At the end of a long day scouting locations for his new TV miniseries, David Simon is sitting in his Upper West Side office in New York describing the type of person who needn’t bother tuning in to his new show. He’s speaking as a TV writer but also as a citizen angered by a political system that he thinks fails many of his fellow countrymen.
“People who think we’re being well governed at the moment… well, there’s no reason for them to watch. People who look at the inertia of Washington, at the partisanship, at the divisive and polarised discourse... people who think that’s the way to build a just society, well, don’t watch the show, because I got nothin’ for you.”
If, on the other hand, “You’re starting to believe that even the vernacular we’re using to argue about solutions to problems is dysfunctional, watch this show because I think it’s a perfect metaphor for what the American government is no longer capable of doing – addressing problems in a utilitarian fashion for the good of most people. American politics has left the room when it comes to finding solutions for our problems.”
Show Me a Hero, which will appear on screens late next year or in spring 2016, is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by formerNew York Times writer Lisa Belkin. It marks the time, says Simon, when American politics left the room.
The 1999 book’s subtitle, “a tale of murder, suicide, race and redemption” hints at the drama involved. Belkin documents the story through a series of interviews with many of the principals involved. It’s a tale of political and personal destruction that convulsed Yonkers, a city of 200,000 people just 40 minutes’ drive north of Manhattan. At its heart was a row about public housing for low-income residents being built in a part of Yonkers almost exclusively reserved for the wealthy.
Show Me a Hero shows how the fallout engulfed the New York body politic and ultimately brought unwanted national attention to Yonkers. When the dispute was finally settled the New York Times noted how the bitter row “had opened an ugly chapter in the city’s history, tearing apart neighbourhoods, building and destroying political careers and unleashing a heated court battle that nearly drove Yonkers to bankruptcy”.
On a bright, sunny morning last week the Schlobohm housing project, in west Yonkers, the largest low-income public housing site in the city and one of the principal locations for Show Me a Hero, is quiet. Except, that is, for Simon, his director Paul Haggis and other crew members who are here to scrutinise backgrounds, visualise scenes and figure out what angle offers the best view of the Hudson river in the near distance. Schlobohm is one of half a dozen stops they will make as they crisscross the city to finalise locations before four months of filming, which starts this week.
As the crew sweeps through a communal space that doubles as a car park, they pass by a mural. Painted on the side of a low wall that circles the area are five words in large, childlike lettering. They add colour to an urban landscape dominated by the red brick of the low- and high-rises. Spaced about a metre apart, they read “Unity”, “Harmony”, “Peace”, “Pride”, “Safe”.
But when the FBI’s New York field office writes about Schlobohm, it uses a different set of words. One of the most recent entries on its website is headed: “Three charged in connection with December 2013 homicide”. It lays bare the cycle of violence that is visited on places such as this when it notes that the arrest of two dozen gang members two years before had paved the way for a rival to thrive in their absence.
“In late June and early July 2012, federal authorities arrested 20 members of the Strip Boyz on charges of narcotics distribution and/or firearm offences… the arrests of the Strip Boyz left GMF [rival gang the Grimy Motherfuckers] dominant in the Schlobohm housing project.”
If the FBI’s reports were reduced to five words they might read “Narcotics”, “Gangs”, “Murder”, “Shooting”, and “Trafficking”.
The story of Schlobohm to be told by David Simon starts in 1980, when the local Yonkers branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), backed by the US justice department, sued the city of Yonkers. The lawsuit alleged that the city’s housing and school policies had, over a period of 40 years, purposely segregated black and Hispanic residents from its more affluent white neighbours. It claimed that Yonkers deliberately placed its poorer (non-white) residents in the west of the city, while the east side remained predominantly white.
In 1985, US federal court judge Leonard Sand ruled in favour of the NAACP and instructed Yonkers to build 200 units of public housing on the east side. That’s when the trouble started.
The six-part miniseries will follow what happened from 1987 to 1994 as local residents and politicians defied the court order in a series of increasingly vocal and public demonstrations that brought the issues of race, housing and deprivation in Yonkers on to the national agenda.
An ABC news report broadcast at the time gives a glimpse of how divisive the dispute was. It features one of the residents at a Save Yonkers meeting (a man named Jack Tracy) making his position clear: “I lived with blacks, I delivered newspapers to blacks, but I can’t live next to what the government has in these projects. If the government wants to put criminals and dope-pushers in the projects I can’t live next to them. The federal judge can find me guilty, the supreme court can find me guilty… but if they think they’re going to integrate with Jack Tracy and his family, they’re going to have to build projects 60 miles north, 80 miles north, they can build them in Maine or wherever they want but I will not live next to a project. And if it means going to Canada, or back to Ireland that is what I will do. That ain’t why I am living in this country.”
In the fury and noise that engulfed Yonkers’s east side, what Jack Tracy and others failed to hear was that the judge’s proposal was not for old style “projects” (ie large-scale, densely populated, high-rise public housing) but for 200 two-storey houses to be distributed in small groups across the east side.
Later in the morning, after we have left Schlobohm and passed on to the noticeably more affluent (and white) east side of Yonkers, Simon and his crew stop at another location. Simon points to a small row of innocuous two-storey houses on this pleasant, leafy street. He says: “Look. That’s them, those are some of the houses. That’s what Yonkers tore itself apart over. And you wouldn’t even know they were public housing.”
What attracted Simon to this story was not the issues of housing or race or deprivation but something more fundamental – the dysfunction of the American political system. The story, Simon says, is tailor-made for showing how US politics now runs on fear and money, two forces that are slowly corroding American society.
“What intrigued me about the story was that it’s an almost perfectly allegorical argument about how our political processes are no longer equipped to recognise or solve problems. You have this mid-size American city, Yonkers, that didn’t have terrifying racial dynamics before the controversy. It had problems like any city but there was no reason that fear should be such an effective currency in the political process. And yet fear and money are the only currencies in the American political process that get their due any more. Nothing makes people more stupid and foolish than money and fear.”
The effect was to split the city in half. The east side set about protecting the value of its homes, livelihoods, children and way of life from the perceived threat from the west side. Looking now at the small clusters of neat, low-rise homes that were eventually built on the east side, its difficult to understand why the fury reached such a pitch.
For Simon, the answer is clear. “Politicians can gain so much by invoking fear and because money is at the core of that fear and the people who are the most frightened were looking towards their real-estate values, the values of their neighbourhoods and what they might personally lose if the neighbourhood went south. Money and fear paralysed Yonkers politically, and caused untold damage to the city’s reputation.”
For Simon, the story of Yonkers is telling for another reason – its timing marks the period in American history when a consensus fractured. The social compact between capital and labour was starting to break. From the 1980s onwards capital won virtually all of its battles with the labour unions in America.
This is a point forcefully made by ex-Clinton labour secretary Robert Reich in his recent film, Inequality for All. He dates the busting of the labour unions and the rupture of the social compact to Ronald Reagan’s firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981. From then on, the idea that a market-driven society would mutually benefit those who held the capital and those who provided the labour was no longer in place, he says. For Simon, this is the point at which the shared community of interests that walked side by side as the American economy surged after the second world war came apart. The collective will that bound together communities, cities and, ultimately, America started to erode.
“What was required in Yonkers was to ask: ‘Are we all in this together or are we not all in this together?’ Is there a society or is there no society, because if there is no society, well, that’s the approach that says ‘Fuck ’em, I got mine’. And Yonkers coincides with the rise of ‘Fuck ’em I got mine’ in America.
“That’s the notion that the markets will solve everything. Leave me alone. I want maximum liberty, I want maximum freedom. Those words have such power in America. On the other hand ‘responsibility’ or ‘society’ or ‘community’ are words that are increasingly held in disfavour in the United States. And that’s a recipe for cooking up a second-rate society, one that does not engage with the notion of collective responsibility. We’re only as good a society as how we treat those who are most vulnerable and nobody’s more vulnerable than our poor. To be poor is not a crime, except in America.”
These are not new themes in Simon’s work. The Wire was a grand tour of the institutions that were failing Americans, from politics to journalism, and from education to the criminal justice system. It was also an indictment of how capital had decisively won its war against American labour, with enduring consequences for America’s working class. This is the issue that most exercises Simon.
In his long and brilliant introductory essay to the 2009 book The Wire: Truth Be Told (a collection of essays by people involved in the making of the series), Simon wrote: “The Wire depicts a world in which capital has triumphed completely, labour has been marginalised and moneyed interests have purchased enough political infrastructure to prevent reform. It is a world in which the rules and values of the free market and maximised profit have been mistaken for a social framework, a world where institutions themselves are paramount and everyday human beings matter less.
“Unemployed and under-employed, idle at a west Baltimore soup kitchen or dead-ended at some strip-mall cash register – these are the excess Americans. The economy staggers along without them, and without anyone in this society truly or sincerely regarding their desperation. Ex-steelworkers and ex-longshoremen, street dealers and street addicts, and an army of young men hired to chase and jail the dealers and addicts, whores and johns and men to run the whores and coerce the johns – and all of them unnecessary and apart from the new millennium economic model that long ago declared them irrelevant.
“This is the world of The Wire, the America left behind.”
But Simon acknowledges that this wider message may have been lost on some of those who watched the highly acclaimed series, set among the politicians, police, press and drug dealers of Baltimore.
“Sure, there’s people who watch The Wire and go ‘Man I love all these fuckin’ characters but I hate it when the politics comes on… I just want to see the badasses shoot each other.’ And it’s like yeah, well, OK, I get it, you know, I get it, but I didn’t leave journalism to write fuckin’ television for you because that’s just horrific.”
He expresses relief, and some amusement, that the cable channel HBO continues to commission his work in spite of the relatively low ratings his TV work attracts (The Wire, belatedly through word of mouth, drew in a healthy audience. Subsequent series, though highly acclaimed, includingGeneration Kill and Treme, fared less well).
He jokes about “getting a 2% share” of audience, but appears untroubled about how long his shelf life as a TV writer might be. “You got to commit to something. If you’re a writer you got to write something. You might as well believe in it.”
HBO seems to believe in it too. That much is clear the next day when Simon and co-writer Bill Zorzi (who has been working on Show Me a Hero, on and off, for 10 years) are the star attractions at a start of production meeting in HBO’s Manhattan headquarters. There are close to 50 people here, and another 10 are looped in on a screen from LA. Haggis jokes that “he’s never seen this many people in a room before”.
Before Simon addresses the room, senior HBO executive Kary Antholis steps forward to speak. One of the executives closest to Simon’s projects, he is wholehearted in his praise. “This project is among the most meaningful that David has ever done. In its reflections on race, politics and community, I think it will be a powerful story and will make an important contrib
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