waffleghost

One of the lingering doubts that has scarily amplified into paranoia since I left graduate school is that overintellectualizing something like the Wire somehow absolves its viewer of the grittily, non-Ivory-Tower responsibility of actually addressing social and economic inequities. Maybe I’m just too crotchety and embittered to separate “structural critique” from certain kinds of onanism. Now, I’ve got no beef with Middlebury students being required to watch the entire series and write papers about media and the legacy of Robert Moses and Foucauldian structures and down-low culture. Probably while drinking and/or high, or drinking maple syrup straight from the flask, which is what I hear they do up in Vermont to pass the winters.

But coupling the show with, say, a service learning component where students spent time volunteering in prisons, or even filing paperwork for rehab facilities, would probably be a better idea. Otherwise you run the risk of shallow engagement with the real conditions the show dances around, or (even worse) sentimentalizing and glamorizing those conditions. Or, even EVEN worse, turning “watching The Wire” as a passkey to a certain kind of hipster authenticity and pseudo-intellectualism and “it’s cool, because I have a couple friends who are black, and we hang out”-ism. Although Norman Mailer can articulate what I’m talking about better than I can.

Don’t get your education second-hand.

youmightfindyourself:

Respecting the Middle: The Wire’s Omar Little as Neoliberal Subjectivity