Trapped in TV Land

Last week, we mentioned the attack on the Constitution and the founding fathers by Time-Warner-CNN-HBO spokesman David Simon, the producer of The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street, and quoted from the recent (and quite enjoyable) book on cable TV’s dark dramas, Difficult Men, whose author noted that for Simon, “The big fish, though, was nothing less than a capitalist system that [Simon and Ed Burns, his co-writer] had begun to see as fundamentally doomed. (If Simon was a dyed-in-the-wool lefty, Burns practically qualified as Zapatista; by ex-cop standards, he might as well have been Trotsky himself.)”

Today at PJM, Andrew Klavan also delves into “The Unbearable Blindness of David Simon:”

But here’s what bugs me. The Wire (which is, to some extent, based on the year Simon spent with the Baltimore Homicide Squad while researching Homicide) takes place in a city without conservatives, even without Republicans. There has not been a Republican mayor of Baltimore since 1967. And much of the show’s genius lies in its depiction of the brutalized life of black people in the city’s ghetto.

So we have a writer who has seen for himself, and who has shown us, the effects of Democrat governance on a city, the dehumanization of the poor that is the direct result of leftism and the corruption that inevitably springs from it. And yet Simon blames conservatives!

I understand why too, as I’ll explain on the next page.

Read the whole thing, which instantly reminded me of this passage from the 1999 book by Peter Hitchens (the late Christopher Hitchens’ conservative brother), The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana:

Beyond the Fringe, Forty Years On and TW3 [That Was The Week That Was] created a tradition of ‘anti-establishment’ comedy which continued long after its roots were forgotten. There may still have been an ‘establishment’ of snobbery, church, monarchy, clubland and old-school-tie links in 1961. There was no such thing ten years later, but it suited the comics and all reformers to pretend that there was and to continue to attack this mythical thing. After all, if there was no snobbery, no crusty old aristocrats and cobwebbed judges, what was the moral justification for all this change, change which benefitted the reformers personally by making them rich, famous, and influential?

Choose your nation; its leftwing is permanently trapped in the past, constantly shadowboxing against a conservative culture it long since decimated, and too terrified to look into the mirror to see its own flaws, which are myriad, growing, and only going to get worse.

(Of course, those same leftists occasionally wax nostalgic for the joys of the past, never bothering to note who it was who tore down that earlier culture in the first place, as we explored last year in “The Paradox of the Nostalgic Progressive.”)

Related: Mark Steyn and England’s Nick Cohen on “The Silence of the Hams,” when it comes time for otherwise in-your-face “transgressive” media “Progressives” to speak truth to Islam.