Seeing and not seeing

If you live in Chicago, as I do, you will eventually see a homeless person.  You can find the homeless in other cities, obviously, but I don't see, for example, the Los Angeles homeless every day on the way to the Metra, seeing as how I am unable in my current state of evolution to surpass the limits of time and space.  I am not a connoisseur of the homeless; I saw homeless men and women when I was a kid coming up to the city, and I see them on my way to wherever I happen to be working at the time, but I'm sure there are Chicago natives who have been ignoring the homeless for far longer than I.  Nevertheless, I have now seen, on multiple occasions, homeless people with dogs.

The mind already puts up barriers when we're dealing with the homeless.  I know I do it all the time.  I stare straight ahead and pretend not to see them.  I turn up my .mp3 player.  I fiddle with my phone.  I walk on, convincing myself in that moment that it's very important for me to get to wherever I'm going, that I don't have the time to stop or the money to give (although frequently I don't have to pretend about that last part), that someone else will stop and help, that they'll be okay.

In other words, I tell myself stories.

When you see a homeless man clutching a dog, this practice goes into overdrive.  You have to tell yourself a story to make that okay because if you really truly confronted what that meant it would ruin your day at the very least.  That guy has to be a scammer.  It's not his dog, it's just a stray he's found to make people feel sorry for him.  He's not really homeless, he's just bilking gullible tourists out of their money, and he's going home to some apartment somewhere after the lunch rush.  He's a drug addict, or an alcoholic.  He knows where the shelters are and just doesn't want to go there and get help.  He's too lazy to keep a job.  He pissed away an inheritance.  He deserves to be out there.  He deserves what he got.  It's fine.  It's okay.  You don't have to care.

Never mind that health care for many people is prohibitively expensive and that if he has any kind of medical condition or complication that becomes too much for him to financially cope with he can be out on his ass.  Never mind that not everyone has a stable family structure that can support them through hard times.  Never mind that people with mental illness, especially returning veterans with PTSD, can find it difficult to function in a society that doesn't fully understand that kind of struggle.  Never mind that the notion of someone making a full and healthy five-to-six figure yearly wage begging chump change from passing strangers is so far into the realm of fantasy that you might as well believe he used to be a dragon slayer.  Never mind that so many people in this world struggle with addictions of all shapes and sizes and that none of us are in a position to judge someone who battled with those demons and lost, that it's not a matter of weakness or strength but of access to treatment and care and empathy from out fellow humans and that anyone can be brought low.

We tell ourselves stories because we don't want to believe that that could be us, and we go into overdrive when we see a man or a woman out on the street with a dog because that just brings that reality into sharper relief.  We tell ourselves stories to eliminate the humanity of the homeless.  But they are human, living in conditions we can't and won't imagine, and our illusions are stretched to the breaking point when we try to make a monster out of a man holding a dog.

"If you want to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the destitute, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come back and follow me," said Jesus.  I don't believe he was the son of God, but I do believe he was more revolutionary than people really know.  Just as that man holding the dog was more human than I, and the sea of humanity passing him by, could bear.

Death and The Wire: "The Hunt", "Cleaning Up" and "Sentencing"

After the jolt of cliffhanger ending of "The Cost," comes a different kind of jolt, in which we see characters who have previously been antagonistic to what we might loosely describe as our heroes show different facets.  Landsman, who has heretofore been the source of comedic, profanity and middle-management dickery in roughly equal measure, shows us that a real police lurks beneath the portly exterior, while Rawls steps into action and clears a path for the men under his command to investigate freely.  Much of the episode concerns the investigation of Kima's shooting, and because it's one of their own everyone swings into action with fervor.  This being The Wire, there's no computer enhancement of surveillance footage or pulling DNA off of random objects; the closest we come is Freamon pulling a partial fingerprint of Little Man off of a discarded soda can.

However, this being, again, The Wire, we're shown the pieces of how that can got there.  Little Man and Wee-Bey hoofed it to a pay phone to page Stringer, then got the call back to confirm that the job - to wit, killing Orlando - was done.  Little Man drops the can, which we see him do.  Freamon notices the call because of the taps on the pagers, at which point Prez puzzles out Bey's pager code.  They deduce what we already know, that Bey called Stringer from the pay phone, and at the phone itself Freamon finds the can.  This might seem redundant if The Wire was a mystery show about how crimes are committed, but it's more interested in establishing just how good police work gets done, through information, observation and leg work (and a little bit of luck; if there wasn't a wire tap going on the shooters, that piece of the puzzle probably never gets found).

What it's also saying, if you read between the lines (something the show tries to train people to do), is about priorities.  When you see the collective might of the police department being brought to bear to solve one case, you'll probably find yourself asking, "why don't they just do this all the time?"  It asks us to briefly entertain a world where the police expand this much energy investigating each and every crime.  I don't mean to suggest that homicide detectives only give a shit when it's one of their own; even if I hadn't read Wire head writer David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets I would still find that too cynical a belief.  The book does make a case for the same ironic detachment we've seen from detectives earlier in the series (Bunk's, "Don't even think of comin' up a murder," exhortation to a corpse, the infamous Bunk-and-McNulty Fuck Scene), positing that it would be impossible for one person to care about every single case and not go insane, confronted as they would be by the worst of humanity.  Barriers are necessary for these men and women, and so I think seeing the energy of the investigation into Kima's shooting should not be read as a wouldn't-it-be-nice-if fantasy of how law enforcement should always work - remember, much of the sound and fury of the investigation is largely meaningless, since the case is solved by the information gleaned from the existing wiretap and some very cool, collected police work from Bunk and Freamon - and more as a privileged view of what happens when those barriers come down.

In the aftermath of the shooting, we start to see the Barksdale crew in panic mode.  After Stringer lets Wee-Bey know that "shorty was a cop," Stringer tells Bey, with chilling indifference, "Little Man got to go."  We never see Little Man's death on screen, only hear it referred to.  In a later scene, where the Barksdale's lawyer Maurice Levy (played by Michael Kostroff, an actor who, in what is, amazingly, only the second most baffling Disney-The Wire-related association, played a character on the Disney sitcom for kids Sonny With a Chance - I'll get to the first most baffling when I cover season 5) tells Stringer and Avon that they need to "limit their liability," (i.e. kill anyone who can hurt them), they come around to Nakeisha Lyles, the security guard from the first episode who was intimidated into changing her testimony against D'Angelo.  The reasoning goes that the intimidation might not stick, and that leaving her alive is too much a risk, so Nakeisha, like William Gant, is sentenced to death.  There is no safe place for residents of Baltimore or, by extension, anyone who lives in a city where they might witness something that someone else might not want them to see.  Lyles was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even though she was willing to stick her head in the sand and disavow what she saw, even though she's not a drug user or a drug dealer, but simply a woman living her day-to-day in a bad part of town, she is as doomed as any of the kids in the game.

Which brings us to Wallace.  Brandon's death so shook him that he decided he wanted out, and D'Angelo, whose own awakening to the horrors of his life has been ongoing throughout the season, gets soft-hearted and lets him leave, telling him, "you a smart little motherfucker," and that he should get back in school.  Wallace's heart has never been in his day job, but after some time out of the city with his aunt, he comes back, since it's what he knows.  This might have gone unnoticed if D'Angelo was the only one he had to deal with, but with the Barksdales paranoid about snitches in their organization (because of the effects of the wiretap and a mandate from the Commissioner to send a message by raiding all of the Barksdale's assets, torpedoing the investigation), Wallace's exodus and return look suspicious.  And so, in "Cleaning Up," we have Daniels and McNulty realizing that they haven't been keeping tabs on Wallace and racing to try and track him down, even as Bodie and Poot, Wallace's childhood friends, have been enlisted by Stringer to kill him.  Which they do, in one of the most powerful scenes of the first season, a beautiful piece of writing and acting, from the way Wallace can barely muster up a coherent defense ("Y'all my boys," he says through tears.  "Why it gotta be like this?"), to the way Bodie actis hard up until the moment he has to pull the trigger, then is unable to do so until Poot shouts at him, and the way Poot takes the gun to finish the job.

As with every death on the show, Wallace's death ripples out.  D'Angelo gets sent to New York to pick up drugs, since the police took everything the Barksdales had, and gets caught because of the wiretap.  The cops try to push him, revealing that Wallace has been killed, and at first, D'Angelo is incredulous, but later, in another incredible scene, he blows up at Stringer and Levy.  Things have finally gone too far, and he tries to cut a deal with the police, to tell them everything he knows, which is pretty substantal (this video contains some graphic photos of dead bodies, one of whom, Deirdre, was naked when she died, so don't watch it at work, I guess, although if you work somewhere where you're watching clips from The Wire let me know where it is so I can send them my resume).  Of note in this scene is D'Angelo's lawyer's reaction to the photos McNulty send D'Angelo's way in the course of the confession.  The photos of Nakeisha, Wallace, Deirdre and Brandon are each horrific in their own ways, but taken together they're particularly gruesome.  However, as viewers we may have, by this point, become used to them, deadened as D'Angelo, McNulty, Rhonda and Bunk have been deadened, and it's useful to have the perspective of someone who can give us what we might consider a normal reaction to them.

Among other things, we get the real story of Deirdre Kresson's death.  Wee-Bey was the shooter, not D, meaning that if D'Angelo's braggadocio when he was trying to impress boys in the Pit rang false to you, you were ahead of the game.  D'Angelo agrees to testify if he can go away, if he can get "what Wallace wanted," and start over somewhere.  However, he's visited by his mother, who appeals to his sense of duty to his family, convincing him that without family, he'll have nothing.  And so D'Angelo goes back to letting Levy represent him and goes to jail, this time for the maximum of 20 years.  Stringer, at the hearing, approaches McNulty and says, "Nicely done," just as McNulty did to him back in the first episode.

And so we come to the end of the first season of The Wire.  The last thing we see after a montage showing what the major and minor players are up to is Omar, sticking up some poor schmoe in, presumably, New York, where he's still laying low.   A lot of bodies got dropped throughout the season, but what The Wire tells us is that the toll for each body goes farther than the immediate friends and family.  You can argue that those who investigate those deaths are relatively unscathed, although even beyond the example of Kima's shooting you have multiple scenes of McNulty and Bunk drinking themselves into oblivion, which speaks to the psychological cost they're incurring by working where they work.  Wee-Bey is serving life in prison for the murders he committed, and for murders he might not have (like the Gant shooting, which he tries to admit to in order to potentially spring Bird), and D'Angelo is serving 20, pushed by forces beyond his control into doing something he didn't want to do, and paying a price he doesn't really want to pay.  Bodie and Poot murdered their best friend.  Omar lost a lover, in an existence where he really doesn't have a lot to call his own.  Avon is in jail and Stringer is in charge of a diminished Barksdale organization.  And drugs are still being sold.

Death toll: 12
Death toll per episode: .92

Ahead in season 2: The death toll increases substantially in only the first episode and we come to one of the two deaths that made me start the series.

I'm not touching you

David Brothers over at 4th letter has a post up about the recent Before Watchmen announcements from DC Comics.  For those of you who have no idea what that is, the Cliff Notes version is that in the 80's Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons wrote Watchmen, one of the most influential superhero comics of the last few decades.  I've read and heard commentary about how Watchmen was more like the crest of a wave that was already building, rather than something out of the blue that made everything do a 180, but regardless, it's a hugely important book, one that says something and makes full use of its form (in terms of panel layouts, repeated imagery, and all those other things you can only really get out of a comic book).  Alan Moore has made a career out of writing influential, important comics, and he's been ill-treated by DC, but up until now Watchmen has been left mostly intact.  However, recently DC announced that there would be a number of mini-series coming out delving into the pre-history of Watchmen, written and drawn by creators who are not Moore and Gibbons, and with no input from same.  It's a pretty obvious cash grab by any stretch of the imagination; these issues are being created not because all these creators had a burning desire to tell these stories, but because there's money to be made.

I was going to write about this not because I have something to say about the situation that hasn't been articulated by Brothers (who is a phenomenal writer and has been killing it on creator's right in comics for a long time now), but because it struck at something that's been on the tip of my tongue about corporate power, and really power in general when wielded against the powerless.  It wasn't crystallized until I saw this interview on the subject of Before Watchmen and how it led him to leave/be fired from DC with Chris Roberson, writer of iZombie (which is not about a new, prohibitively dangerous but undeniably stylish Apple product).  From the interview:

...[T]he only defense that’s offered of things like either Before Watchmen or the counter-suit against the Siegels or any number of different things that have been done historically is that the company is operating within the bounds of the law. The company is doing nothing illegal. There’s no defense mounted to the ethics or morality of their actions, and in many cases they will make kind of passing nods to the fact that what they are doing might be interpreted as unethical, but that because it’s not illegal, you know, they’re going to do it.

That's really it, right there.  Hiding behind legality and pretending that makes it right.  This contract says I can fuck this guy over, so I'm going to do it.  Why are you mad?  It says I can do it, so that makes it okay?

It's exactly like the "I'm not touching you," game.  Anyone with a sibling knows this one.  Someone gets right up in your grill, like inches away, and obviously you react badly, because no one likes it when someone's up in their personal space.  You're afraid they're going to headbutt you, or tickle you, or sucker-punch you or get your right in the nuts, but they just wait, like the test of the Emergency Broadcast System.  Finally you snap and tell them to stop, likely getting upset because seriously that shit is annoying, and they smile that beatific smile of the confirmed asshole and say, "I'm not touching you."

Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich is no longer legally allowed to say he's the creator of Ghost Rider and get paid for it, because a judge ruled in Marvel's favor; furthermore, he now owes Marvel $17,000, which he doesn't have because he hasn't been getting paychecks for creating Ghost Rider for decades.  I'm not touching you.

Joanne Siegel, the model for Lois Lane, wife of Jerry Siegel, co-creator, with Joe Schuster, of Superman, died before seeing the rights for Action Comics #1 return rightfully to the Siegel estate, because DC Comics has a steadfast resolve to stick to the letter of the law and not the spirit.  I'm not touching you.

It's perfectly legal for the police to ask you for a strip search no matter what you've been accused of, according to the highest court in the land.  I'm not touching you.

Florida's Stand Your Ground law may exonerate a man who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager.  I'm not touching you.

American corporations have hundreds of billions of dollars in untaxable off-shore accounts, which are "legally out of reach of the Internal Revenue Service."  I'm not touching you.

I'm not touching you.

Lying In the Pursuit of Truth, or The Daisey Dismantling

So A Thing happened recently.  A couple months back, This American Life did an episode about Mike Daisey's 2010 trip to China that inspired his one-man show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, wherein Daisey claimed to have visited a number of factories to speak with workers who worked on the iPad.  The monologue is an account of various worker violations at the Foxconn factory that manufactures iPad parts; Daisey claims to have met significant numbers of underage workers (and implies that their existence at the factory is an open secret with management, who turn a blind eye), spoken with a sizable contingent of workers who are part of an illegal union, seen guards with guns at the gate of the factory, met with workers who have suffered neurological damage from a cleaning agent called n-hexane, and met with a man whose hand was crushed in an industrial accident who had never seen an iPad before being shown one by Daisey.

If you go to the link above, you'll see that they've since aired an episode retracting the story.  The plot began to unravel when Rob Schmitz, a reporter for Marketplace stationed in Shanghai, noticed discrepancies in Daisey's story and decided to track down the translator Daisey worked with (with little difficulty, as he tells it).  Daisey had previously said that he had given his translator, who he calls Cathy in the play, that name as an alias, when her real name was Anna, and that he no longer had up-to-date contact information for her (this is the point, says TAL host Ira Glass, that they should have immediately killed the story).  The reason he did this, as Schmitz lays out, is that Daisey's account of events and the translator's differ wildly.  Daisey, in other words, fabricated many of the factual details of his journey.

Death and The Wire: "Lessons" and "The Cost"

For a number of reasons I struggled getting into this particular entry, partly because I've been distracted by other TV shows (Breaking Bad, Parks and Recreation, and the superlative Community) and partly because the newest addition to the death toll is something of a bit player.  However, I realized eventually that that was the point, and it's actually brilliant.

An unlikely association

So Cookie Monster is a lot like Tyler Durden.

Stay with me.

P IS FOR PUNCHING

I was thinking about Cookie Monster yesterday morning on the way to work, for two reasons.  One is that I was, as usual, grasping at any mental straw I could get my figurative hands on in order to distract myself from the fact that it was 6:23 in the morning and I was on my way to a 6-hour shift in the data entry factory, and the second was that I was trying to forget that the morning before, I had, upon leaving my apartment, neglected to close the door.  For whatever reasons my brain coughed up Cookie Monster, that lovable expression of the id, who I primarily remember from my yearly viewing of Christmas Eve on Sesame Street which, along with Ernest Saves Christmas, was yearly Holiday viewing (meanwhile, I have, to this day, managed to avoid more than a few minutes at a time of A Christmas Story, and in fact had to Google 'christmas ralphie' in order to pull out the title for it.  I have seen It's a Wonderful Life, but it took until my mid-twenties).  For those of you who haven't seen this particular special, Cookie Monster's character arc throughout the special features his repeated attempts to contact Santa Claus, but his hyper-awareness of his own desires and impulses (to wit: he wants cookies) causes him to eat first his pencil and paper, his typewriter, and then the telephone, confusing each of them with the delicious treats he so desperately craves.  The telephone scene is especially heart-wrenching; after staring at the phone, an old-fashioned rotary (the special was created before cellular technology, meaning it now plays as a period piece) he confuses the two ends of the phone for chocolate cupcakes and eats the whole thing.  Unfortunately, just as he finishes his impromptu feeding frenzy, Santa picks up from hold.  The scene is a master class in dramatic irony, as Cookie Monster, horror slowly dawning in both googly eyes, tries in vain to communicate with Santa.  You could cut the pathos with a knife, were you not afraid that he would eat it.  What's worse is that the movie's tag has Susan and Gordon returning to their apartment, only to discover that Cookie Monster has eaten the needles and ornaments from their Christmas tree, having not learned his lesson.  Cookie Monster is the living embodiment of that first tenet of Buddhism, "desire leads to suffering."

I am Jack's addictive personality.

Perhaps that yearly message of suffering is why I took Cookie Monster as a cautionary tale, whose behavior was not something to emulate.  I'm not saying I totally eschew baked goods; I don't even eschew baked goods daily.  But I learned this behavior because sugar and chocolate are delicious, not because I was following the example of a blue monster.  Nevertheless, in an effort that I don't think is entirely misguided Cookie Monster, having declared that he was powerless to control his addiction and accepting change though a higher power (probably Snuffleupagus), legally changed his name to Veggie Monster, explaining that cookies are a "sometime" food.  I can see the logic here even though I recognize that, by becoming Veggie Monster, the blatant absurdity of the character is dampened; most kids are probably not going to be terribly discerning when they see their favorite (although this possibly deserved air quotes since I have no idea how popular Sesame Street is these days) character scarfing down pastries.  Seeing someone who is funny, engaging, appealing, charismatic, or otherwise adjectival behave badly can cause us to link that behavior with the demeanor in our minds, and even if that person suffers negative consequences for the bad behavior we still may not get the message that we shouldn't do what they do.

This brings us to Tyler Durden and why I made the association.  Fight Club (the movie; it's been too long since I read the book for me to be able to confidently speak about it) is a movie where one man, reacting violently against his meaningless rat-race consumerist lifestyle, snaps toward another extreme, that of anarchic nihilism.  Said anarchic nihilism manifests in Tyler Durden, who creates the titular fight clubs and basically sets out to destroy society.  The thing is that Tyler Durden is played by Brad Pitt in probably the best shape of his or anyone else's life, and he just looks so fucking stylish and cool that even if you intellectually understand the meaning of the movie (that neither Ed Norton's nameless protagonist's life nor Durden's are desirable) you'll still likely want to walk out of the movie saying, with some degree of seriousness, that you want to start your own fight club.

I'm not meaning to imply that I'm smarter than anyone else who saw Fight Club; I thought it was cool and bad-ass too and it took me years to come around to the actual, "oh, they're both nuts," thing, but I'm willing to bet that there is a non-negligible population of people who have seen Fight Club who honestly believe the take-away is that you should buy less Ikea furniture, be more manly and solve problems with violence, and I'm 100% certain there's someone who's re-enacted the skin-burning scene.  And I'm not saying that we should never make complicated, layered entertainment with messages you have to dig for, or that we should suger-coat or pull back because someone might misinterpret something or because someone disturbed might watch it and take it the wrong way.  But I don't know how different we, as adults, are from kids who need to be reminded that cookies are a sometime food.  Maybe I'm wrong and people largely got Fight Club, but I find myself feeling like the movie could use a little Veggie Durden.

Sanding the edges: Arkham City

Batman: Arkham City came out for PC a couple days ago.  This is a momentous occasion for me because I love Batman.  He's my favorite superhero, and I'm the kind of person who doesn't really have a favorite anything.  Ask me what my favorite band is and it's going to oscillate between a number of groups or artists, as it would if you asked me about my favorite book or author.  But superheroes?  Batman is number one.  (The number two slot is up for grabs, naturally.)

My favorite part of the game so far is nearly everything about it.  My least favorite part is the brutal, unrelenting misogyny.