Riffing on Eugene V. Debs, Pope Francis and Slavoj Zizek brought me to this spot-on indictment of the capitalist mess we've dug (Simon's words). The following excerpt is no more than a tease; you really must read the whole article.
David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show' (The Observer/The Guardian)
The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract
... And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.
We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse ...
1 comment:
Well worth reading. Thanks for linking.
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