‘Show Me a Hero’: David Simon Is Still Mad as Hell
So how would you fix the system?
The government would finance elections. Nobody could give any fucking money to any political candidate, ever. You know, I wasn’t offended that the Supreme Court decided that a corporation is a person. We crossed that river a long time ago. What freaked me out was money being equated to speech. That fucked me up. Speech is speech. Nothing will make people say more stupid shit than money. When money is actually transformed into actual words, the words are, by in large, quite stupid, self-serving and disastrous. So money is speech — that to me was an obscenity.
Do you feel Treme was unfairly treated by critics and audiences?
I think it was ridiculously compared to The Wire in terms of its intentions and purpose. When nobody knew who I was, The Wire’s politics were more permissible. There’s been a cost to playing to public gadfly, when it comes to arguing politics in public forums. I tend to argue politics like I talk about basketball, but the cost has been in how people perceive the material. But I really don’t judge my work by whether or not it achieves some cult status. I can’t. It can’t be, will this catch the zeitgeist? Because honestly, that’s like trying to catch fire in a bottle and it’s a fool’s errand.
And your next story is also set in the past and is about the rise of the sex industry in NYC’s Time Square of the Seventies. That sounds commercial. . .
You would think so, but I’ll find a way to fuck it up. I’m really determined not to use porn to sell porn. You can’t be a Puritan about what you’re depicting, nor can you be prurient. If people are getting off to the show, then we’ve failed.
What else is in the pipeline?
I’m trying to make a Capitol Hill story about the part of our government that is completely damaged. The legislative branch is the part that’s being completely purchased. There’s something in the notion that the markets will solve everything, that markets will make this all better and what the markets want is a society that we’re supposed to have, that gets good argument.
The next miniseries I’m looking to make is Taylor Branch’s trilogy about the Martin Luther King years, because it’s the part of the Civil Rights story that everybody stops telling after they get to I Have a Dream. It’s where King goes north and starts talking about embedded racism and poverty, systemic exclusion from society and things that are all entirely relevant right now. Everyone told him to take a pill and go fuck himself
