The King Stay The King

First of all, a confession and a warning. The confession is that I’m obsessed with the HBO series “The Wire.” I think the creator, David Simon, is a prophet for our times. The warning is that I’m going to share some videos and they contain pretty harsh language. So, if you think it will bother you, be duly warned to not watch. OK, now on with it…

I’d like to start with a clip from the first season of “The Wire.” And I’ll give you a little background so you understand the conversation if you haven’t watched the show. In this clip D’Angelo is teaching two of his “corner boys” how to play chess. D’Angelo supervises the drug trade at a high-rise and his uncle, Avon, runs the show on the west side of Baltimore. Avon’s right-hand man in the business is Stringer. So, here’s the clip:

The boys catch on quickly that D’Angelo is teaching them about more than the game of chess – they know they are in ‘the game” and who the players are. But, as the creators of “The Wire” let us know, this is more than just about the drug trade. Its also about our corrupted military/industrial/political complex.

Its clear from the outset who the pawns are. And the “castle” or “stash” is whatever commodity the king is trying to exploit – military/industrial complex, oil, whatever. Notice how the castle moves reguarly and needs to be guarded. The question is, who do the king and queen represent? I think we make the mistake, especially during these presidential elections, of thinking the President (and perhaps to a lesser extent Congress) is king. But what we’re talking about here is that thinking like that is an illusion. Whoever becomes President is really the queen, the one the king uses to “get shit done.” The king in this scenario is those that manage the “castle.” When we see the defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies and Rupert Murdoch are just as willing to support Hillary as they are to support Bush, we know the game is on. Those few who are not willing to play the game, are marginalized by the media (ie, Dean and Kucinich) and if you really fight back, you wind up the victim of some kind of accidental plane crash.

To illustrate this point, we’ll jump forward to season three. Stringer has gathered all the various groups running the drug trade in Baltimore and developed a “cooperative.” Instead of killing each other off, they are working together and, doing so, have a monopoly in the city that they use to inflate their earnings. But, even so, he is killed by someone with an old vendetta. In this clip, folks are gathered for his funeral and Avon, who has struggled with the “new game” begins to wonder if maybe Stringer was right. But Slim Charles lets him know how the game works:

Lesson: The king stay the king. And once you in it, you in it. If its a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight.

That’s the game. In my mind, we only have one choice – do we want to play or not? It doesn’t sound like much of a choice since, as D’Angelo says, “the pawns get capped quick.” “Unless,” as Bodie says at the end of the first clip, “they some smart-ass pawns.” That’s what seems to keep us all in the game – willing to risk getting capped quick – in hopes of becoming queen and getting to do the king’s business.

Just another take on what the “American Dream” has become.

I say all this to point out my thinking that if we really want to make change, we need to know the stakes. This is a dealy serious game to those that are playing – and we would do well to take heed.