this is as interesting, informed and provocative an overview of the fundamental lunacies of contemporary america that i've seen in a while. and it's interesting that it comes from the creator of the hbo series "the wire"---and that the series is built around these premises and so is a vehicle in a sense for this vision.
have a look:
Bill Moyers Talks Drugs, Crime, Journalism and Democracy with Creator of 'The Wire' | DrugReporter | AlterNet
i'm personally interested in the argument that simon makes that the wire is dissent:
Quote:
DAVID SIMON: Yes. It is dissent. It is saying-
BILL MOYERS: Against what? From what?
DAVID SIMON: It is saying, "We no longer buy these false ideologies. And false motifs you have of American life."
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there's alot to talk about from this interview i think.
what do you make of the basic outlines of it: the contemporary capitalism has produced what amounts to entire classes of "superfluous people"--that the drug war is an enormous sham aimed at regulated this population---that there is a complicity between the superficiality of benchmarking in education, this structural feature of contemporary capitalism, and the drug war---that statistics have become an entirely superficial mode of generating psuedo-information that generates reassuring but ultimately meaningless ideological images back to the institutions that are invested in creating and acting on these images.
most importantly, the arguments about the destruction of feedback loops, which you can see through his discussion of the state of the american press.
this is not the happy-face world of the right. this is quite far from the non-image of american reality that lay behind the obama administration's actions up to this point--which one can see are locked in reactive mode to the Situation it was handed--but if this guy is anything like correct, the social reality of the united states is much further out of phase with the happy-face neoliberal image of it that unless some very significant changes are made at the level of information gathering and processing that informs policy, it could turn out that we are well and truly fucked.
but what do you make of this?
what strikes you as interesting about the interview?
what strikes you as off the mark?
many themes get touched on, and multiple forms of interconnectedness are discussed--it's a real advantage of working from the particular to the general--here is a knot of realities on the ground in baltimore---here's how they feed into each other--here's how the fit into larger problems--here's what i think it means....