‘Show Me a Hero’: David Simon Is Still Mad as Hell
Of all those who revolutionized TV in the last 20 years, David Simon was always the most political and least commercial. From The Wire to Generation Kill and Treme, he’s consistently dived into the country’s thorniest topics: the Drug War, inner city public schools, the invasion of Iraq, New Orleans post-Katrina. In his new HBO project, Show Me a Hero, he takes on his least likely subject for nightly entertainment yet: public housing. A true story set in Yonkers in the late Eighties/early Nineties, the six-episode miniseries stars Oscar Isaac (giving a young-Pacino level performance) as Nick Wasicsko, the youngest mayor in America at the time. He finds himself confronting an enraged constituency after a Federal court orders 200 units of affordable housing — all of which is set to be built in the city’s lily-white neighborhoods. What unfolds is an American tragedy in six acts.
What initially drew you to the material?
Fifteen years ago, I read the book by Lisa Belkin. I was living in Baltimore, a city that had a similar fundamental dynamic of racial inequality, and we were contending with the same arguments and the manner in which the government fails to deal with it. There’s an abject lesson in the journey of Nick Wasicsko, a way of seeing just what we avoid when we govern ourselves in America. While he wasn’t a perfect creature in any sense, he had a moment where he actually attended to this pathology, which is otherwise left unaddressed.
And they blew him up, they just blew him up. In what’s supposedly a pluralistic society, there was so much trauma over 200 units of public housing in a city of 200,000 people. Can you imagine the trauma if America really took to addressing the schism between the separate societies that we’ve built. What if we really tried to incorporate economically, socially and politically, the non-white population?
Why do you think we don’t?
I don’t mean to blame just the political system, because clearly leading on the issue of race politically is something of a third rail — but we’re the fucking electricity running through the rail. It’s us. It’s a significant plurality of Americans who would prefer to have these two Americas, that are growing much too distinct and separated.
Isn’t there a reckoning though? The front page of the New York Times say race relations are worse than ever, and that’s under a black president.
All due respect to Barack Obama, or anyone that’s in public office. On some level, I think that there are two currencies that operate in politics to a far more profound effect than goodwill or sentiment. Those things are money and fear. That shit is what pays and punishes politicians, money and fear.
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