When a puppy stops peeing on your carpet, it’s important to give him lots of praise and encouragement. So when the New York and LA Times gets a story right, it’s important to do the same.

I’m talking about their reviews of HBO’s The Wire, which starts its forth season tonight. If you’ve missed the first three seasons, you’ve missed some of America’s most important and relevant television in decades. No other crime drama captures the anguish and frustration of good people trying to make things better in a society twisted by politicians, unions, drugs, corruption, and crime. The Wire tells this story with honest clarity that Hollywood liberals are too self-conscious to present.

As the show’s creator, David Simon, explains, “Cop shows in particular have no interest in it because it screws with the basic motif of catching the bad guy… In police procedurals, the people being pursued… are really there to validate the morality and the superiority and the intellect and the heroism of the authorities.”

Simon describes the frustration felt by most cops and public school teachers I’ve known, that in “post-modern America, institutions that are ostensibly there to serve people and are ostensibly there for people to serve, end up betraying people on a fundamental level.” This is probably why highly motivated and promising new teachers quit within their first five years, and why cops like me cannot wait to abandon the profession we love.

Writer and producer Edward Burns is a former Baltimore homicide detective who taught social studies in a middle school for seven years after leaving the police department. Out of the 200 students Burns instructed in his first year, 13 had been shot — two of them twice.

“I was in the infantry in Vietnam,” he recounted. “I chased escapees and murderers and rapists. I was in homicide. There’s nothing like walking into a middle school in a setting like Baltimore.”

The forth season of The Wire delves into the realities of our disastrous public school monopolies. Anyone who cares about our children, inner cities, and America’s future must see this series. And if Simon hits a home run the way he did in the first three years, viewers with the courage to watch will understand why our public schools cannot be fixed, why our children need charters and vouchers to escape, and why Hollywood liberals, the unions, and the politicians they buy refuse to tell this story.

Read Matea Gold’s reviewHERE
& Virginia Heffernan’s review HERE

1. I’d like to invite you to have a look at Fear And Loathing - The Gonzo Papers. Interested in a link exchange if you would like to engage.

   I am participating in the 2,996 project…believing it is more important to remember the people than to mark the event. It is, though, very interesting how the Clintonians are trying to stop The Path to 9/11. I have a feeling it is because they truly screwed the pooch.

   I look foward to your visit and any commentns you may have to share. Please have a look at my July 4th commentary.

   Comment by Kilroy_60 — September 9, 2006 @ 7:51 pm