Crafty

“In the real world they pay professionals. That’s why we call them pros.”
— Carver

I finally caught the first episode of Season 5 of The Wire.

Now that the show’s focus has widened to include my own trade, its almost Aristotelian* emphasis on virtue and craft seems even more emphatic. This thread runs throughout the series, a constant opposition of those who care about “the job” and those who care about the career.

The “natural po-lice” are craftsmen. They study the craft, learn the craft, and do it well. The central conflicts of the show are not between the police and the criminals, but between those who respect the craft and those who do not — between those who view the standards of the craft as the most important set of rules and those who would substitute some other measure of success.

The dynamic is repeated, echoed and underscored in every setting. The same dividing line between craftsmen and careerists is seen in the school system, on the docks, in city hall and — most explicitly — among the drug dealers and others operating outside the law. Omar Little and Brother Mouzone could hardly be more different, but they find mutual respect due to their shared commitment to their peculiar craft.

Seeing that dividing line and that central conflict portrayed in the newsroom of the show’s semi-fictionalized Baltimore Sun hits closer to home. Clark Johnson’s city editor character, Gus Haynes, is a close cousin to Clarke Peters’ detective Lester Freamon. Haynes doesn’t have time for dollhouse miniatures — his craft is “literature in a hurry” — but he shares the same fierce attention to detail. The proper use of the verb “evacuate” and the question “What kind of people stand around watching a fire?” are, according to the standards of his craft, two parts of the same thing.

I’ve read reviews complaining that Haynes seems unrealistically heroic, or that the newsroom scenes are overly explicit, with the lines of right and wrong drawn in uncharacteristically broad strokes. We’ll see. That can happen in a series’ final season, when the writers sometimes feel a now-or-never pressure that can override a previously subtle touch. But to me the scenes in the newsroom were painfully real. The dialogue rang true with words and phrases I’ve heard — or said myself — dozens of times.

I would say that David Simon’s fictional newsroom looks and feels just like the newsroom I work in, except that I don’t work in a “newsroom” anymore. That word is now forbidden. The country’s largest newspaper chain no longer has “newsrooms” — it has “local information centers.” I’ve only seen one episode of Season 5, but already I find I’d love to see Gus Haynes respond to that kind of corporate edict. So if Haynes is, to some extent, the wish-fulfillment expression of Simon’s impatience with the sorry state of the craft of daily journalism, then I suppose I share his impatience and wish he’d made the point even more explicitly.

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* In Simon’s fully realized fictional world, the careerists reign and the craftsmen are, inexorably, punished. Their adherence to a different, external set of standards cannot be tolerated by the institutions that control them. So maybe this theme in The Wire has less to do with Aristotle than with James Joyce.