a calm, calculating black man in his late 20s, a child of the projects and a much feared adversary of Baltimore's drug dealers, whose stashes he specializes in taking. He is assisted by other people of color: his Puerto Rican boyfriend Renaldo, a black girl Kimmy, and Renaldo's Latino associates. In course of the robbery, they confront several unnamed guards of the shipment, all of them African-American.
Omar's desire for revenge does fall into the list of possible criminal motivations as given by Sparks, but the crime is not portrayed as a product of his inherently villainous nature: he treats it just like another job, another round of “the game,” as the drug trade is called on the streets of David Simon's Baltimore. There are few true villains in The Wire, and Omar isn't one of them. If anything, he is a peculiar kind of a hero: he never harms civilians while on the job, eschews killing people if they are not trying to kill him (the only shot fired during the robbery was by Kimmy). Omar is shown to be merely a child of a broken social system, where a young poor man of color has little opportunities. He lives in relative poverty, never being able to successfully cash out after his many robberies, but, at the same time, is his own man, which is rare in the world of crime shows that Sparks covers: in Sparks' sample, poor criminals are most always the minions of the rich ones. Mr. Little is never a direct adversary of the show's police officers (true for this episode as well), but he has a lot of potential for one: Omar is every bit as smart, cunning and able, as they are—thus matching Sparks' basic description of a TV criminal mastermind. He is certainly capable of having a connection with a civilian world, but the possibility of his rehabilitation is never openly implied, either.
Absent the villains, we do have a hero in this episode: Lester Freamon. The seasoned detective tries to persuade his superiors to let him open new cases on the bodies found in the projects, but they are reluctant, because it would drive the force's murder clearance rates into the ground, and possibly destroy the good statistics for the year (Freamon makes his stunning discovery in December.) Lester is forced to struggle with the authority, with the angry chain of command going as high up as the Baltimore's police commissioner and the Mayor, but he undoubtedly has the moral high ground. “Heroic insubordination” is often the case in The Wire, but not in the current episode. In any event, Freamon validates the whole BPD by being an honest and hardworking cop, even if that isn't in the current best interest of the organization.
The victims in the episode are numerous. First, the nameless rival drug dealers found dead by Freamon in the tenement buildings. Second, Sherrod—the accidental victim of Bubbles. Third—Miss Anna, the foster parent of a problem kid, Randy Wagstaff, who suffers severe burns after uknown assailants throw Molotov cocktails through her apartment windows. All the victims are black and poor (therefore, as per Sparks, “socialy proximate” to the villains), but only Miss Anna isn't a “legitimate” part of the Baltimore's underworld, so her suffering particularly resonates with the viewer, because the dealers were, after all, part of “the game,” (“culpable”) and Sherrod was an addict already set out to destroy himself (just unfortunate). Again, The Wire is never too close to sending simplistic moral messages, but the “vulnerability trope” is obviously at work here: Miss Anna is a single mother, and she is shown to offer one of the detectives breakfast when he comes by to check if she and Randy are all right.
Crime and criminals in the episode are essentially the symptoms of a social malady, hardly treatable in the current conditions, which include indifferent policing, preoccupation with crime statistics, and broke city schools. The consequences of the latter are especially visible, as the show follows three junior high black kids orbit further and further from normal life, as the school is unable to keep them in, burdened by test performance requirements and other bureaucratic matters. “Nature versus nurture” argument about criminals is presented in an interesting light, as a boy named Namond Brice struggles to leave the drug-running, but is pushed back to it by his angry mother. At one point, he confesses to the local boxing gym manager (a reformed criminal): “The way he [his hitman father serving a life sentence] is and shit... it just ain't in me.” Eventually, even the demanding environment can't make a criminal of someone not cut to be one, the scene suggests.


Sparks, Richard. Television and the drama of crime: Moral tales and the place of crime in public life. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992.

Studying Race, Ethnicity, and Class Formation (practice paper, September 2014)

APPLIED PRACTICE PAPER#1

Studying Race, Ethnicity, and Class Formation

“Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic”

GQ, July 2014

 Stepan Serdiukov

AMST 501: Theory and Methods

September 23, 2014

In March 2014, the United States Bureau of Land Management sent its representatives, along with the law enforcement rangers, to round up and impound the trespassing cattle on the federal land in Clark County, Nevada. Thus, the government moved to resolve its 20-year dispute with the cattle's owner, local rancher Cliven Bundy, who had been refusing to pay his grazing fees since 1993, claiming that federal powers have no authority over any of Nevada's lands.

However, the story was still far from its conclusion. On April 12, a group of Bundy's supporters, many of them heavily armed, confronted the BLM agents guarding the impounded cattle. Fearing especially fatal consequences, the Bureau director Neil Kornze ordered the agency's employees to release the cattle and leave. So, the unruly rancher emerged victorious—at least, for the time being. Bundy's supporters, in some number, remained on his land until June.

Their exploits are described in the article 'Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic,' published in GQ magazine in July 2014 —the text that is going to be the subject of the current paper. It is built around reporter's conversations with Cliven Bundy himself, the militiamen, and his own observations about the situation in the vigilante camp.

For several reasons, this article is especially well-suited for analysis applying the American Studies theoretical framework. First of all, its principal characters are members of a self-styled 'citizen militia,' yet another modern facet of a fringe paramilitary movement, that gained momentum in the early 1990s, and which, in turn, was part of a long and controversial American tradition of vigilantism. Second of all, vigilantism in the US is inextricably connected with racial and social conflicts that in no small part defined the relationship between different class and race groups in this country. Additionally, the magazine story is rich with author's personal assumptions and opinions, expressed quite openly; this gives our inquiry yet another subject, also inseparable from American tradition (of letters.)

Therefore, it appears appropriate to study this text as a cultural manifestation of public attitudes towards militia and vigilante movements and their relationship with the federal authority, and race.

From the start, the article explicitly evokes the imagery of the American War of Independence: “Did you know there was a revolutionary war fought on American soil earlier this spring? It's true! Back in April, a small band of militiamen led by a rabble-rousing Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy defeated the United States of America without firing a single shot. And so a brand-new country—sand-choked, heatstroked, and very heavily armed—was formed inside this one [emphasis added]”. The author keeps the association alive, repeatedly referring to Bundy's supporters' camp as the “Republic” throughout the text. Moreover, the camp itself was known among its inhabitants under two names: Camp Tripwire and Camp Liberty, with American flags, as the author notes, almost ubiquitous.

The men and women defending the camp, the “Liberty” from supposed imminent encroachment or attack by the government forces, unmistakably see themselves as vigilantes, protectors of freedom. Essentially, in the American history, vigilantism meant direct democracy, the collective of people standing guard of their community's laws, and, inevitably, values. However, vigilantism is mostly a local phenomenon, whereas Bundy's supporters came from all over the United States. Take “Bam Bam”, one of the men being interviewed by Baron: he claims to have traveled all the way from New Jersey. Texas, California and New Hampshire also were among the places where Bundy's supporters came from. This makes their classification quite a curious task, because the locality they claimed to protect seemed to exist only in their minds, as they projected the ideal America they held dear onto the situation with Bundy's ranch, land, and cattle. Are they vigilantes, militiamen, or both? 

One of the most important motives in historical vigilantism was race. White lynch mobs dispatched their quick and brutal “justice” to the people outside the circle of whiteness, as whiteness, as Nikhil Pal Singh puts it, has always been a prerequisite for an ideal American national subject. Racist motives behind Bundy's supporters' actions can be found throughout the text. For example, “Bam Bam,” a New Jersey militiaman, in a conversation with the author first talks about the Fourteenth Amendment, that effectively included African Americans in the circle of citizenship. He claims that the language of the amendment suggests that people are considered corporations. (The present writer fails to find that language in the amendment.) Though “Bam Bam” does not outright deny the legality of the document, he still claims that something was not quite right with it. However, in the next paragraph, he is quoted as calling Abraham Lincoln “a tyrant-ass son of a bitch,” giving quite an impression of the aforementioned denial. Note that “Bam Bam” (as most of the camp's inhabitants) does not divulge his real name. Such propensity for remaining anonymous is quite conspicuous, especially considering the racist undertones in his speech: Ku Klux Klan lynchers (exemplary vigilantes) made quite an effort to hide their faces and names.

Baron does make a connection between the racial composition of Bundy's supporters and their motives to come all the way to the Nevadan desert: “After talking to people like Marky awhile, I thought maybe I understood it—back home they were carpenters, contractors, mechanics, repairmen, at loose ends. They were white men, mostly, who felt like this country had once been theirs and now was not [emphasis added]”. Another interesting racial image is found in an exchange between the author and a vigilante dubbed “a slightly feral Seann William Scott”:

"I've been here for days," I stammered out. I said I was a member of the press.

"What outlet you with, did you say?"

"GQ magazine."

"GQ?!" Seann William Scott sneered. "We're a bunch of G.I. Joes, not Ken dolls."

The initial line-up of the G.I. Joe action figures (depicting four of the US armed forces branches) was all-white, and to this day these Hasbro toys are mostly associated with white masculinity. Some even argue that the subsequent line-ups of G.I. Joes, where African-American toys were added, still recreated the white supremacy system while attempting to convey diversity.

Another important trait of American vigilantes throughout history was, of course, the self-righteousness with which they operated. They usually appealed to popular sovereignty and the right to revolution. The latter is prominently mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, which gives the modern militia movements a cause to invoke the Framers' ideas as defence for their activity. Vigilantes frequently see themselves as fixing the troubles with the established law and order, and Cliven Bundy is not an exception. He is portrayed to be a firm believer in his cause. “Twenty years ago, Cliven Bundy says, he “fired” the Bureau of Land Management, who'd been responsible for stewarding the land and who had failed at its job, at least according to Cliven Bundy.” This precisely reflects Bundy's philosophy of government: he does not recognize the representative government's authority over the land that belongs to it, because the land actually belongs to 'the people'. A government is seen here as an employee, subject to dismissal. So when the employee violently disobeyed, Bundy confronted the government with his own army—the vigilantes from all over America.

Self-righteousness of a vigilante also sometimes implies doing the God's work, and the text presents us with more than one example of such behavior. Bundy says: “I felt like, you know, I had God on my side.” The other camp inhabitant, a man going by the name “Marky,” confesses to Baron: “As a Christian man, I feel like the Lord has his hands right over me. I am not afraid.” Some of the armed men remembered the Waco siege as a battle of people who were in the right and died for it. They felt that the religious, sectarian zeal of the Branch Davidians had something in common with their cause.

The frontier myth is also at play here. Vigilantism, as Linda Gordon notes in her book “The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction,” was strongly identified with the imagined West, the open land and the 'spice of danger' promised by it. “People kept talking about dying in the republic,” Baron notes. Here is his description of the standoff that ended in BLM agents withdrawing: “The people knelt before the government's corral and paused to pray. Many had seen this exact moment in their dreams. They prayed for their own safety, but they also prayed in thanks: Finally.”

So, the Bundy standoff as depicted in the GQ article can be perceived as a threeway performance: as reenactment of the Revolutionary era, white supremacy era and the frontier period, all consistent with the ideal national subject notion, and the American vigilante culture.

References

Zach Baron. “Cliven Bundy's War: Inside the Rancher's Independent Sovereign Republic,” GQ, July 2014, http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201407/cliven-bundy

Nikhil Pal Singh. "Rethinking Race and Nation." American Studies: An Anthology (2009): 9-16.

Karen J. Hall. "A soldier's body: Gi Joe, Hasbro's Great American Hero, and the symptoms of Empire." The Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 1 (2004): 34-54.