The Weyer
I’ve made it to the series finale of the Wire just in time to lament my Journalism degree. Also, I think I might be pregnant.
I’d give anything to be an enemy of the American people. Not the American people who spend their lives fighting for freedom and equality. Not the people struggling to keep their families afloat by sacrificing themselves to a labor force that reminds them of their expendability daily. I certainly don’t mean the loving bodega owner who used to take my breakfast order, even if my Spanish was only half as good as his English.
I’m talking about Glenn Beck’s American people (maybe it was Donald Trump, the article had a paywall so I didn’t actually read it). The people who ignore societal problems deemed too inconvenient to rectify. The people who uphold traditions they don’t understand at the expense of our society’s growth. The people who rather win against imaginary enemies than learn something. In other words…I want to be a journalist.
There’s a global pandemic ripping people away and our response is to debate its legitimacy. Our President will likely commit a crime in the time it will take me to finish this piece and our response will be to focus on his botched pronunciation of the name of a country we’ll never visit. I’m a twenty-seven-year-old with a degree in Journalism with daily injustices to battle and my response is to watch a television show that stopped airing twelve years ago.
The Wire is an HBO Series focusing on the people of Baltimore. The cast is struggling with insurmountable challenges of honest policing, labor, governing, education and journalism in an America that is stricken by poverty, addiction, corruption, bureaucracy and crime. Luckily, these themes hold up exceptionally well after over a decade of ignoring my friends and family who pestered me to watch it. In my defense, I was busy consuming other media.
I really didn’t think the series could hold my attention very far past Michael B Jordan’s character Wallace exiting the show during the first season. The show’s protagonist is an annoying, white police officer whose defining characteristic is compensating for his inadequacy by putting himself above his defeatist colleagues and defeated community. While crime dramas will always have flair, the outdated concept of a wiretap being placed on pay phones could never alarm me as much as my reality. I live in the America with computer programs passively recording each time I sniffle while typing because it’s cold in my apartment, signaling my capitalist overlords to feed a new space-heater into my personalized ads. I’ve used a pay phone once in my life and it was part of an art installation…in Toronto.
I was wrong. I love the ever-expanding cast. I adore the rejection of us-versus-them and giving a voice to the downtrodden as well as those treading. The final scenes of the penultimate episode are fresh in my mind. In order to savor these last moments of having not seen the finale of one of human history’s greatest stories ever told in the relatively new medium of television, I’m going to procrastinate. I’m going to look up the actors who played my favorite cast members and see how their careers have taken off since the show ended. I’m going to read about writer David Simon, and learn about his opinions on television, journalism and all the things he does that I wish I could do.
Why do I do this? I need something to look forward to tomorrow. It’s 4:30 AM on a Tuesday that will feel like a Monday. Columbus Day has ended and I have work in a few hours. I work from home because of the aforementioned global pandemic. I hope the President is asleep and that I’m wrong about exactly how often he commits crimes. I don’t want to see another meme about Bitchstopher Columbitch. I don’t want to ponder the looming election. I don’t want to see that another friend has broken down from stress or lost their job or has a family member dying (of something that their neighbor is pretty sure is a hoax). I’m tired. I’ve been having too many nightmares to trust going to sleep. I’ve already tried once since starting this piece.
It’s going to be okay though, because I’ve given myself a mission. After reading three commentary works cited in David Simon’s wikipedia page, his words have called me to action. I need to reexamine my place in society. This is a weekly tradition for most people my age. My new therapist says I’ve been creating too many identities in order to exist in this world that’s stretched over so many platforms of expression and community. No more. Not this week.
This week, I’m introducing myself. Not the socially conscious Paul Michael from Facebook nor StBuzzkill from Instagram. Not that anxious guy from work nor that fantasy writer my parents believe in. Not the enigmatic musician Bokeh nor Guy Finch, founder of KYD Comics. My name is Paul Weyer and I’m not an enemy of the American people. So why do I have this degree?
I’m a scatterbrained faux-intellectual who’s ready to impress you with my thought-pieces on Medium. I’m ready to draw a straight line through the Penrose Steps of modern living. To surf the fake news waves of the Disinformation Age via my stream of consciousness. To prove myself wrong and actually use this Journalism degree. Ready to harness the passion instilled in me by my angry poet of a professor, Howie Good. If you’re reading this, it was demonstrably worse before editing.
Simon’s commentary on journalism pokes at recurring themes from his HBO series. When an organization, such as a newspaper, competes in a market to profit off people’s attention, it needs to do so with a standard of quality. Once the competition has ended, and the newspaper is proven most qualified, it can only compete with itself. How does an organization make more money? It becomes more efficient. How does it become more efficient? It lays off its veteran employees. We’re still feeling the impact of events in the 80s and 90s that Simon shared his thoughts on long before I applied to a university.
The monopolization of Journalism was more than just an excuse for loosening ties and lowering standards in a high-brow industry. It was eras when journalism was defined by capitalists who couldn’t care less about the content they were demanding for their 24-hour news cycles. It was about telling stories designed to grab the attention of subscribers rather than speak defiance to corruption or substance to ambiguity. If the written word bespoke absolute truth; this truth was no longer significant in America. That was before the Internet.
I grew up playing outside. I hated it, but what else was I going to do? The internet was new and exciting and I could barely read. I can’t attest to the early days because frankly, I used it to play games. The first time I saw a local paper was in high school, when a friend’s mother asked for help distributing her paper to local businesses. I didn’t read the paper, but I felt convinced it was important. The businesses did not. Nor were they enthused. I told them I wasn’t selling anything, only dropping off their local paper for customers to peruse. I was turned away many times in several towns that I’d never been to before the rain prevented me from walking any further.
In college, I endeavored to study Psychology. Then Industrial Psychology. Then Sociology. Then I was running out of -ologies and needed to graduate soon, lest I be buried by the infamous debt crisis that my classmates kept going on about. I had been told as a teenager not to think about money. I was to be educated and discover my passions. Financial stability would follow my efforts. I took a Journalism class. I had a writing assignment. My professor crossed out 90% of my flowery prose and wrote “No,” among other heartening comments.
No teacher had ever questioned my talent as a writer. I knew big words! My second language was cliche! I had to listen more. He taught me to confront assumptions, communicate efficiently and respect truth. I took more classes. I learned Journalistic ethics and how to apply these philosophies in storytelling. I felt like I was learning, which wasn’t usual in academia. Despite what Glenn Beck says, there are no Communist brainwashing seminars. Most professors are lucky if a student even remembers their name after a semester. Since I didn’t have many of those left, I stuck with Howie Good as my advisor and graduated with a Journalism degree.
Studying Journalism wasn’t all embracing integrity and indulging storytelling as an art. It was equally telling one professor that I had no intention of exploiting the asexual community for a by-line, telling another that my piece was about local wonders (not an ad for a product), and telling yet another that the first episode of the Newsroom doesn’t really inspire me. You can’t demonstrate journalistic prowess by having a character who happens to be related to a member of the Board of directors for BP Oil. Not one of my pieces was published in our school paper. I did make a listicle for our website whose views exceeded all of my classmates’ well-done articles by a grotesque margin. It made me sad.
By graduation, I developed a profound respect for Journalism equal to my disgust in what journalism had become. Maybe I should have watched the Wire sooner. It may have saved me a lot of time and money. I don’t work in journalism. I don’t desire to work in journalism. Journalism, as an industry, just doesn’t hold up to the standards it once bore. It doesn’t comfort the afflicted. It doesn’t afflict the comfortable. It barely pays. It really just serves as a battleground. Each cadre courting control in a cascade of unquenchable contradictions. Who is right? What is real? If truth exists, does it matter?
I don’t know. I’m going to submit this piece to Medium. There will be a paywall, which means a lot of people won’t read it. Those who do will have a baseline expectation that It’s going to be provocative. It’s going to be relatable. Hopefully, it’ll be enticing enough to get you this far into an article that you thought would be about a beloved television drama and possibly my pregnancy. It was a metaphor. Sorry, no gender reveals this week.
I am pregnant with a new self. A more consistent self, to placate my therapist. A more accomplished self, to justify wasting my professors’ time. A more aware self, to help me through this horrifying historical happenstance. David Simon would agree that journalism needs to adapt to revive its position in society. It needs to become something less structured and traditional. It needs to reawaken public consciousness with nebulous subtlety and biting intentions.
I’m here to reclaim it as it never was in my America.
We’re going to be okay. We’re going to write our thought-pieces. We’re going to heed the calls to action and mobilize. We’re going to save America’s soul and heal each others’ hearts. We’re going to lose a lot more battles along the way. Ultimately, we’re going to unite. Maybe one day, we can all just sit and watch the Wire without feeling like it’s uncaring to consume while such catastrophe careens through our culture.
Let’s weaponize our leisure. Let’s make memes for our thought-pieces. Let’s entertain each other while we prepare each other. I love America and I love Journalism and I’m going to hate myself if I don’t do something about it. Let passion impregnate us so that we may birth a new day of unity and freedom and love and, damnit, let’s bring back the truth.
But first, I have one more episode to watch…
