A Revealing Joke

The Attorney General orders David Simon to make another season of the Wire. Huh?

Fine, I get that he is joking and it's cool he finds the Wire good and socially useful and all that. But what lies underneath this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how things (such as TV shows or jobs or revolutions) are created that often come from people in or around the Obama Administration. Anyone with a half-a-brain knows you couldn't up and restart The Wire, nor would you want to. Beyond just the practicalities of scheduling, there is also a time and place for things and when the time passes, it is gone and cannot be replicated. Quentin Tarantino could not go out and make Pulp Fiction today anymore than Jerry Seinfeld could go out and start making Seinfeld episodes again. It would not be the same. Most likely, it would be some awful mish mash, kind of like watching Magic Johnson and Larry Bird lace up their converse and playing a basketball game against the Heat. It would be ugly.

Beyond that, however, who the f is the Attorney General to tell David Simon what to do? This is the thing that bugs me about the Obama Administration. They have a tendency to poke their noses into all sorts of things they shouldn't...what TV shows should be made...whether there ought to be a college football playoff...beer summit for a wronged professor...health care...general motors...cash for clunkers...all these type of things, some big, some small, but not fundamentally part of the role of the United States government. And yet, ironically, when it comes to things like oh-you-know standing up for nascent democracies and people longing for it, like the Iranian protestors, Tunsian protestors, Libyan protestors, or Egyptian protestors, their first reaction is always to sit back and wait and see what happens and be all...well...that's none of our business, really, but if you happen to maybe win, then we'll back you.

And so we wonder why this administration hasn't helped bring back the jobs. It's because their ideas are as stupid as bringing back the Wire for another season. For those in entertainment, we can understand why this wouldn't work and why it is a dumb idea that wishful thinking college freshman would come up with. It doesn't give me any faith that the stimulus was a smart move or the bailouts were thought-through. I'm just imagining a tv slate made by the Obama Administration, forcing all the best and most politically correct shows to reair and parceling out - a black show here, a white show here, an old folks show here, a hispanic show here. Ugh. Making me sick just thinking about it. Although, it still might be better than CBS and ABC.

All that said, he still got Bin Laden.