David Simon began his career as a reporter working for the Baltimore Sun.
He is most remembered for his Television series:
Homicide, The corner, The Wire, Generation Kill and Treme
AT - 28:16:
David Simon,
"The notion that the product could be human incarceration shows you the level of psychic disease can be applied. Capitalism is not a moral force, how we ever mistook it for that, it doesn't mean that it's not the most effective way of generating mass wealth in the modern world. Clearly it's demonstrated its great facility for that. But what you do with it, what you do with the money, or what you don't do with it, that's the definition of society.”
Marc Maron,
"This whole thing that privatization will find its level and the most moral thing will win out is retarded, it's ridiculous. What about greed, it's one of the seven deadlies. I mean what do people do?"
David Simon,
"Did you ever get in an argument with a libertarian?
Marc Maron,
“I've tried. It's annoying. I don’t have the patience, the skill set anymore."
David Simon,
“There is no skill set.
But the one thing they always rely on, invariably… you’ll start pointing out, where like, look at what happened when you let capital address the system of incarceration. They made human misery into a product and they went to Wall Street with it and they said, hey:
We can get you 3% growth next year. That's 3% more of the population to jail.
How do you do that? Well you got to make more nonviolent crimes, jailable."
Marc Maron,
“And then mostly poor people, mostly people of color, the insane."
David Simon,
"Of course. Of course it's insane! And yet they'll look at you and they'll go, oh well that's crony capitalism."
Marc Maron,
"Is there another kind?"
David Simon,
"Of course. Tell me of a society in human history that ever applied capitalism in some sort of benign way, that wasn't mitigated by the society and saying, look; here are our priorities, here are our moral standards. Here's what we want to do. Here's what we don't want to do. Figure it out.
The crony capitalism is, no, no, no, once the markets get it pure...you guys are batshit crazy.
And I think citizenship in some very basic ways, if you're talking to me about those wonderful watchwords, of freedom and liberty, and there's not a corresponding sense of responsibility. All that is to me, it's just a recipe for an incredibly selfish culture.
On the other hand if it's all responsibility and no freedom, that's tyranny. But somewhere in the middle is something that, Jesus, the Athenians recognized it as being sort of the fundamental of the democratic state.
You gotta kick in. You gotta kick in, and if somebody down the road is getting the shit kicked out of him, wrongly you're marginalized even if you don't feel it. Even if it's happening to somebody else a little lower on whatever the pyramid of pain is. At the moment that you don't stand up for that guy, it's closer to you. It's just something that's so elemental and yet so many people don't stand up.”
Marc Maron,
"The ideology says, it's not my problem.”
David Simon,
"In fact he's different from me.”
Marc,
"That's even worse, because that's loaded, because not my problem is selfish, not my problem because he's different from me is racist.”
David,
"And we're still living through those times."
There is much more in this interview:
No comments:
Post a Comment
You can add your voice to this blog by posting a comment.