Back down in the hole

Back to The Wire, and the latest incarnation of the bluesy theme song, with its warning about how you’ve got to keep the devil down in the hole. Impossible task, that. This is a show about working life, and one of the things it makes you realise is just how crap being a drug dealer is; the boredom, the violence, the bullying bosses, the lack of legal protection, the risk of imprisonment, injury and death. An above-board office job may have its Bartleby moments, but you’re unlikely to end up assassinated by staple-gun and covered in quicklime.

The Wire also makes you realise – not that you doubted it, but you prefer not to think about it – how entrenched the drugs industry is, and that ending the prohibition on the end product, at least at a local level, might be the best way to limit its capacity for damage. The other thing it makes you think is: what a dump. The shittiness of the drugs districts is matched only by the inimitable gun-totin’ languor of the way the characters express themselves.

This was an expert introductory episode to season four, with plenty of deft humour: the piss-bomb vengeance attack that backfires, happy Jimmy McNulty nicking a spare folder to take home for the kids, sweaty Carcetti needing to keep a spare suit in the car and enduring the awfulness of being obliged to solicit funds for himself while shut up in a small room with sick yellow wallpaper, a titty-girl poster and a darts board.

There were also two great inappropriate training montages. Prez sat in a room full of teachers who were exhorted to think of themselves as lovable when they were about to face Armageddon. Meanwhile, Sydnor, McNulty et al were urged to be aware of soft targets for terrorists, and laughed at the counter-suggestion that the work of terrorists would probably pass unnoticed, and that the terrorists wouldn’t stand a chance anyway.

Probably most of the US population has no idea what it might be like in the inner cities where street corners are retail outlets to be fought over, and don’t want to know, any more than Daily Mail-reading Middle England really wants to have to think about Peckham, Brixton and other boroughs where people get stabbed or shot on a regular basis, other than to allocate blame and condemn the outcomes. This sort of moralising laissez-faire ensures that it’s business as usual; misery for the punters and pushers and vast, invisible profits for the untouchable few. Sounds familiar, don’t it? And nothing’s quite as dangerous as people who have nothing but their status to lose.