The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

by David Simon

Thirty years. And now, all that’s left is national failure on a grand scale, a tainted political inheritance that is backhanded from one administration to the next. Thirty years and the politicians and professionals are still offering up the kind of piss-into-the-wind optimism that compels any rational mind to recall another, comparable disaster. Listen to a big-city narcotics detective boasting about his arrest statistics, savoring them as tangible evidence of progress, and you might think of some starched Saigon briefing officer in an air-conditioned Quonset hut tallying up the daily body count. Or the hear the voice of a DEA or Customs spokesman talking up the street value of some huge cocaine seizure along the Mexican border, and you might conjure the ghost of a long-dead Pentagon guru promising to carpet-bomb infiltration to a standstill along the Ho Chi Minh trail. An urban police commander extolling the virtues of community-oriented policing as a means of regaining the trust of inner-city neighborhoods? He’s the direct descendant of every CIA spook and Agency for International Development official who ever spoke earnestly about pacification or the model villages program. You want more? Then watch any prosecutor in any American city call the obligatory press briefing to announce the indictment of one major trafficker in a million-dollar drug probe, even as new dealers arrive to take possession of the same open-air drug markets. That’s a corps commander grinding up me...

Definitely an Ed Burns passage.