My Name is My Name: Four of my Favorite Clips from The Wire

I have a new favorite show. Sadly, (if predictably) I’m late to the party and it was over before I started. But I am willing to careen into hyperbole and deem “The Wire” the best television drama of all time.

Now, it took me a while to warm up to The Wire. After each of the first three discs (4 episodes each) I gave up on it. But critical acclaim and repeated urgings from people I respect made me give it second, third and fourth chances. But by the end of the first season I was all in.



I eventually came to realize that the very thing that made the series difficult to get into was the thing that made it transcendent. It is a character driven exploration of human nature. In order to tell real, sustentative, narratives about textured, carefully crafted, characters that behave consistently and ‘ring true,’ we had to get to know them. But once we knew them, they were worth knowing. I didn’t anxiously await each disc to see how the writers would resolve some contrive plot cliff hanger[1]…I stayed up late watching ‘one more episode’ because I wanted to see who these people became.

And then there was Baltimore. I have said all I have to say about art that has a sense of place, but the wire is the prototype. Baltimore is as textured and gorgeous, despite and because of its grit[2] and decay as Omar, Freamon, Snoop or Stringer Bell[3].

It is impossible to summarize the series in a post. Do I write about the moments that left me stunned and literally breathless?[4] Do I write about the grief I felt as ‘the game’ claimed character after character with brutal capriciousness and with indiscriminate ferocity? Do I describe the pervasive corruption in the police, politics and press that mirror the wickedness of the street which succeeded in skirting a preachy and false moral equivalency while illustrating the pervasive fallenness of our condition despite our circumstances? Do I pick out the hilarious moments like the British actor who plays Jimmy practicing a bad British accent or every single monologue by Sgt Landsman that registered a 7.5 on the rictor scale of crassness but managed to be not only hysterical, but sublime? No idea. So I thought I’d just post a little commentary on four clips that contain four of my favorite quotes.

Quote #1 - Dan, my preaching partner, and I could not be more different musically. I openly mock him for his love of Sheryl Crowe and he has declared that my indifference for James Taylor is my most glaring personality disorder. But we agree that The Wire is probably the best television show ever…which makes it awkward that we both love a show we cannot recommend in the college ministry we serve.[5] Plus, we both love to illustrate our preaching with our favorite art, and can almost always think of a perfect Wire clip that is totally unusable. But this clip I plan to use.[6]



“You want it to be one way…but it’s the other way.”

There may not be a better summary of Genesis 3.[7]

Quote #2 And while we are talking about Marlo…Marlo is probably the most chilling character in the series. He is devastatingly understated…almost emotionless. Which is what made this scene so powerful:



“My name is my name”[8]

That there is Marlo’s longest monologue of the show and the clearest insight we get into who he is.

Quote #3 Then there was Omar. Omar was, rightfully, the show’s most beloved character.[9] Picking a best Omar scene is almost impossible. But this one was great[10]:



“I shot the boy mike mike in his hind parts, that all.”

Quote #4 Finally, for all of great narrative and characters, The Wire was most powerful when it cashed in those narratives and characters to make some of the most powerful and precise observations about human nature I have encountered in contemporary small screen art. This is most compelling when the ‘heroes’ talk about ‘the job.’



““The job will not save you Jimmy.”

[11] ‘Righteousness’ can be as destructive as ‘wickedness.’ ‘The job’ can destroy you as sure as ‘the game.’[12] Tim Keller could have written this scene.

And a few more….



This post was written while listening to the Ivoryline Pandora station.
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[1] Seriously, I loved Lost as much as the next guy, but I often felt manipulated.
[2] I am going to skip the whole ‘white guilt’ discussion. There were aspects of the wire that I appreciated because it drew attention to the ‘corner’ culture that my Buffalo kids interacted with. But The Wire isn’t great because of it provides a voyeuristic expose on urban life…the wire is great because it told stories that rung true and connected with my experiences of beauty and brokenness.
[3] Its funny how everyone else can be identified by a single name, but it takes two for “Russell.”
[4] E.g. the simultaneous tenderness and coldness of the Chris/Snoop executions. Or, one of my favorite scenes has two Baltimore drug dealers listening to Prairie Home Companion on their way to NY and one of them starts fiddling with the radio as the station begins to cut out. He thought it was broken. He’d never been far enough away from his corner to realize that radio stations are not static entities.
[5] I have written repeatedly about my frustration with HBO’s gratuitous exploration of ‘boob shots’ in what is otherwise excellent, nuanced, art. Also, I usually have a very high tolerance for words with social taboo, but I found myself thinking in a new and colorful vocabulary after banging through a couple discs of this show. Don’t get me wrong, the dialogue is amazing and the language is perfectly apt and believable, but there is one famous episode where the ‘dialogue’ consists of 38 F-bombs in a row (in about 3 minutes).
[6] I’m going to use the middle scene in the convenient store.
[7] Which I am preaching in the fall.
[8] One of the things I love about it is how it makes sense of a seemingly insignificant detail from a former season (this was always happening). There is a great scene when Marlo is in a power struggle with Bodie and decides to assimilate rather than destroy him. He walks up to Bodie and gets his name wrong a couple times. Bodie, responds “You know my name.” This all reminds me of the theme of Yahweh’s name and the demons asking Jesus his name and visa versa in the first and second testaments. It is the classic example of an illustration that ‘cuts the wrong way’ but there is a really interesting parallel here regarding name and power.
[9] SPOILER ALERT – IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE WHOLE SERIES DO NOT READ THIS FOOTNOTE– Nothing in this show was more controversial than Omar’s death. And, I felt outrage…because he was, in some ways, the show’s moral center. “A man has got to have a code.” But Omar had to die, and die unceremoniously, and pass without fanfare. That was the point. We loved Omar, because we knew him, but in the end, he was just another body. The rules were that ‘the game’ could and would claim everybody and an honorable life did not assure you an honorable death. Oh, and he was my favorite gay character in any art…ever.
[10] Though almost ruined by the overacting of the defense attorney.
[11] I think Freamon is my favorite character.
[12] There is an echo of this with Daniels, who has his S#$% together more than Jimmy, but still worships ‘the job’. ‘The job does not love you,’ in the mouth of his wife could be a straight up Keller Quote.

The Altruism Paradox: The Surprising Confluence of Christian Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology

Altruism is one of the most interesting evolutionary puzzles. Mild forms of “altruistic” behavior have been observed in several distantly related taxa. Some of this has been cleverly and definitively explained on purely Darwinian principles[1] but some of it still seems a little ‘hand waving-ish’[2]…particularly when the theories are applied to humans acting altruistically towards non-relatives.[3] The problem is that pure altruism is not an “evolutionary stable strategy” (ESS).[4] But one of the solutions that evolutionary biologists and behavioral ecologists have floated sounds shockingly familiar to those of us who have spent much time in the ancient texts that compose the normative documents of Christianity.

The story goes like this. Altruism is better than pure competition on the species scale, but selection does not happen on that scale. Advantageous alleles are selected based on the survival and reproductive benefits to the individual. Therefore, in order for altruism to be selected, the bearers of altruist genes have to benefit, on the whole, more than it costs them.[5] This is evolutionarily unstable because cheaters would accept benefits of the altruists, not take the risks, and eventually ‘win’ pushing the altruistic genes from the population. Therefore, altruism requires some sort of ‘enforcement’ on the ‘population’[6] scale. There are some interesting examples of enforcement in non-human altruists, but the really interesting hypothesis is that humans use ‘guilt’ to enforce the terms of altruism on the tribal scale.

But, even with guilt enforcing altruism, it is not an ESS. Therefore, the successful altruistic strategy is that of the ‘subtle cheater.’ In each generation altruistic systems disproportionately propagate individuals that cheat just enough to have a survival or reproductive advantage but not so much that they incur the penalties of the enforcement mechanism.

This is all pretty plausible (especially for non-human species). But the really interesting insight is how ‘subtle cheating’ works out in human populations. If our enforcement mechanism is built into our psychological and sociological hardware and software (guilt[7]) what does it mean to be a subtle cheater? Who do I need to deceive?

Myself.


And that is the shocking and thrilling detail. If human altruism is self enforced through genetic and environmental imprints on our operating systems, getting away with subtle cheating REQUIRES “self deception.”[8] Human success is largely due to our altruistic tendencies…but only if those tendencies include “subtle cheating” which, given our enforcement mechanisms, require “self deception.”

Um, Really? So, let me get this straight. Humans work best in cooperative community. But there is something fundamental in each one of us that will always try to get more than we give. And in order to live with ourselves and our seemingly universal need to perceive ourselves as “a good person”[9] we all engage in self deception to convince ourselves that the real cheater is ‘the other.’ It seems like I have heard that somewhere before. Allow me to introduce: Christian anthropology.

The fundamental premise of Christian anthropology is that we are valuable beyond measure and designed to reflect the altruistic character of our maker but deeply broken and have an insurmountable entropy towards self interested behavior. We describe this causally with the narrative of the fall. Regardless of whether or not you hypothesize a historical Adam and Eve[10] the fall is the process by which we not only tarnish our immense capacity for beauty and generosity with the fundamental entropy of self interest, such that the former merely punctuates than the latter…but then we lie to ourselves about it.

All of this could lead us to argue (with a smile, and hopefully in a cheeky rather than a douchey way) that Christians are more in touch with reality, as specified by behavioral ecology. The Christian operating system which is self aware of our tendency of self deception and our tendency towards subtle cheating, makes it an evolutionary unstable strategy…but also gives it a huge epistemic advantage.[11] But, if Jesus was to talk in the language of behavioral ecology, I think the sermon on the mount might have included something like:

"Blessed are those who are aware of their self deception, it is the first step in actual self forgetfulness.”

Which is actually just my paraphrase of:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”[12]

This post was prepared while listening to The Sufferer and the Witness by Rise Against

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[1] The classic example is eusocial insects who turned out to be haplodiploid, which makes sisters more closely related than they would be to their own daughters, making celibate cooperative labor the most effective way to get genetic material into future generations.
[2] My personal favorite is the argument that we have the impulse to save a drowning unrelated child because the act of heroism may be observed by one of the victim’s hot relatives who would then have sex with the rescuer providing a mechanism where the risk is overweighed by the genetic payoff in the long term, selecting for risk taking altruists. If you think about the kind of selective pressure it would take to preference that genotype as broadly as it exists in our species…that would take a lot of extremely grateful sisters.
[3] Adoption of unrelated children cannot be seen as anything other than an ‘evolutionary trap.’
[4] An ESS is a strategy that is resistant to ‘invaders’ or ‘cheaters’. For example, it was hypothesized that the huge, seasonal gatherings of birds, like those that soil our cars at the U-mall or the Arc parking lot – were a type of self-regulating behavior. The birds were taking a ‘census’ of sorts and then would regulate the number of eggs they laid accordingly in order self-regulate and keep the population size proportional to the resources (under the carrying capacity). This has been widely discredited, however, as evolutionarily unstable…because cheaters would eventually take over. If everyone else is self regulating, a few birds that do not would compose a disproportionate portion of each successive cohort, until they quickly took over. Dawkins calls this “subversion from within.” Therefore, most ‘self regulation’ hypotheses have been jettisoned for resource or predator regulation.
[5] i.e. Alturism must be fundamentally self interested.
[6] Tribal.
[7] Note: Police do not count as enforcing altruism. They reduce the ferocity of our competition but do not require cooperation. You could make a case that liberal fiscal policy enforces altruism…but I will argue in a couple of posts that this is simply an outworking of guilt.
[8] All of the phrases I am using in quotes are not my own reading of this…they are the actual language of the theory from my coursework on behavioral ecology at UC Davis…from phenomenal Prof Sih who is one of the rare professors who is uncommonly brilliant AND a thrilling lecturer.
[9] I totally buy the idea as guilt as an altruism enforcing mechanism. There is nothing as ubiquitous as the idea that ‘I am a good person.’ After Imus was publically called out about his comments on the Rutgers woman’s basket ball team he said “I am a good person who did a bad thing.” After Jim Belushi died, someone said “He was a good man and a bad boy.” We all have this compelling need to self perceive as ‘basically a good person.’ And may be no idea that people will fight harder for despite mounting evidence to the contrary…regardless how much violence we have to do to the word ‘good’ or even ‘person.’ Before I was a Christian, there was nothing about the Christian worldview I found more repulsive than the assertion that I was not a good person. Now there is no insight I find more pragmatically helpful.
[10] I do (as the Homo Sapien ancestors that were contemporary with Australopithecine), but I don’t think you have to. And it is mostly a non-issue because it is non-falsifiable. But what is clear about the first three chapters of Genesis is that it is not the whole story. It has a fundamental pedagogical agenda. So I am more than happy to allow the scientific process to fill in the estimable gaps. Regardless of whether the fall happened in a cosmic moment (which I tend to believe) or over evolutionary time, it is the process by which humans, a special creation in the image of God, traded that image for an evolutionarily stable strategy. (Footnote to the footnote: I am working on a post about the Battle Star Galactica finale…if that seems like a non sequiter – you didn’t see it).
[11]Please note: I am not now, nor have I ever argued that Christians are, therefore, ‘better’ than those who do not go in for the Christian narrative. In fact I have argued often (here and here) that the logic of the Christian story gives the counter-intuitive result that Christians are, on the whole, less moral than their non-Christian neighbors…and that this is exactly what you would expect if it was true.
[12] Matthew 5:3