David Simon - The excess population in America

On April 17th, 2009, Bill Moyers interviewed David Simon the creator and producer of the HBO show, The Wire. David Simon says some very profound things. I have been writing about them on Markham's Behavioral Health because they have helped me understand the country I am living in and the dynamics of our society.

In this segment, Simon talks about the excess people in America which is about 15% of our population. We degrade them, humiliate them, refuse to help them, incarcerate them, segregate them economically in areas of poverty and social disorganization and then blame them for their social dysfunction which we have helped to create because it keeps middle class professionals employed as probation officers, attorneys, social workers, babysitters in schools where control is the primary function not education.

I have never before thought about these poor and working class folks as "excess population" but in fact they are treated as such by the elites who profit and benefit from our established society.


Bill Moyers: I was struck by something, I forget where I read it, that you said. You were wrestling with this one big existential question. And you talked about drug addicts who would come out of detox and then try to steel jaw themselves through their neighborhood. And then they'd come face to face with the question, which is?

DAVID SIMON: "What am I doing here? What am I doing here?" You know, all the same problems that a guy coming out of addiction at 30, 35, because it often takes to that age, he often got into addiction with a string of problems, some of which were interpersonal and personal, and some of which were systemic. The fact that these really are the excess people in America, we-- our economy doesn't need them. We don't need ten or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy. We pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we're actually including them in the American ideal, but we're not. And they're not foolish. They get it.

This is article #3 in a series on David Simon.