Landsman's Eulogy and the Ethic of Responsibility
After the police lights red on sweaty faces; after the frosty silence on the playground; after the agony in boarded-up places; the whistling and the crying; prison and state house and reverberation – there’s Jimmy McNulty, old McNutty, laid up on the felt.
David Simon has done the police in different voices for five seasons, during which time we've gotten to see a lot weigh on Jimmy. Now it’s the avoirdupois of Sgt. Jay Landsman that’s hanging over him, weighing his sins and his virtues.
"He was the black sheep, the permanent pariah. He asked no quarter of the bosses and none was given. He learned no lessons; he acknowledged no mistakes; he was as stubborn a Mick as ever stumbled out of the Northeast parish to take up a patrolman's shield. He brooked no authority. He did what he wanted to do and he said what he wanted to say, and in the end, he gave you the clearances. He was natural police. Yes, he was. And I don't say that about many people, even when they're here on the felt. I don't give that one up unless it happens to be true. Natchrell po – leece.”
We've all appreciated how much David Simon wants to say to us in The Wire, and how much discipline he generally shows in not beating us over the head with it (ahem, latter-day Aaron Sorkin). We should especially appreciate what he seems to say about responsibility.
Simon cares about responsibility. When he spoke to the assembled graduates of his high school alma mater this past June, the money paragraph was this (it’s long, so I'm tempted to throw in some ellipses on general principle, but I doubt I've earned the right. So screw it.):
"I know that man’s natural state is disorder, that we go day to day, year to year, pretending to a plan, and charting our progress, but in the end, we can only control so much of our lives, much less the world around us. I know that most, but not all of us, want the same things for ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods, our world – and by and large those things are worth a fight. I know that luck matters and circumstance matters; hard work and endurance are required, but they guarantee absolutely nothing. I know the world isn’t close to fair enough to those who labor in it. And I know one thing above all. And it’s this: You are responsible. For everything. For yourselves, for the people you know and love – of course. That’s the easy part. But it gets harder in that you are responsible for the folks you don’t know and love, for people you have never met, for people who don’t know and don’t love you. We are all responsible. All of us. For our community. For our society. For our country. For our world. And that isn’t platitude. Because to me, that responsibility is terrifying, it’s epic, it’s almost too big for the ordinary human heart to bear."
I think most of us are basically with Simon at least this far – responsibility’s kind of a bitch, even if it’s also what imbues our lives with sine quibus non like meaning and dignity.
That's a nice Important Truth to express to the assembled graduates of Bethesda-Chevy Chase (a leafy, hyphenated, wrought-iron gate-enclosed ranking-topper), but where's the local intersection between responsibility and Bodymore, Murdaland? A couple things.
First, McNulty as the “permanent pariah” strikes me because Simon is, above all else, a journalist (most of us have made the now-hackneyed argument, somewhere or other, that The Wire is just the finest long-form piece of feature reporting ever created, with apologies to John McPhee), and journalists are called pariahs somewhere else. They get the designation in one of the most famous lectures ever given on responsibility, Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation," which, among other highlights, avows an "ethic of responsibility" and calls the political game "the strong and slow boring of hard boards." (I'm sure he would have used a different metaphor for the drug game had he been born 80 years later with the chance to go power tool shopping with Snoop). Of the journalist, Weber writes:
"The journalist belongs to a sort of pariah caste, which is always estimated by 'society' in terms of its ethically lowest representative. ... It is almost never acknowledged that the responsibility of the journalist is far greater, and that the sense of responsibility of every honorable journalist is, on the average, not a bit lower than that of the scholar, but rather, as the war has shown, higher. This is because, in the very nature of the case, irresponsible journalistic accomplishments and their often terrible effects are remembered."
You could write a whole essay on that paragraph, Season Five, and the historical events in which the creation of The Wire is inscribed, though there's sadly no space for it here. The journalism paragraph in Weber is not a centerpiece of the lecture, but it's not hard to imagine Simon – the pariah journalist who treats his craft as sacred scholarship – lingering over it.
Second, it's just as hard not to imagine him lingering over the whole lecture, for which "the ethic of responsibility" is the central animating idea. Weber, after all, is as aware as the Chair that no one wants to look like some punk-ass bitches out there, and the major takeaway from the lecture – which Weber, a liberal German Democrat, gave to a bunch of liberal German students in the wake of the First World War – is that leaders who focus on the idealized notions of what's right and proper and pure are a bunch of a punk-ass bitches who are ignoring their real responsibility to do what's tough and hard and thankless and sometimes even ethically questionable for the good of their constituents. He even throws in an approving nod to Machiavelli, for, in the History of Florence, "[having] one of his heroes praise those citizens who deemed the greatness of their native city higher than the salvation of their souls."
Put another way: it's Florence, gentlemen. The gods will not save you. (If Showtime hasn't cancelled the Borgias yet, they've got to be kicking themselves they can't use this as a tagline).
Where do we see this ethic of responsibility in The Wire? Bunny's the easiest exemplar – legalizing drugs in Hamsterdam in Season Three, calling an end run around the education system in Season Four. Hard to know what to think about Frank Sobotka, but you've got to figure he's at least a halfway sympathetic figure because we know he's not committing his sins out of greed or malevolence, but because the Port and his guys are important to him, and he knows that the meaning and dignity around their own lives are collapsing. And then there's McNulty in Season Five, doing things that no one thinks are right – but, you know…insert your own justification here.
Why McNulty does what he does throughout the show is a bit of a mystery, from the moment he (improbably) cites (and then updates) Col. Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai in S1E1 – "what the fuck did I do?" The quote becomes a verbal metonym for the character, and it's an important revision – Nicholson's emphasis is on the act ("What have I done?") whereas McNulty's is on the first person singular. (Peter Honig, at The Wire Blog, has a thoughtful post that goes deeper on the Nicholson-McNulty connection…somewhere.) But, at the end of the day, McNutty's a flawed guy, doing his best to bring the ethic of responsibility to his policecraft, to Baltimore itself – better than the most of his brothers and sisters on the sclerotic force, in the decaying schools, in the increasingly irresponsible press (and I don't just mean Templeton, who is the Janus face to Jimmy's lies but the narrowly self-serving diametric opposite to his motivation, but even those like Gus who, as the Appreciator-in-Chief notes, is "all preach and no soul"). This ethic of responsibility explains why Bushy Top bonds so well with Bunny Colvin – these are the characters who don't get bogged down in ideals and sacrosanct principles, but who, when they're at their best (though they aren't always), do what they can to carry out the hard, slogging work of making real things work a little better for real people. Being called – serving – being counted.
The line I eternally return to is Landsman's: "He asked no quarter of the bosses and none was given." Maybe because it calls to mind the closing of another lecture, this one by the great pragmatist judicial theorist Judge Learned Hand, in homage to his own teachers and the ethic of responsibility they imbued in him: "In the universe of truth they lived by the sword; they asked no quarter of absolutes and they gave none." The language is antiquated and similar enough that maybe it's a deliberate homage and maybe it's not (deliberate or not, given the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the BPD, flipping the last clause to the passive voice sounds oddly appropriate – Simon's version also scans better). Either way, it feels like a common coda, and, perversely, a common code.
Such a code not to have a code is dangerous in the wrong hands and it's ethically problematic in anybody's hands. But it's also something to appreciate. Because Burrell's no saint, but there's no evidence he's wrong about Baltimore and the gods.
Mike Zuckerman thinks 40 degree days are why April is the cruelest month and appreciates Twin Peaks, tomalley, and the memory of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. If he hears the music, he's gonna dance.