Why teachers across the country are teaching couses about HBO's THE WIRE

 why teachers are teaching "THE WIRE"

"The Wire" is my favorite television show of all time. This hour-long weekly drama blows away the competition in its cinematography, dialogue and plot lines. And nothing can match Baltimore as stage set.

Words can't describe how immensely pleasurable, disturbing, entertaining -- yet thought provoking -- this show is. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Imagine that picture, at 30 frames per second, showing:

•  a bowtied, bespectacled hitman from The Nation of Islam who reads Harper's magazine as well as The Economist. 

• a guy who pretends to be a geriatric in a wheelchair, in order to break into drug dealers' safe houses and rob them blind... he also happens to be gay.

• a renegade, broken down semi alcoholic homicide detective using dentures to leave teeth marks on homeless corpses' asscheeks, creating a phantom serial killer in order to get the mayor to give the police department the funds they desperately need.

 Imagine all this taking place  on the streets of Baltimore, providing not just a backdrop for a mere tv show (its not tv, its hbo, by the way...) but as a backdrop for all former heavy industrial and shipping cities in our country. Rusted waterfronts and factories, manufacturing centers (and the jobs they created) gone--reduced to smoke like specters rising from the gutters that haunt the inner city.

The public schools are so severely fucked up, that many children attend school only one day of the year, the day when principals round up truants to bolster their attendance rolls to receive better funding. 8th graders, halfway through the year, get "socially promoted" to high-school in order to move them through the system faster. High powered drug dealers read Adam Smith's "the wealth of nations" and develop slums into condos.

The first season focuses on cops and crooks, and all the bureaucracy in the way of trying to catch the crooks and remaining financially solvent. second season focuses on the ports and how drugs get into baltimore. third season goes back to the cops and crooks (i'll leave it at that, i dont want to ruin it for you). 4th season revolves around the schools and we witness the various fates that befall a group of four 8th graders. 5th season, shit gets real nuts ( you'll thank me for the ambiguity later, trust me).

after seeing the entirety of this greek  tragedy, where institutions like the police department and city hall are the gods and everyone else are mere mortals who are trapped, you realize a few things.

• 1) one should always pronounce "shit" like "sheeeeeeeet." 
• 2) Newports are the best cigarettes (something i personally can attest to). 
• 3) Drugs are bad, Mkay?). 
• 4) the actors from the wire are in every movie or tv show (go watch the episode of Bored to Death where zach galafinakis-or however the fuck you spell it-gets a colon cleanser...from the actor who plays brother mouzone).  and finally
• 5) apparently,  if we do not endeavor to fundamentally change the things that are wrong around us, in whatever incarnation they may be, history will repeat itself. watch the entire series and see what happens in the last episode if you dont believe me.