David Simon on America as a Horror Show
BILL MOYERS: Every president from Kennedy to Obama has insisted that the rising tide will lift all boats, but it hasn't happened.
DAVID SIMON: Yeah, I think supply-side economics has been shown to be bankrupt as an intellectual concept. It's not only unproved, the opposite has occurred if you're looking at the divergence in the economic health of middle class families or the working class, what's left of the working class --certainly the underclass -- and you're looking at where the wealth of the country is going and how fast. We are becoming two Americas in every fundamental sense.
BILL MOYERS: So you weren't using hyperbole in Australia? That wasn't just to try to drive a point home when you talked about--
DAVID SIMON: No.
BILL MOYERS: --two Americas and the people in one of those Americas has been “utterly divorced from the American experience” that you, David Simon--
DAVID SIMON: You know, listen, a lot of this falls on people of color because, you know, they're the last in through the door in the economic ladder. And if you look at the city where I live and you look at Baltimore, Maryland, half of the adult male African American residents have no work. That's not an economic system that is having a bad go of it, that's something that doesn't actually work.
That's an economic system that is throwing away and doesn't need 10 to 15 percent of its population.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, without work they have no value, no worth to society?
DAVID SIMON: It's existential. And--
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
DAVID SIMON: Work is meaning for all of us. And it's relevance and it's our place in society--is dictated to us by what we contribute and what we're paid to do. And if part of America is validated to the extent that they are predominant in all of the luxury that the country can afford and part of the country is utterly irrelevant to the economic structure, you know, those factories are all gone. We don't need those people anymore. And we've let them know.
And you know, the only factory in my city, in west Baltimore or in east Baltimore that was working, that was viable was the drug corner. And that worked like a charm. And ultimately what I look at is the hyperbole by which we say we're including everybody while we're tossing people out of the boat left and right.
We've changed and we've become contemptuous of the idea that we are all in this together. This is about sharing and about, you know, when you say sharing there's a percentage of the population (and it's the moneyed percent of our population), that hears socialism or communism or any of the other -isms they want to put on it. But ultimately we are all part of the same society. And it's either going to be a mediocre society that, you know, abuses people or it's not.
BILL MOYERS: In your speech you said that knowing that they're worthless, these people, worthless, valueless because they have no economic means of support and nothing economically--
DAVID SIMON: They're not relevant.
BILL MOYERS: They're not relevant. But they have to endure as you said. And is that the horror show, the fact that they know they're not needed and they have to go on anyway?
DAVID SIMON: And that once they're in that situation, they're not only marginalized, they're abused. I mean, we are the country that jails more of our population than any other state on the globe. More than totalitarian states we put people in prison. We've managed to monetize these irrelevant people in a way that allows some of us to get rich.
Now, we're all paying for it as taxpayers for having this level of incarceration in American society which is unheard of in the world. But we let some people, you know, get a profit off of it. The monetization of human beings like that, you know, anybody tells you that the markets will solve everything, the libertarian ideal.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37524.htm
