Land of The Wire

You drive down to the old Lexington Market in Baltimore, famous for its crab cakes and other sea food.The market, which was started in 1782, is an old and venerable institution. However, an adjacent corner is filled with men and women with no place to go who hang out listlessly in front of a beaten down storefront where take out Chinese is sold. These are not the itinerant homeless whose eyes you seek to avoid. William H. Whyte wrote a book called Street Corner Society back in l943 and what you see on Lexington Street in the dilapidated outskirts of Baltimore’s downtown area is the epitome of the expression. It’s like a person who wears his jacket inside out. This is a world where life is lived in a fishbowl. A driver cruising through the neighborhood has to beware for behind the listless sullen eyes is also a chaotic, explosive anger, that takes the form of erratic eruptions which are impervious to traffic. The 15 story Emerson Bromo-Selzer Tower, built in l911 and fashioned after Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, stands out as a curiosity and the sprawling Maryland Institute College of Art Campus has gobbled up much of the adjacent neighborhood; only a mile away luxury hotels like the Marriott and the Four Seasons carve up the expensive waterfront like Mafia dons divvying up the drug trade. But Lexington Street is the kind of neighborhood immortalized on the HBO series, The Wire. It manifests an entrenched poverty which a city like New York now only exhibits in patches. Here the burned out blocks, punctuated with anomalously elegant bits of red brickVictoriana, are a testament to a depression both economic and psychological that's taken on a life of its own.

Blackmail for Dummies

Forget Letterman. What about all those people who are dying to be blackmailed, even though they’re not hiding any sexual peccadilloes, and in fact have no sex life at all? Imagine blackmailing some lonely widower whose sole enjoyment in life is watching “The Wire” while eating a Salisbury steak TV dinner. Wouldn't a good blackmailing add a little zing to his life?

From a moral standpoint, it’s easy to become a talk show host and have sex with staff members, while making wisecracks about the sins of rollers high and holy. It’s about as easy as playing Eliot Ness while employing the services of a VIP escort service. Client 9, aka Eliot Spitzer, met Ashley Alexandra Dupre, his rock n’ roll hooker, in room 871 of The Mayflower, the legendary Washington Hotel where Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers were handed over to Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. Talk about a lack of sophistication.

To get blackmailed, it’s necessary to be on a search, and not the kind of search that motivates Bix Bolling in Walker Percy’s classic novel The Moviegoer. Bix, like Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger and Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishement, seeks something that goes beyond the gratification of the senses. People who commit philosophical crimes, even if they’re accompanied by murder and mayhem, should be exempt from blackmail.

It’s easy to get blackmailed if that is what you’re after. Go to a serious prep school and then some Ivy League colleges and law schools, become a governor in the Northeast, or make it as a network talk show host, or become a Republican senator from a Western state. Perhaps even mouth off about how William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale didn’t go far enough. Getting blackmailed is easy. Just do all of the above and then “shit where you eat.”