Homicide, The Book

Having watched and rewatched The Wire enough times it has become a sort of Rocky Horror Show experience, I felt I had to move on, so I read David Simon's Homicide, which, it turns out has many of the anecdotes which appear in the series, including that most wonderful of stories which Bunk tells about dispatching the mouse with his service revolver and leaving the dead mouse right there,  "As a warning to the others."

What really struck me was all the dust jacket testimonials from a variety of writers and social commentators, all of whom talked about the book as if it were a police procedural, a crime book, which, I suppose, narrowly viewed, it is. But that is like saying Oliver Twist is about child labor or Gone with the Wind is about ladies in hoop skirts.  It diminishes a great, sweeping social portrait with a keyhole view.

There is one lovely, devastating passage about Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, in which murder victims and paupers are buried, and where a detective Simon has followed vainly tries to exhume a body, which has been lost because it has not been buried in the plot it has been assigned and it turns out, probably very few bodies are buried where they are supposed to be buried, but there are few headstones and who cares?  And Simon observes these are people who nobody cared about in life and nobody cares about in death. His portrait of that muddy plot of earth as more than a metaphor but a concrete example of the heartlessness of life among the underclass in Baltimore makes Dickens look like Mary Poppins.

There is an echo of this in the Second Season of The Wire when Beadie Russell first becomes interested in Jimmy McNulty because it bothers him that the fourteen Jane Does found suffocated in a container ship box will wind up in the paupers' field, buried without a headstone, without anyone caring or knowing specifically where. McNulty, we know by now cares about things like this, and he is different from other police and government administrators and lawyers in that things like this still bother him.

And so is David Simon different in the same way.

I have never met the man, and likely never will. But I like him for what bothers him.

I also watched, recently, the movie Easy Rider another portrait of America, which in its own way, as a work of fiction is just as bleak a picture of America.  It may be fiction, but it looked a lot like the America I saw growing up in the South and traveling  in the West. And it evoked a lot of memories about hippiedom during the late 60's, which did not look like fiction to me.

The wonder is, looking at America through these prisms, anyone would ever want to immigrate here.

Maybe this is the answer to our border control problems: We send DVDs of Easy Rider to every Mexican and we try to get Homicide into the hands of Chinese, European and South American students

Or maybe we just load up planeloads of potential illegals and drop them off in Detroit, and say, "You can stay, but we'll be back in a week, just in case you change your mind." Those who stay, who remain strewn about, well they can be a warning to others.

Hey, I'm trying to be creative here.