The Wire: 10 years gone, the lessons still fit
HBO
The Wire, Season 2
Season 2 really does get dogged on by viewers with little taste for a slow methodical pacing. Once all five seasons unfolded, the importance of Season 2 becomes magnified.
Most everything in America comes through a port of entry or moves by way of commercial trucking vehicle. Illicit contraband like drugs or illegal immigrant sex trade slaves is no different. Season 2 mapped the scale, the reach and the inevitability for all — not just the addicts formerly scoffed at before the opiate crisis hit white America. Season 2 shows the upper management of supply and the lowest of demand.
Spiros and the Greek knew their hustle, their market, and their mark. Move all over, never leaving a trial. Get the drugs in, shuffle some dodgy paperwork, cash in when the cops catch wind. Offer a struggling man with a passion more money than he is ever seen, enough to maybe save his way of life. Who could say no?
Season 2 found Avon Barksdale in prison running the same hustle, looking for the same angles. Stringer is free, focused on being strictly business. While Avon does not realize he can come out of prison and live nice without the Game, Stringer failed to realize he couldn’t buy himself out of what brought him to be a man of means and property. Avon wanted his corners. Stringer wanted to move off.
Avon’s prison stint seemed to be a nice strategy boot camp, a place to hone some skills and pocket some favors. He was gaining even more street cred running a prison. Ziggy’s future prison sentence is probably not going so well. I doubt he is allowed on the same fence as WeeBay or Chris Partlow, though up on the same charges from the same network of the Game. It’s all the Game.
Burrell and Rawls are still trying to consolidate power and keep the subordinates in line. They, like Stringer, focus only on this year’s stats. Really, who cares about a two-year-old murder that doesn’t count for this year’s pay raise? Why take on a whodunnit murder when it can be passed off on the next guy’s loss column. Why now should anyone worry about “Where’s Wallace?” Why should McNulty care about a prison suicide stat?
The boiling fury of the steve-doers and other working stiff blue collar American tradesman and even some union lifers are the ammo of modern political battlegrounds. Frank felt betrayed by the system. It’s only about money, not men and their lives. America today has many Frank Sobotka’s.
The new modern port with all the new computer and automation technology was the death knell. Frank Sobotka was paying politicians to stem the inevitable tide. The industry was changing. The money was following the profits of change. Frank just threw bad money after bad, until his tide came in.
The politicians dealt with the problem only when their bag man forgot to employ a bag man. The unions deal with the problems creatively and will never snitch if things go south. The drug dealers will save their own hide.
It is arguable that Omar showed strong moral foundations despite his occupation. This code had helped insulate him from being caught in a setup. Season 2 showed the great and honorable Working Man had the most heart and belief in their endeavors, in their fellow man in the same struggle.
What honor in that they were the only group with no one to turn on fellow workers. However, they’d been set up as the patsy holding the empty bag; they were getting screwed over. Maybe the Omar’s of the world were on to something and could still be held honorable, if not eventually accountable.